On this day … 10 October 1199

King John sealed a charter confirming to Preston all the rights and privileges which had been granted in a charter of Henry II in 1179. John had just succeeded his brother Richard the Lionheart as king and was ratifying his relations with the town.

The details of that charter were confirmed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in a document carefully transcribed and translated early in the nineteenth century by the Lancashire historian and Catholic priest, John Lingard.

One of the most significant grants contained in John’s charter and confirmed by Elizabeth was the following:

‘Know ye that we have granted, and by this our charter have confirmed to the burgesses of Preston, all the liberties and free customs, which the lord H. our father, gave, granted, and by his charter confirmed to the same burgesses, the whole toll of the Wapentake Hundred of Amounderness, and a free fair at Preston, at the Assumption of St Mary, to last for eight days.’

This was an especially valuable grant since Amounderness Hundred or Wapentake was one of the six great divisions of the old Lancashire county, which included the whole of the Fylde and stretched from the Ribble to the north of Garstang and out to Chipping in the east. It contained within its bounds several village markets.

What this grant meant hangs on the translation of one word in the Latin of the original document. This word was ‘Theloneum’, which Lingard, in his edition of the Preston charters, discusses as follows:

‘Theloneum is a payment in towns, markets, and fairs, for goods and cattle, bought and sold. According to Bracton (ii. 24.) it implies a liberty as well to take, as to be free from, toll.’

Wikipedia defines the word as follows:

‘In the Middle Ages, the teloneum, in French tonlieu, sometimes anglicized thelony, was a market toll, a tax paid on a sale in the marketplace. The term originally referred to the customs house, but came gradually to refer to the tax levied. The collector of the teloneum was the telonearius.’

This would seem to mean that as well as the tolls that Preston could collect at its own markets and fairs, it was owed those on all the other markets and fairs held in Amounderness.

Lingard is possibly unsure himself about how strictly and in what way the collection of tolls was enforced, and, as a painstakingly accurate historian, he would not go beyond the evidence. He, along with Thomas Macaulay, was one of the principal historians of England in the early nineteenth century, and his priesthood, most of which was spent at Hornby, near Lancaster, gained him very useful access to the papal archives denied to Macauley.

What is known is that at the end of the sixteenth century, Preston folk were claiming the right to be free of tolls at Kirkham market. We know this because in 1598/99 some Kirkham men sued Preston Corporation in the Duchy of Lancaster court, contesting Preston’s privilege.

In its defence, the corporation argued that:

‘… by the Charter of King John confirmed by Queen Elizabeth, the borough of Preston was free of all tolls, &c., payable for goods or chattels, wares, or merchandise, taken by the burgesses to the fairs and markets of Kirkham, the same being within the Wapentake: it was also alleged that the defendants had got into their possession the aforesaid Charters and combined together to defraud the borough of Preston.’

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Sources
John Lingard’s Preston Charters: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Charters_Granted_by_Different_Sovere/w7SEYSmyfQ4C?hl=en
Fishwick’s History of Preston