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Medieval Bramley

The first mention of Bramley comes in the Domesday Book compiled for William the Conqueror in 1086. The Bram part of the name occurs in several other Yorkshire village names such as Bramhope and Bramham.

In Old English (the language of the Anglo-Saxons) it signifies the broom plant. Ley means a clearing. It would seem therefore that Bramley started out life as 'a clearing covered with broom'.

The place name element ley can also be found in other place names along the Aire valley. These include Armley, Headingley, Rodley, Calverley, Apperley, Shipley Bingley and Keighley as well as Bramley itself.

This density of place names suggests that the upper Aire valley was first cleared of woodland and scrub by incoming Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 7th century.

Perhaps they were moving into marginal land which, at the time was not occupied by anyone else.

At the time of the Domesday Survey Bramley was described as being 'waste'. This is typical of many Yorkshire villages at the time. In what later became known as the 'Harrying of the North', William adopted a 'slash and burn' policy against those who had rebelled against his rule.

The word 'waste' does not however imply that there was nothing in Bramley at all at the time. It's just that the new Norman landlords saw nothing out of which they could make a profit. Domesday is after all a revenue document.

In the generations that followed the Norman landlords were to develop the economic potential of the Aire Valley, which was at the time still a relatively isolated pastoral area and not the suburb of a big city as it is today.

This was particularly true of Kirkstall Abbey founded by Henry De Lacy in 1152. As time passed the new Cistercian house began to acquire land throughout the area, given to them as acts of piety by landholders both rich and small. One of these was tenement at Whitcote: the name is medieval despite the popular local tradition that the area got its name from a platoon of soldiers with white coats who were stationed there during the Civil War.

Kirkstall began to build up a large holding in Bramley as it did elsewhere in the Aire valley, and the tenement at Whitcotes probably became the centre of a monastic grange, or farm. This would be worked by local people, but the profits would go to the Abbey.

The monks certainly exploited the land they were given. Some people think that the stone to build the great abbey church came from Bramley Fall though others say that it came from Hawksworth Wood.


In either case it would be an easer job to transport the stone downstream on a barge than it would be to attempt to drag it along unpaved medieval roads.

It is also possible that the monks took part of their water supply from Bramley Township.

In Monks Wood, which formerly occupied the area around the old Kirkstall Brewery, was a spring of exceptionally pure water. Ralph Thoresby, the 18th century historian of Leeds noted that lead pipes had been found near the spring and assumed that they had been used to pipe drinking water over to the Abbey.

The population of Bramley must have begun to grow too. For someone, possibly the monks themselves, built a chapel of ease in Bramley. This was a place where villagers could go to hear mass and to make personal prayers.


It saved them the walk into the parish church at Leeds for such purposes. However, they still had to go to Leeds for baptisms, weddings and funerals. The parish church still retained the sole right to administer such rites.


The chapel can never have been large. It probably started out a similar size to the chapel of ease at Lotherton Hall near Aberford. 19th century writers say that it had been rebuilt several times and had lost all its original character.


Despite the rebuilds it was still too small for the growing urban population of Bramley: the chapel of ease was demolished after the construction of St Margaret's in the early 1800s.

After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539 the Abbey's lands at Bramley passed into the hands of Tudor entrepreneurs who continued to develop the resources offered by the land for their own use. Two centuries later came the mill owners and all the associated trades that the woollen industry brings with it.

Today there's only the woodland of Bramley Fall to remind us of Bramley's rural past, and even in Bramley Fall there are quarries.

Almost everything else is built over. Only the name remains to remind us that Bramley, now a bustling suburb, was once only 'a clearing covered in broom'.


* There's lot more information about local places on the WYAAS website at http://www.archaeology.wyjs.org.uk . Have a look today. You never know what you might find.