History of Chester

The area of Chester is thought to have formed part of the kingdom of Powys, whose early kings claimed descent from the exile Vortigern.

In 616, Æthelfrith of Northumbria defeated a Welsh army at the Battle of Chester and probably established the Anglo-Saxon position in the area from then on.

The Anglo-Saxons adopted the native name as the calque Legeceaster, which over time was shortened to Ceaster and finally corrupted to Chester.

Taking a barge up the River Dee from his court to the Minster of St John the Baptist, Edgar supposedly took the helm of the vessel while it was rowed by six or eight[18] tributary "kings" (Latin: reguli, lit.

Hugh d'Avranches, the first Norman earl (it was first given to a Fleming, Gherbod, who never took up residence but returned to Flanders where he was captured, and later killed) was William's nephew.

It is now known as Chester Castle and was rebuilt in stone by Henry III in 1245,[20] after the last of six Norman earls died without issue.

Before Ranulph, Hugo's son had inherited at the age of seven but died in the White Ship, along with the king's heir, William, on his way to England from France, where he was educated under the guardianship of Henry I. Earl Ranulf II, Ranulph's son, even helped to capture King Stephen in 1140, and ended up controlling a third of England after supporting Henry II's claim to the throne.

The monastery was dissolved under Henry VIII in 1540 and was rededicated to Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary to become Chester Cathedral.

There is a popular belief that it was the silting of the River Dee that created the land which is now Chester's racecourse (known as the Roodee), on which a stone cross still stands which is said to have been erected in memory of Lady Trawst who died as a result of an image of the Virgin Mary called Holy Rood falling upon her in Hawarden church a few miles down the river).

The silting which led to the creation of the Roodee, in its current form, is well established on a sequence of post-medieval maps dating from the later 16th century.

Despite stories to the contrary, the weir above the Old Dee Bridge was not built by the Romans but by Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester between 1077 and 1101 to hold water for his river mills.

In 1195 a monk, Lucian, wrote 'ships from Aquitaine, Spain, Ireland and Germany unload their cargoes of wine and other merchandise'.

However the estuary was silting up so that trading ships to the port of Chester had to harbour downstream at Neston, Parkgate, and "Hoyle Lake" or Hoylake.

The map sequence shows the river moving its course from against the wall north of the Watergate out to its current location between 1580 and approximately the 1830s.

However, it is apparent that some rivulets and inlets have been lost since, although some have been identified in archaeological work on the site of the former House of Industry and Gasworks.

In March 1643, leading Chester royalist Francis Gamull was commissioned to raise a regiment of foot to defend the city.

The earthworks consisted of a ditch and mud wall with a series of 'mounts' or gun platforms were added along with turnpike gates on incoming roads.

In the early morning of 20 September 1645, parliamentary forces overran the eastern earthworks at the Boughton turnpike and captured the east suburbs of the city up to the walls.

A cannon battery placed in St John's churchyard breached the city walls on 22 September near the Roman amphitheatre.

Also during the evening Sydenham Poyntz, a Parliamentarian in pursuit of the King's forces, entered Whitchurch (15 miles to the south) with 3000 horse.

A decision was made to send out Lord Gerrard's horse troops and five hundred foot soldiers in the morning.

By 1646, after having refused to surrender nine times and with Lord Byron at the head of the city's defences, having only spring water and boiled wheat for lunch — the citizens (17,000) had already eaten their dogs — a treaty was signed.

When the exultant Puritan forces were let loose on the city, despite the treaty, they destroyed religious icons including the high cross, which was not erected again for over three centuries.

In 1643 Sir Richard Grosvenor petitioned the Assembly to enclose the Row which ran through the front of his town house on Lower Bridge Street, and his request was granted.

It was once thought that Chester's maritime trade was brought to an end by the silting of the River Dee, although recent research has shown this was not the case.

It was the use of larger ocean-going ships that led to the diversion of the trade to the relatively young town of Liverpool and other locations on the River Mersey, which had long been rivals to Chester, such as Runcorn.

Edmond Halley (of comet fame) was the deputy controller of Chester Castle for a short time and on 10 May 1697 recorded a fall of one-inch hailstones in the area.

The building of the route to Holyhead involved one particularly notable tragedy, when a cast iron bridge over the river Dee just by the Roodee race course, collapsed.

A Royal Commission was set up to investigate the problem, and they confirmed the conclusions of the Railway Inspectorate that the design was deficient.

The Ruskinian Venetian Gothic Town Hall was ceremoniously opened by Prince of Wales in 1869; its design, following a public competition held to replace the Exchange building, which had stood at the centre of Northgate Street until it burnt down in 1862, was by William Henry Lynn[28] (1829–1915) an Irish architect with a practice in Belfast.