A Fenkell Street mystery

When the Preston doctor and antiquarian Richard Kuerden wrote his description of Preston in the 1680s, he included a description of the streets of the town, and among them was the intriguing Fenkell Street.

Fenkell Street was the name he gave to the stretch of Church Street from the present Manchester Road to the prison, and possibly including part of Stanley Street. This is what Kuerden wrote:

‘The first street as you enter upon the south side from the bridge, is Fenkell-street, unto the barrs; and from the barrs proceeding to the town’s hall, is styled the Church-street, all though the other part below the barrs hath been, and is, vulgarly taken for part thereof.’

The ‘barrs’ refers to the barriers that used to stand in the main entrances to the town. They could be closed on market days to control access to the town for the collection of tolls. In the 1660s the Church Street barrs were at the corner of the present Manchester Road, then named Cocker Hole, and Church Street.

When Kuerden writes that the lower part of the present Church Street ‘hath been, and is, vulgarly taken for part’ of Church Street he is implying that the proper name for that section Church Street was Fenkell Street in his day.

There is only one other mention of Fenkell Street in the histories of the town. Charles Hardwick in his History of Preston includes the following short mention, but does not give his source.

‘Barton, William.—This clever theological scholar was born in Fenkell-street (now Church-street), Preston. He was descended from a respectable family at Barton. He became successively bishop of Rochester and Lincoln, and died in May, 1613.’

The Lancashire Archives catalogue has no mention of Fenkell Street, and neither is there any in the Preston Court Leet records that date from 1653.

There was no mention of Fenkell Street when surveyors mapped the town in 1685, nor in the Preston Poor Tax Survey carried out in 1732.

The only other Fenkell Streets I’ve found are one mentioned in a will dated 1590 in Durham University’s North East Inheritance Database where the following phrase is found ‘burgage or tenement in Alnwick in a street called Fenkell Street’. A second is found in the University of Michigan’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online, which contains several references to Fenkell Street in John Brand’s ‘History of Newcastle upon Tyne’ published in 1789..

But there are several streets around the North of England with variations of the Fenkell spelling. For example, Finkhill Street in Nottingham and Finkill Street in Brighouse, West Yorkshire.

One variation, ‘Finkle’, yields 23 mentions in the Lancashire Archives catalogue, including one referencing the stopping up of Finkle Street in Lancaster in 1960 and a ‘Fennel or Finkle Street’ in Workington.

The Workington Fennel Street variation is possibly explained by an Oxford English Dictionary entry, which gives Fenkell as a variation of ‘finkle’, a Middle English word for the herb, fennel, as in ‘Fenkell is an Herbe of the Gardaine and fielde common to them both’ found in a 1567 text.

But Alan Crosby and Ralph Herron both pointed out that a more likely etymology would be a word of Scandinavian origin meaning ‘corner or bend’ or ‘winding, twisted’.

Quite why a stretch of the present Church Street had such brief mentions as Fenkell Street in the 17^th century remains a mystery.