The mediaeval background

There was already a vill, or settlement, and a port at Whitby in 1078, when William de Percy granted land for the foundation of a Benedictine abbey, dedicated to St Hilda, on the ruined site of an abbey that had flourished from the seventh to the ninth century. The refounded abbey prospered and the abbots became entitled to wear a mitre, a coveted status. (In 1225, Abbot Roger de Scarborough was a witness to the major reissue of Magna Charta.) The land held by the abbey was very early elevated to the status of a Liberty. That privilege gave the abbey a great measure of independence from the Crown, such as the right to offer ‘sanctuary’, but also gave it the responsibilities of a major centre of provincial power so near the Scottish frontier. The records of the medieval period show many incursions and raids by Scots and Scandinavians.

In 1128 ‘burgage’, the right to plant a town, was granted to the settlement at the foot of the abbey cliff. The extent of the medieval burgage area is not recorded, but later documentation makes the confines of the town clear, and by 1801 the township was defined as containing 48 acres, about half of which was inter-tidal mud. Housing in the neighbouring ‘constablery’, or township, of Ruswarp eventually abutted in part with that of the township of Whitby. This limitation of size, the probable extent of the original burgage, became of great importance to the development of the town in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact, by the time of the 1831 census, Whitby had the most densely populated central township in the north of England.

Towards the end of the twelfth century the town's status was elevated to that of a ‘free’ borough, with a ‘burgess court’. However, an early thirteenth-century abbot became alarmed by the fiscal consequences of that freedom. Supported by the Earl of Northumberland, who was high steward of the abbey, he persuaded King John to rescind the charter, and the town reverted to its former dependent status, despite a long fight through the courts until the middle of the fourteenth century. By that time the town was prosperous despite the loss of free status.