England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Cockerham St Michael

The Parish

The parish of Cockerham lies towards the north of that main part of Lancashire "south of the Sands" and roughly 7 miles south of the town of Lancaster. Cockerham sits on the A588 road which runs southwards from Lancaster towards The Fulde and the outskirts of the resort of Blackpool. Cockerham parish is a largely rural parish with Cockerham itself only a small village sitting at the junction of the A588 with the B5272, which heads for Garstang, early gazetteers estimate that fewer than 25% of the parish population actually lived in Cockerham. The wider parish encompasses the chapelry of Ellel which was not licensed for marriages and does not warrant a page within this project, it also included 3 further townships including Forton, a name familiar to early travellers on the nearby M6 motorway as the site of service stations. The chief economic force within the parish was pastoral farming with rich pastures on the coastal grazing marshes rising into sheep pastures on higher ground inland. As a coastal parish bordering the sands of the southern part of Morecambe Bay it also took advantage of the shell-fisheries and fisheries that that vast area provided. The earliest settlement in the area of the parish was the site of the Augustinian Priory but it dissolved before the Reformation and little trace remains, it sat on the point overlooking the estuary of the Lune. Modern developments have come to the wider parish, the earliest development was the Lancaster Canal designed to connect that town with the wider canal network, the West Coast main railway line from London to Glasgow passes near to Forton as does the aforementioned modern M6 motorway; all 3 pass through a narrow corridor of the eastern part of Cockerham parish. A number of small streams including the River Cocker, which donates it name to the village, drain into the nearby Irish Sea, the coastal area being extensive modified by man's drainage efforts there are numerous small drains and creeks. Cockerham is sited at just 20 metres above the sea, most of the parish sitting below 40 metres on the gentle fore-plain whilst the nearby Pennines, rising to 479 metres on Hawthornthwaite Fell Top dominate the eastern horizon. Cockerham parish covers a vast area of almost 14,000 acres within which it would have supported a population of close to 3,500 parishioners. Several manor are listed for the wider parish within Domesday Book either held by King William or Roger of Poitou, all are described simply as "waste", a term used in the book to define undeveloped land.

The Church

St Michael's church sits amongst field almost a half mile southwest of the village of Cockerham with views across the grazing marshes to the nearby coast. Sadly little remains of the medieval within today's church as a result of successive rebuilds right into the 20th century. Of the main pieces of the building only the western tower is medieval, a carved date on an internal beam is said to carry the date 1589 and that is consistent with its late-Perpendicular styling, early gazetteers report the church as being built either in the reign of James I or Charles I not dissimilar to that engraved date. The main body of the church has 2 re-buildings, the first of 1814 being replaced in its turn by today's church of 1911. The builders, at least, made a consistent effort to build in a style similar to that of the medieval tower, Pevsner describes it as a "commendably restrained essay in Perpendicular". Obviously today's church would be unrecognisable to the participants in these marriages. The church is accessed down a dead-end lane from the B5272 where a plethora of signs and the large village hall mark its start, at the churchyard is a substantial car park, only accessible by vehicles below the height restricting barrier at the entrance. Once within the churchyard is largely open to the photographers eye, a set of trees at the southeastern corner necessitates a differing set of aspects from the norm, however.