Thirsk
Thirsk grew up between two medieval highways either side of a beck, made its money from the road, and lost that trade in a single year when the railway opened a mile to the west. Here is the town’s story, with the popular version corrected where it does not survive checking.
The setting
Thirsk sits near the eastern edge of a broad lowland that runs unbroken for at least sixty miles, from south of York to the Tees, never rising much above a hundred metres. That lowland has carried north and south traffic since before the Romans, and still carries the A1, the A19 and the East Coast Main Line.
It is often described as a gap between the Pennines and the moors. Measured against elevation data, that is generous. At Thirsk’s latitude the lowland is about fifteen miles wide below the hundred-metre contour and twenty miles wide between the two-hundred-metre contours. You cannot see across it, and Natural England, which maps this landscape, never calls it a gap. It calls it the broad Vale.
What Thirsk does have is a wall. The Hambleton escarpment stands about five and a half miles east of the Market Place and climbs from a hundred and twenty metres to nearly three hundred in the space of a kilometre, with vertical crags at the top and very few roads over it. Sutton Bank is one of the steepest A roads in the country. Westward, the ground does not reach the same height for another fifteen miles. Thirsk is not in the middle of anything. It is pinned against its eastern edge, and that escarpment is the genuinely distinctive fact about where the town sits.
Two towns
The Victoria County History explains the shape of the town in one sentence: Thirsk lies between two important medieval highways which run along opposite banks of Cod Beck. On the east was the Street from York to the port of Yarm. On the west was the road from Topcliffe to Northallerton and Scotland. The town grew in between them, in two halves.
Old Thirsk, on the east bank, is the older settlement and was the borough. Its houses stand along Long Street and around St James’s Green, the great open space that was the “old market stead” named in 1398 and still held the cattle market in 1859. The fifty-two burgage tenements that carried the parliamentary vote were all here.
New Thirsk, on the west bank, grew up around the bailey of the castle. That is where the Market Place is, and the Market Place contains no burgages at all, which is how you know it is the later of the two. The bit visitors find confusing, that the market square is in the newer half of the town, is exactly the interesting part. Sowerby and Norby were separate places again, and have since grown into the whole.
In 1086 Domesday recorded Thirsk as Tresche, from an Old Scandinavian word meaning fen or lake. Hugh son of Baldric’s manor, with ten villans and eight acres of meadow, was worth four pounds in 1066 and ten shillings in 1086. That collapse is the Harrying of the North showing up in the accounts, and it is the most eloquent number in the town’s early record.
The coaching town
The best-documented part of Thirsk’s history is the coaching trade, and the numbers come from printed directories rather than local tradition. In 1823, four named services worked out of George Blythe’s Golden Fleece on the Market Place: the Expedition to Leeds, the Highflyer to Newcastle and York, the Royal Mail to London and Edinburgh, and the Wellington, which reached London at seven the second morning. Between them, nine scheduled departures a day.
Pigot’s directory of 1829 records the Royal Mail from Edinburgh calling at the Crown every morning at four, and the Shields mail at the Golden Fleece at half past three. The post office despatched letters for London every morning at four and took delivery at eight minutes past nine each evening. Timings that precise mean a through mail coach passing, not a local receiving office.
By 1840 six services were calling and twelve departures a day. Thirsk had thirty inns and taverns plus eight beerhouses, two of them posting houses, and at the Golden Fleece alone the landlord kept fifty to sixty horses including twelve pairs of post horses. The Three Tuns opposite kept about twenty.
Then it stopped. The Great North of England railway was completed in 1841, passing a mile west of the town, and the 1890 directory records the consequence in eight words: the waggons and coaches disappeared from the road. The last Edinburgh mail ran into York in 1842. Northallerton’s population actually fell between 1851 and 1871. The trade did not decline. It ended.
Corrections
The market is prescriptive, held by immemorial custom with no charter at all, and certainly older than 1145. The document of that year is the foundation charter of Newburgh Priory. The truer line is better anyway: Thirsk’s market is older than any record of it.
It was Robert de Stuteville, around 1092. The Mowbray name did not reach Thirsk until after 1106 and the family only bore it from 1138. The town’s own interpretation boards get this wrong; the plaque on the site gets it right.
The Hambleton Drove Road runs the escarpment five miles east, and its whole purpose was to keep to the hilltops and avoid the turnpike tolls on the roads Thirsk sat on. Thirsk’s own cattle were sold on St James’s Green.
A claim that the Highflyer managed it in just over 24 hours in 1786 turns up locally. The mail, faster than any stage coach, took forty-two and a half hours for the 393 miles. Twenty-four would need better than sixteen miles an hour sustained through the night, including every change of horses.
