England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Knottingley St Botolph

The Parish

The chapel of ease of Knottingley lies in southern Yorkshire within the West Riding and located roughly 3 1/2 miles northeast of its mother parish Pontefract. Knottingley sits on the southern banks of the River Aire and on the A645 road which links Pontefract with Snaith. For much of its existence Knottingley was merely a chapel of ease to Pontefract, in 1789 it became a parish in its own right allowing it to perform marriages which is why these register commence in that year, prior to 1789 any marriage would have been celebrated in Pontefract. Despite its limited religious status Knottingley was a thriving town largely as a consequence of its position at the highest navigable point of the River Aire. Even by the 16th century Knottingley had become a substantial inland port covering most of the West Riding. The town moved slightly following the arrival of the Knottingley and Goole canal which formed a faster and more efficient route to the Humber Estuary and to the North Sea. In addition to its role as a port the local limestone was extensively quarried for building stone, industries such as brewing, malting and manufacture of pottery took hold turning Knottingley into a thriving industrial town. The wider parish lies largely on the Aire's flood-plain and thus would have been more pastoral in its farming. Modern developments have arrived in abundance, apart from the canal, now renamed as the Aire & Calder Navigation, railways also arrived from multiple directions, north, west, east and southeast making Knottingley a major railway crossroads and granting it a station. In more modern times Knottingley hosts the modern M62 motorway, England's trans-Pennine artery connecting Liverpool with Hull whilst its junction with the North-South A1M sits just to the west. The result of all of this development is a large urban area stretching long the Aire almost contiguously for almost 9 miles westwards from Knottingley to Altofts near Normanton. Knottingley is drained eastwards by the Aire which merges with the other Dales rivers to pass to the North Sea through the Humber Estuary. Knottingley is sited at around 10 metres above the sea, away from the river land rises gently to around a general height of 40 metres. Knottingley parish covered just over 1,500 acres of the ancient parish of Pontefract yet would have supported a population growing fast to around 4,300 parishioners, much lower for most of the transcript period. In Domesday times Knottingley was a holding of Ilbert de Lacy offering merely 3 ploughs and some woodland.

The Church

St Botolph's church stands on Chapel Street nowadays sandwiched between the canal and the river in what was the older part of the town serving the port. Whilst there had been a medieval chapel here, described in early gazetteers as an ancient edifice of brick, with a campanile turret. The only trace of that early church is a 12th century Norman Romanesque window reused when the present church was completely rebuilt in 1755, it sits on the western wall. The church of 1755 is essentially a simple box, a preaching box says Pevsner. The church's stand-out feature was not added until 1873 when the limestone western tower was added and when it was increased in height and given pinnacles in 1887. Both 1886 & 1887 saw work on other portions of the church with the chancel extended by an additional bay in 1886 and the nave restored in 1887. There is ample space for on-street parking on Chapel Street south of the site. The church sits within an extensive churchyard where there are few obstacles when viewed from the south, enough to satisfy the photographer, obtaining views of the western tower from the west are slightly more problematic due to tree cover.