Village history: Denby’s link to Scotland’s king

Nov 4 2009 By Chris Heath

New information on some of Denby Dale’s earliest names inhabitants has recently come to light in Scotland, and Chris has been quick to exploit a mass of new connections with the Balliol and Burdet and de Denby families, all of whom owned extensive tracts of land in the Denby Dale area.

It was Peter Burdet who handed over the keys of Berwick Castle to the Balliols when Edward I chose John Balliol as King of Scotland in 1292.

John Balliol has been married to Margaret de Denby for at least 10 years by then, and Peter Burdet’s family was well established in the Denby area.

As a footnote, John Balliol rebelled six years later and Edward sacked Berwick Castle, killing 7,000.

Publicly stripped of crown, sceptre, sword, rings and even the fur of his royal robe, John slunk off in 1296 to France, where he died, never revisiting his lands in Denby.

As a final flourish, Chris has assembled a montage of largely unrelated ‘deeds and misdeeds’ involving Denby Dalers down the ages.

To a large extent, this compendium relied on a painstaking ploughing through newspaper records page by page from the 1850s onwards for some of the more bizarre and gory entries.

Denby Dale and District IV, by Chris Heath, published by Wharncliffe Books, £12.99.