Odds and ends
The borough sent two members to Parliament from 1295. The Franklands of Thirkleby commanded both seats from 1688 to 1832 without once facing a contest, and in 1816 Sir Thomas Frankland owned 49 of the 50 burgage tenements that carried the vote.
William de Mowbray was born at Thirsk Castle, was one of the twenty-five sureties appointed to enforce Magna Carta in 1215, was excommunicated by Pope Innocent III, was taken prisoner at the Battle of Lincoln in 1217 and is buried at Newburgh Priory.
At Old Byland on 14 October 1322, Robert the Bruce's Highlanders scaled the cliffs onto the English flank and Edward II fled Rievaulx so fast he left his belongings behind. The Mowbray manor house at Thirsk and its dovecotes were destroyed by the Scots the same year.
Thirsk Town station opened on 1 June 1848 and closed to passengers in December 1855, almost certainly because a railway merger let trains run via the main line instead. It carried goods until 1966. There is a Tesco on the site.
The lord of the manor won a perpetual Chancery injunction on 17 November 1909 against the Thirsk Farmers' Auction Mart for trading without paying the manorial tolls.
The Victoria County History records, in one sentence, that the tollbooth on the Market Place was burnt down in 1834 while occupied by a travelling showman.
The drinking town
The coaching inns are the famous part of Thirsk’s drinking history, and they are the middle of the story rather than the beginning. In 1630 the manor court presented Henry Kildayle for keeping a common alehouse and selling his best beer above the statutory penny a quart. He was fined elevenpence. Seven years later, forty alehouse keepers were presented and fined fourpence each in a single sitting for the same offence.
By 1673 Richard Blome’s Britannianoted Thirsk for its good ale, a century and a half before the first mail coach changed horses in the Market Place. The town’s court leet officers included four ale tasters.
The counts, taken from printed directories, run: twenty-six licensed houses in 1823, thirty-eight by 1840 as the coaching trade peaked and the new beerhouses arrived together, and back to thirty-one by 1890 with the coaches fifty years dead. Today there are fourteen. Eleven of those appear in the 1890 directory under the same or a traceable name, which is a documented continuity of at least a hundred and thirty-five years.
Brewing was a family business here. Thomas and Richard Meek and the Rhodes family were brewing and malting on Kirkgate from at least 1823, and Quintin Rhodes was still listed as a brewer there in 1890, by which time he also chaired the Rural Sanitary Authority. Temperance arrived early too: a temperance hotel is listed at Norby in 1840, and in 1846 the Mechanics’ Institute was founded by temperance campaigners specifically to keep young men out of the pubs. That building later became the Ritz cinema.
Questions
Older than any document that records it. The Victoria County History says the market is prescriptive, meaning held by immemorial custom with no charter at all, and certainly predates 1145. It has been held on a Monday since at least 1293. The 1145 date often quoted as a market charter is actually the foundation charter of Newburgh Priory, which extended privileges inside a borough that already existed.
No, though it was on the road the mail actually took. The trunk route ran through Boroughbridge and Northallerton, and the A1 today is about six miles west of the Market Place. Thirsk stood on the York branch of the London to Edinburgh mail road, which the standard 1901 survey of the route says can equally claim to be part of the Great North Road.
Because there were two settlements. Old Thirsk, on the east bank of Cod Beck along Long Street and around St James's Green, was the borough and held the 52 burgage tenements. New Thirsk grew up on the west bank around the castle bailey, and that is where the Market Place is. The Market Place contains no burgages at all, which is the clearest proof it is the later of the two.
Yes, at Castle Garth, built around 1092 by Robert de Stuteville. Roger de Mowbray held it against Henry II in the revolt of 1173 to 74, surrendered it, and Henry ordered it destroyed in 1176. About half the earthworks survive. Note that the town's own interpretation boards name the wrong builder; the boulder plaque on the site is the one that gets it right.
In 1823, four named services made nine departures a day from the Golden Fleece alone. By 1840 six services were calling, twelve departures a day. Then the railway opened a mile west of the town in March 1841 and, as the 1890 directory puts it, the waggons and coaches disappeared from the road.
Almost. An Act of Parliament in 1767 authorised a navigation up Cod Beck from the Swale. A wharf was built, one lock was cut at Sowerby and the beck was deepened and straightened, and then the money ran out. Lock Bridge still stands where the first and only lock was made.
Sources checked on 23 August 2026, chiefly the Victoria County History, the printed trade directories of 1823 to 1890, Tom Bradley’s account of the Yorkshire coaching days published in 1889, William Grainge’s history of 1859, and the National Heritage List. Where sources disagree, the page says so. The blue plaque trail walks you past a good deal of it.