What’s in a name?
The Old names given to places , fields and lanes often give us a clue to their past. One of the more interesting in the locality of Adwick Le Street is Tenter Balk Lane.
A balk was a ridge caused by ploughing or an unploughed mound used as a boundary line between ploughed areas. This was the case at Tenter Balk. Before the 1761 enclosure award a large open field known as Humroyd stretched northwards from the line of Tenter Balk to Redhouse. A similar open field known as middle field stretched from Windmill Balk Lane to the Highwayman (Broad Highway), this was inbetween an already enclosed area that stretched up from Adwick Hall.
The Enclosure award reveals that there was a small ancient enclosure at the bottom of Tenter Balk Lane, roughly where houses 111 – 131 now stand, known as tenters, a small field where the tenters would formerly have been constructed. A tenter was a wooden framework of upright and horizontal bars on which cloth was stretched after being fulled or milled so that it would set and dry evenly without shrinking. Fulling was a process of cleansing and thickening the woollen cloth by beating and washing. Along the frame was an array of hooks on which the cloth was suspended.
Interestingly we still use the phrase to be on tenter hooks to describe someone in a position of tension, stress and suspense.
Although the production of woollen cloth used to be fairly widespread throughout the country, the West Riding was one of the noted areas. Before the eighteenth century and the industrial revolution, woollen cloth was the chief export of Britain. The wool merchants formed a wealthy section of society. There was an important wool market at Doncaster as well as a large one at Leeds. The Lord Chancellor, the Chief Citizen of the Land sits on the woolsack in the House of Lords as a reminder of the source of the country’s wealth.
