Bychton in the Domesday Book (1086)
The 1086 Domesday survey records the settlement of Bychton, entered under the hundred of Ati’s Cross in Cheshire. The survey assessed Bychton at 15 carucates of taxable land.
At the time of the survey, Bychton supported a recorded population of 17 villagers, 4 smallholders, 2 slaves, working 12 ploughs between them.
The survey records Bychton’s value at 12 shillings in 1086. No pre-Conquest figure survives – not unusual in the North, where records were disrupted by the Harrying and by the patchy coverage of the survey.
The survey lists 2 manors at Bychton under different lords. Splitting a single settlement between multiple tenants was common across the North – Saxon estates broken up and handed to William’s followers after 1066.
Resources Recorded at Bychton (1086)
- Mills: 2 mills (valued at 9d)
- Meadow: 12 None
- Woodland: 1 league * 2 furlongs None
Other Settlements in Ati’s Cross
The Meaning of the Name
The name Bychton is of Anglo-Saxon origin. Its final element derives from the Old English word tūn, a farmstead or village. The first element is most likely a personal name or an early descriptive term, now difficult to recover with certainty. Taken together the name probably meant something close to ‘a farmstead’.
Remarkably, the name has changed little since 1086, when the Domesday scribes wrote it as Bychton.
Bychton Today
Today Bychton lies within the administrative area of Flintshire, and the settlement recorded a population of 1,892 at the 2021 census. Nine and a half centuries separate that figure from the small rural community the Domesday survey recorded here in 1086.
Read more about modern Mostyn on Wikipedia .
Nearby Domesday Settlements
Other places recorded in the 1086 survey within a few miles:
Heritage Around Bychton
Photographs of churches, listed buildings and monuments in the vicinity, contributed by volunteers to the Geograph project and reused here under a Creative Commons licence.
© Roger May · Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0
© Steve Daniels · Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0
© Dot Potter · Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0
Images © their respective photographers, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 and reused here with attribution. Photographs depict listed buildings, churches and monuments near this settlement and may show neighbouring villages.
Data derived from the Open Domesday project (opendomesday.org), based on the Domesday Book dataset compiled by Professor J.J.N. Palmer and team. The Domesday Book (1086) is in the public domain.
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