More information : TF 159848. Settlement remains, perhaps the site of the deserted village of Coldecotes and a later grange of Sixhills Priory lie on a S-facing slope at the E end of a low ridge of Boulder Clay/Till at 70m above OD. The site of Coldecotes has not been previously identified and the name has usually been associated with the adjacent settlement of Collow (Legsby (4)).(a) Its existence is first noted in 1086 when Domesday Book lists it as soke of the large manor of Wragby, assessed at 1.5 carucates and with a recorded population of seven.(b) Thereafter its size and fortunes are poorly documented and difficult to detail. By the early 12th century it had become separated from Wragby and was held as an independent manor directly of the Crown.(c) Its previous prosperity, when the manor had dwelling houses, gardens, orchards and a dovecote, were recalled in 1321-2, but already by then the houses were in ruins and the manor was reckoned as a member of the adjacent manor of Sixhills, though part of East Torrington parish.(d) Coldecotes passed from the Grelle or Grellys family to the la Warre family in 1307, when it was still part of the manor of Sixhills.(e) In 1407 Thomas la Warre granted his estate at 'Caldecote in Tyrington by Sixhills' to the Gilbertine priory of Sixhills. It then comprised nothing but 50 acres of meadow and 300 acres of pasture.(f) Following the acquisition of the estates of the priory by the Heneages of Hainton at the Dissolution, Coldecotes survived into the early 17th century as a group of (unlocated) fields in Legsby to which three messuages seemed to have been attached, and as a place recognizable to the Consistory Court of Lincoln in 1615 as part of the possession of Helen Fautes, as well as being a historical curiosity.(g) Thereafter all knowledge of the place is lost.
The estate or township of Coldecotes can be plausibly defined as that portion of the modern parish of Legsby remaining when the other five medieval units that make up the parish, namely Legsby, Bleasby, Collow, Holtham and East Torrington have been identified. More specifically it comprises that part of the former East Torrington parish that was owned in 1849 by George Fieschi Heneage and made an ancient customary payment to the rector of East Torrington. (This may be a reflection of the medieval ecclesiastical provision for Coldecotes through a chapel in East Torrington (Legsby (8)) that was clearly not functioning by the early 17th century.) The area forms a neat economic unit, the S boundary of which is the stream that forms parish boundaries for long distances E and W, the W boundary forms a striking straight alignment with that of Legsby and Holtham to the N.(h) The W and S boundaries of this area are those of the part of the Heneages' estates which, in the early 19th century, was said to lie partly in Legsby and partly in East Torrington.(i) The earthworks recorded here lie centrally within this township, in a situation very similar to the nearby settlements of Collow (Legsby (4)) and East Torrington (Legsby (5)). As no other site has yet been identified within the township it seems likely that the earthworks mark the position of Coldecotes.
The poor and incomplete remains appear to be parts of the N and W sides of a rectangular enclosure defined by shallow ditches and low scarps, nowhere more than 1m in elevation. The probable line of the E side is visible as a crop-mark on aerial photographs, giving overall dimensions of 180-190m by at least 150m.(j) Similar low banks and scarps mark out two rectangular inner divisions of unequal size. These remains are cut through, not only by the existing 19th-century hedge-line and farm track, but also by an earlier system of enclosure hedges, now earthwork features, that had already been abandoned by 1814.(k) This system, perhaps part of the 16th- or early 17th-century enclosure of the township when it came into the hands of the Heneage family, in part roughly follows an E-W division between blocks of ridge-and-furrow though it also clearly overlies the ridges.
In form, size and siting the remains more closely resemble those of the monastic grange at Collow (Legsby(4)) than of a village. It is possible that the site of the original settlement, already deserted in 1322, was re-occupied as a grange from which the adjacent pastures were run after the acquisition by Sixhills Priory in 1407. (1-2)
The features described by the previous authorities have also been mapped from air photographs at 1:10,000 scale as part of the RCHME: Lincolnshire NMP. (3) |