Norton on tees history

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Memories Overview Gallery People Find. Sign in Create Account. Family Tree. From FamilySearch Wiki. Close to the church to the north east is a building called The Hermitage that may have once been a house for the canons of the collegiate church.

It was restructured as a grammar school in the s. A canon is a member of a chapter — a group of people responsible for the administration of a collegiate church which has a similar administrative organisation to a monastery. Norton became a collegiate church around when the Bishop of Durham evicted the Durham monks and relocated them here.

Although Norton had started life as an Anglo-Saxon farm or estate it developed into a farming village where land holders in medieval times included Adam of Normanton and Adam son of Gilbert De Herdwic and then, a little later, a Sir Roger Fulthorpe.

The Fulthorpes, presumably named from Fulthorpe Farm to the north of Norton owned land here for a considerable period. By the 18th century, the village had become a favoured residence for wealthy business people connected with the town and port of Stockton-on-Tees.

Norton still retains a village atmosphere though it has now been swallowed up by the growth of Stockton. In fact, originally, Norton had been the senior settlement. For centuries, old Norton and its Saxon church were the centre of an important parish which included Stockton.

Today the status of these towns has been reversed. Stockton became a parish in its own right in Norton retained its parish status but subsequently became a part of the Borough of Stockton on Tees. Norton High Street not to be confused with the High Street in Stockton is the main thoroughfare through Norton and is a leafy street of some considerable length that is full of charming 18th century houses and it is worth a stroll for those with a passion for old houses to pick out some of the best ones.

Some are occupied by pleasing outlets and places to eat. The High Street culminates in the focal point of Norton — the huge village green that still retains a rural atmosphere with some 18th century cottages and a substantial village duck pond that once provided the water supply for the village. The church is tucked away about a hundred yards along the road from the green. The village was once the site of a market at a spot called Cross Dike, near the pond.

The market was established in Norman times but this ceased operating around the time of the Civil War in the s. One story is that the market established by Henry II and Bishop Flambard of Durham was to operate on the sabbath and this offended God who caused the markets to collapse by swallowing them up with the sudden opening up of the ground by some kind of earthquake that then allegedly formed the village pond.

By the late nineteenth century there was already a scattering of houses along the Norton Road that links the Norton High Street to the High Street in Stockton to the south of the Lustring Beck. Here there was in historic times a toll bridge across the beck linking the two places.

The Norton Road area of Norton was the home to a number of large houses or villas at the north end and there was a nearby brewery. Terraces had developed at the south end just outside Stockton with a neighbouring brick works, the Clarence Pottery and the Clarence Windmill nearby.

Generally Norton escaped the industrial developments of neighbouring Teesside towns but its industries did include an iron works to the north of the village where the first ever bell for Big Ben in the Houses of Parliament at Westminster was cast.

It was tested and found to be perfect but there was a delay in London of sixteen months in having it fitted and it was then found to be cracked, possibly due to over-testing. In addition to the Norton Road, there was another offshoot road from the south end of Norton High Street that passed through the once open country to the south west.

It followed the course of the present South Road and part of what is now the eastern perimeter of the Holme House Prison. This country Lane was not seemingly part of the road called Portrack Lane that is so familiar in Stockton today, though that too was originally a country lane called Portrack Lane East. That Portrack Lane was part of Stockton rather than Norton and led to a bridge across the Lustrum Beck and was presumably linked to the other part of Portrack Lane to the north.

Holm House has long since gone, its site now occupied by the Lustrum Industrial Park near the Holme House prison built in which bears its name. Norton was a place noted for its boarding schools and the genteel occupations of its inhabitants and for its good soil, in times past. The attributes of the soil were acknowledged by Thomas Baker, farmer Quaker and preacher who lived at the aforementioned Holm House between Portrack and Norton. Once, as the pair walked in Stockton High Street during foul weather, they encountered a gulley or drain which the delicate Mary feared to step over.

As an act of gallantry Tom placed his foot within it allowing Mary to use his foot as a step — in an act which was seemingly enough to persuade her to marry him.

Remember it was Sir Walter Raleigh who introduced the potato to England and he is also famed for an act of gallantry — throwing his cape across a puddle at the feet of Queen Elizabeth I — though that particular noble act did not end in marriage. Stockton-on-Tees Hartlepool Billingham.