Pennington in the Domesday Book (1086)
The settlement of Pennington is recorded in William I’s Domesday survey of 1086, entered under the hundred of Amounderness in Yorkshire. The survey assessed Pennington at 10 carucates of taxable land.
At the time of the survey, Pennington supported a recorded population of 10 villagers, 4 smallholders, 3 slaves, working 10 ploughs between them.
The valuation dropped between 1066 and 1086. Before 1066, Pennington was worth 8 shillings; by 1086 that had dropped to 7 shillings – a fall of 12%. Most Yorkshire villages that lost value on this scale were swept up in the Harrying of the North – William’s scorched-earth campaign of 1069–70.
Resources Recorded at Pennington (1086)
- Meadow: 3 ploughs
- Woodland: 100 pigs
Other Settlements in Amounderness
- Aighton
- Aldcliffe
- Aldingham
- Arkholme
- Aschebi
- Ashton [Hall]
- Ashton [on Ribble]
- Austwick
- Barbon
- Bardsea
- Bare
- Barnoldswick
- Barton
- Beetham
The Meaning of the Name
The name Pennington 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 Pennington.
Listed Buildings Near Pennington
Historic England records 5 listed buildings within about a mile of Pennington. Listing protects structures of special architectural or historic interest, graded I (exceptional), II* (particularly important) and II.
Grade II
- Church of St Michael - 0.3 km
- Sundial Approximately 12.5 Metres South of St Michael’s Church - 0.31 km
- Stocks to South of South Churchyard Wall of St Michael’s Church - 0.32 km
- Pennington Parish War Memorial Cross - 0.78 km
- Dykelands - 1.12 km
Scheduled Monuments Near Pennington
Scheduled monuments are nationally important archaeological sites given legal protection. 2 lie within roughly a mile of Pennington:
- Eller Barrow, round barrow - 0.09 km
- Castle Hill - 0.86 km
Pennington Today
Today Pennington lies within the administrative area of South Lakeland, and the settlement recorded a population of 1,959 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 Pennington on Wikipedia .
Nearby Domesday Settlements
Other places recorded in the 1086 survey within a few miles:
Heritage Around Pennington
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.
© Alexander P Kapp · Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0
© Alexander P Kapp · Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0
© Maigheach-gheal · 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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