Bierlow

In England, a township (Latin: villa) is a local division or district of a large parish containing a village or small town usually having its own church. A township may or may not be coterminous with a chapelry, manor, or any other minor area of local administration.

The township is distinguished from the following:

'Township' is, however, sometimes used loosely for one of the above.

In many areas of England, the basic unit of civil administration was the parish, generally identical with the ecclesiastical parish. However, in some cases, particularly in northern England, there was a lesser unit called a township, being a subdivision of a parish. This could happen for several reasons:

The local historian Dorothy Silvester has identified a "parish line", which divided northern from southern counties of England and Wales (Denbighshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, and northern Yorkshire). North of this line, parishes tended on the whole to be large, containing several townships. However, south of this line, parishes tended to contain single townships.

A township appointed overseers of the poor and surveyors of highways in the same way as a parish and they financed their obligations by levying a rate, in the same way as parish officials. The original definition of a Civil Parish was any place in respect of which a rate could lawfully be levied. Most townships disappeared before 1866 either being included into adjacent civil parishes or gaining their own separate civil parish status.

The use of the term 'township' persisted and has recently been revived as a name for subdivisions of boroughs in northern England. For example, the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale has township committees, and the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan divides the borough into ten townships, which each have a township forum.Wirral is divided into forty-four, for planning purposes.

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