A short distance north of the church at the Junction of the Snydale and Castleford Roads, stands the remains of the village cross. These crosses were of some importance in bygone days as a meeting place where the people met to discuss matters of a public character.
From the steps of the cross the king's proclamations were often read and here the people gathered to enact by-laws for the local government of the village. Some were called market cross, others were called preaching crosses. In some villages the market was held at the Cross out in the open and in some towns the custom is still kept up to this day.
In the early days of Christianity there were of course many villages with no church, and the early preachers used the steps of the Cross from which they delivered their discourses.
In the middle ages there was also a considerable number of mendicant Friars, a sort of monk who went from village to village preaching to the people and tending the sick. They are said to have been very poor owning no worldly riches of any kind, and their clothing being nothing but a loose gown with a girdle round the waist. The different orders were known by the colour of the gowns they wore; thus we had the different Orders - Grey Friars, Black Friars and White Friars. These wandering preachers gathered the poor people round the village cross and from its steps preached to them. There was a house of the Black Friars at Pontefract.
In more modern times, as the number of public places of worship increased and more modern methods of local government became prevalent, the village cross lost its importance. But long after that it was, and in some villages still is, the meeting place of the gossips of the village, and there are old inhabitants still living in Normanton who remember the time when the cross at Normanton was the rendezvous of the farmer lads who met there to play the old English games.
The cross is now surmounted with a street lamp but it seems to me it would have been better to repair and preserve it in its original form, than to make it into a lamp-post and a signboard. Normanton in the old days, like many other villages, had to depend for its water supply on wells and springs, and in those days a reliable spring of pure water was an important asset to the life of the community. We may Judge what importance the people attached to those wells by the names they gave them. Many of them were named after some saint, or other famous personage. We have for instance, at East Hardwick near Pontefract, "St.Ives Well", which, Mr. L. Padgett in his history of Pontefract tells us, has been there a thousand years, and we have a number of wells in Yorkshire named after the famous outlaw Robin Hood. Thus we find that the people looked on those wells with much respect if not with reverence.
One of the best known wells in Normanton was in what is now the busiest street in the town. It was free to all the inhabitants and was known as ''West Well'' and was situated on the south side of High Street. The water came from a spring and vas collected in a kind of trough fixed by the side of the road, providing a supply of fresh water for both man and beast, and was certainly as reliable as the more modern fountain that now stands in the centre of the Market Place, and which often seems to be but a receptacle for waste paper and rubbish.
When the land about here was required for building, West Well was closed (1877) but the water still springs in the cellar of the premises now occupied by Mr. F. Dolphin, whence it flows into the main sewer. The name and place of the well still survives in "Westwell House", and the premises of the Westwell Furnishing Co. Thus do old landmarks pass away and their existence becomes but a memory and a tradition.
I have found no records as to how Normanton was effected by the Civil War with Charles the First in the middle of the seventeenth century. Battles were fought at Leeds and Wakefield, armies were constantly passing within a mile or two of the town, Pontefract was the centre of military operations for five years, the Castle was besieged by both the Parliamentary and the King's forces (three times in all) and yet we find no records to show that the inhabitants of Normanton were in any way disturbed during the whole of the tumultous period; so we may assume that the farmer tilled his land, the miller ground his corn, the village smith wrought at his forge and the labourers pursued their several tasks with the same uninterrupted regularity as their predecessors had done for hundreds of years.
In those days few events happened to break the perhaps not altogether joyless monotony of their simple but useful lives; and the history of those who lived in one generation is but a repetition of those who lived in proceeding and succeeding generations.
Thus, for a long period, reaching down to the beginning of the nineteenth century, we find no local events of sufficient importance to claim a place in these chronicles.
In the first decade of the nineteenth century an historical event took place which was of supreme importance to the inhabitants of Normanton; namely, the enclosure by an act of parliament of more than six hundred acres of the common lands of the township and it is interesting to learn how these lands were allotted and to whom the several allotments were awarded.
