Around the time of Henry II, the manor of High Legh in Bucklow hundred, Cheshire, was granted in moieties to two families who assumed the name, becoming the Leghs of East Hall and the Leghs (who later adopted the spelling Leigh) of West Hall. The earliest record of the landholdings of the Leghs of East Hall dates from c.1230, when Adam Legh was granted half a bovate of land in the township (CLW/1). The Leghs of East Hall resided in the neighbourhood for almost eight hundred years.
According to Evelyn Lord, during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries the Leghs of East Hall concentrated on building up their estates by marriage or purchase, avoiding political involvement or military enterprise. Until the eighteenth century they habitually married into similar gentry families in Cheshire or south Lancashire, and they were related to most of the landed families in the neighbourhood. Lord notes that the family used strict settlements to ensure the continuity and integrity of the estates in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In c.1312 John, son of Hugh de Legh, acquired one-seventh of the manor of Alpraham through his marriage to Joan Somerville, one of the co-heiresses of Mathew, lord of Alpraham (CWL/19). John Legh’s marriage to Isabella Poole in 1406 brought Capenhurst in the Wirral to the Legh family (CLW/75). In c.1587 George Legh married the heiress Anne Booth of Barton upon Irwell, Lancashire, bringing lands in Barton, Openshaw and Manchester to the Legh family (CWL/987). The manor of Thornton le Moors was acquired by remainder on the death of Hon. Langham Booth (1684-1724), George Legh’s claim being upheld by the House of Lords in 1733 (CWL/785-860). Property in Birstall and elsewhere in Yorkshire came to the Leghs through the marriage in 1761 of Henry Cornwall Legh with Elizabeth, daughter and co-heiress of Robert Hopkinson of Heath near Wakefield (CWL/254). Property in Fiskerton near Newark on Trent, Nottinghamshire, appears to have been acquired when the Sale estate was purchased in the late eighteenth century, as Samuel Cliffe of Newark married Anne, daughter of Richard Massey of Sale, in 1694 (CWL/916-919).
In 1731 George Legh (1703-80) married Anna-Maria Cornwall, the only daughter and heiress of Francis Cornwall, Baron of Burford, Shropshire (CLW/245). Their eldest son was named Henry Cornwall Legh. However, it was another two generations before George Cornwall-Legh (1804-77) adopted the double-barrelled surname which his successors retained.
Raymond Richards records that in 1877 the Leghs of East Hall owned 2,675 out of 4,521 acres in the township, while the Leighs of West Hall owned 1,135 acres. According to John Bateman’s The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (1883), Henry Martin Legh owned 2,798 acres in Cheshire, worth £6,223, and 579 acres in Lancashire, with a rental value of £953. In 1912 the Leighs sold their interests in the township to the Leghs of East Hall. East Hall was requisitioned by the War Office on the outbreak of World War II and was demolished in the 1970s. However, the family continued to reside in the neighbourhood in the early twenty-first century.
Sources:
George Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, 2nd edition revised and enlarged by Thomas Helsby, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1882), iii, 449-64.
John Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Harrison, 1883), 263.
Raymond Richards, ‘The Chapels of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St John at High Legh, Cheshire with an account of the Cornwall-Legh and Egerton-Legh families’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 101 (1949), 97-136.
Evelyn Lord, ‘The Cornwall-Leghs of High Legh: Approaches to the Inheritance Patterns of North-West England’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 73.2 (1991), 21-36.
