Of the transactions, enough remains in the very names to furnish a reflecting mind with conjectural ideas as to the occurrence of a serious conflict there.

In the early periods of Saxon dominion this bleak, and scarcely cultivated tract, appears to have been almost in a state of nature, thin of population, and its occupants scantily fed, and meagrely clad. Yet there can be little doubt it was during this era the place first received its name, and a Saxon family became the earliest tillers of the earth, the originators of the meadow on the hill, the builders of the first house subsequently called, when other dwellings clung around it, the hall in the bottom, the germ of the present Holebottom. The habitations of the time would be of timber, rude, and low, and small. The Saxon military chiefs parcelled out the country in sufficient proportions to support themselves, their families, and dependents. Seated upon his demesne (the hall farm) consisting probably of one or two carucates (a carucate was one hundred acres) "the Saxon chief settled into a peaceful layman, occupied in husbandry and pasturage; here he erected his rude but independent mansion, surrounded by the huts of his shepherds and husbandmen, over whom he exercised the rights of a sort of primitive government, and such appear to have been the origin of our manors, vills, or townships (for the terms were at first convertible), which, having commenced in the earliest period of the Northumbrian kingdom, still subsist, with little alteration, but in the orthography of the names, the increase of their population, and the extent of their cultivated lands."

There seems every reason to suppose the place to have been from a most remote period a berewick, or small manor, or lordship, without baronial rights, subject to the greater manor of Salford, which it is not improbable was always an appendage of the crown, even during the existence of the heptarchy.

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