Horsforth

Horsforth is a town and civil parish in the City of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, five miles north-west of Leeds city centre. Historically a village within the West Riding of Yorkshire, it had a population of 18,895 at the 2011 Census. It became part of the City of Leeds metropolitan borough in 1974. In 1999, a civil parish was created for the area, and the parish council voted to rename itself a town council. The area is within the Horsforth ward of Leeds City Council, which also includes the southern part of Rawdon. Horsforth was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Horseford, Horseforde, Hoseforde; but late-ninth-century coins with the legend ORSNA FORD and OHSNA FORD may have come from Horsforth. The name derives from Old English hors or, to judge from the coins, *horsa ('horse') in the genitive plural form horsa/horsna + ford 'ford', thus meaning 'horses' ford'. This refers to a river crossing on the River Aire (possibly at Newlay), that was subsequently used to transport woollen goods to and from Pudsey, Shipley and Bradford. The original ford was situated off Calverley Lane, but was replaced by a stone footbridge at the turn of the 19th century. The three unnamed Saxon thegns that held the land at the Conquest gave way to the king who granted it to lesser Norman nobles, but not long after most of the village came under the control of Kirkstall Abbey, a Cistercian house founded in 1152 on the bank of the River Aire downstream of Horsforth. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, Horsforth was partitioned and sold to five families, one of them – the Stanhopes – achieved supremacy and controlled the village for the next 300 years. The estate record of the Stanhopes is regarded as one of the most extensive and important collections of its kind, complementing the extensive medieval record associated with Kirkstall Abbey. Until the mid 19th century, Horsforth was an agricultural community but it expanded rapidly with the growth of the nearby industrial centre of Leeds.