When the compilers of William the Conqueror's Domesday Survey arrived in ‘Cesterscire’ they recorded, five miles south of the city of Chester, a manor called ‘Gretford’. The property of three Normans, Hugh, Osbern and Rainald, it contained ‘a church, a priest and seven villans and twelve bordars [husbandmen] and one Frenchman’.

The Domesday spelling of the name has no significance and was modified as time went by. Both King Offa and his shadowy predecessor Wat placed the lines of their great dykes to the west of the village that developed on the site, making it part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. A local historian in the early twentieth century rejected suggestions that it had once had a Welsh name: in all the surviving documents, he insisted, it is always referred to as ‘Gresford’, which is ‘evidently English’. But whatever name it went under its history was chequered.

Before the Norman conquest, control of the ‘debatable lands’ along the Welsh border had been effectively in the hands of trusted noblemen. William continued the system, creating an Earldom of Chester for one of his followers, but this seems not to have saved Gresford from harassment by Welsh Britons. The same historian writes