Lordship of Bowland

The Lordship of Bowland is an historic feudal barony associated with the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, England. It was once thought lost and was rediscovered in 2008. It disappeared in 1885 when the estates of the Towneleys, one of Lancashire’s great aristocratic families, were broken up following the death of the last male heir. For much of the twentieth century, experts thought that the Lordship belonged to the Crown. In 1938, the Duchy of Lancaster had acquired some 6,000 acres (2,400 ha) of the Forest of Bowland, now known as the Whitewell Estate, near Clitheroe, and it was believed that the Lordship had been acquired with it.

It was discovered in 2008 that the 1938 sale, while it included mineral, sporting and forestry rights, specifically excluded the Lordship of Bowland itself. It accordingly descended to a Towneley family trust. In 2008, Charles Towneley Strachey, 4th Baron O'Hagan auctioned the title. The new Lord of Bowland was later revealed to be a Cambridge University don who specialises in the history of Lancashire, its place names and dialects and has ancestral links to the Forest.

While a lineage for the barony can be traced back speculatively through the Earls of Northumbria to Oswiu and his marriage alliance in 638 AD with the Urien kings of Rheged, the roots of the modern lordship are Norman.

Although Roger de Poitou is recorded as tenant-in-chief of the manors of Bowland in Domesday, what we now understand as the Forest and Liberty of Bowland was created by William Rufus sometime after 1087. It formed part of a larger parcel of lands granted to his vassal, either to reward Poitou for his role in the defeat of Dolfin of Carlisle and the army of Scots king Malcolm III in 1091-2 or as a result of the confiscation of lands from Robert de Mowbray, Earl of Northumbria in 1095. These lands came to form the Barony, later the Honor of Lancaster in the closing decade of the eleventh century. By the late twelfth century, the disparate holdings within the Honor of Lancaster had cohered to form what became Lancashire, first explicitly recognised as a county in 1194.

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