In 1296 the church at Prestwich suffered a burglary in which a number of charters, placed there for safe-keeping, were stolen. What was lost was probably the whole early history of Prestwich – grants of the Manor to Saxon Thanes or Norman knights, the foundation deeds of the church etc. What we are left with is a black hole and we have to peer into it somehow.
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The name, Prestwich, is Anglo-Saxon probably Mercian. It was translated in a rather ham-fisted manner in the nineteenth century as “The Priests’ Retreat”. In fact “wich” in a place name means an “enclosure” or “place of work”. Prestwich means “the Priests’ enclosure” or the enclosed land of the Priests. Wich should not be confused with wick, which, in the north of England is usually Danish in origin and indicates a dairy farm.
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Note the Saxon form is plural – Priests’ not Priest’s – which implies a religious community, a group of Priests, rather than a single Parish Priest. This fits in with the family tradition mentioned by Sir John Prestwich in the eighteenth century. That his family, the de Prestwich family, had been Thanes of Prestwich from before the Norman Conquest and had founded a monastery in the village which later merged with Stanlow Abbey. The de Prestwich family certainly were the Lords of the Manor of Prestwich up to 1362. Sir John’s claims about the “monastery” have been rubbished, notably by Booker in his Memorials of the Church in Prestwich. But they do seem to bear the hallmarks of a long held family tradition which has a kernel of truth in it. A Saxon monastery need not be the grand imposing edifice we think of in regard to medieval monasteries. It might just have been an enclosure with a wooden church and monk’s huts scattered around it.
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The area between the Ribble and the Mersey (where Prestwich is situated ) had a confused history during the Dark Ages. It was part of the Kingdom of Northumbria between 610 and 850 but from 850 to 920 it was in the Danish Kingdom of York. In about 918 King Edward the Elder waged war in the area with his sister, The Lady Ethelflaeda of Mercia. They defeated the Danish King of York and he had to hand over our area – the land between the Ribble and the Mersey. King Edward made the whole area a royal possession run from manors like the royal manor of Salford. But he gave it to Mercia to supervise. Mercians flooded into this area after 920, sent to reclaim the area for the Saxons. Manchester is a name showing Mercian influence and so is Prestwich ( the soft “ch” of the Mercian version of Anglo-Saxon contrasts with the hard “c” of Northumbria. – Manchester versus Lancaster for example).
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It is from that period, the tenth century between 920 and 980, that the name Prestwich probably comes. Of course that does not mean to say that there was not a settlement there before that. We know there were Romano-British farms in Prestwich from the archaeological record.
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