Wikipedia
Leath was one of the wards of the ancient county of Cumberland in north west England. Unlike most other English counties, Cumberland was divided into wards rather than hundreds.
The ward was bounded on the south by Westmorland, the north by Cumberland and Eskdale wards, the east by the counties of Northumberland and Durham and on the west by the wards of Allerdale above Derwent and Allerdale below Derwent.
In the Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales (1870–72) John Marius Wilson described Leath:
The ward largely corresponds to that part of the modern Eden District that lies within Cumberland that is the former Penrith urban and rural districts and the Alston with Garrigill Rural District.
Market towns in the ward were Penrith (the largest settlement and seat of local government), Kirkoswald and Alston. At one time, the village of Greystoke had held markets.
A large part of the ward once made up the main part of the Royal hunting ground known as Inglewood Forest, which was subject to Forest Laws up until the reign of Henry VIII.
The manors of Penrith, Langwathby, Castle Sowerby and Great Salkeld were part of the royal estate known as the Honour of Penrith, which eventually passed into the hands of the Dukes of Devonshire.
Usage examples of "leath".
He had guessed that Owen's rebellion symbolized for his step-mother her own long struggle against the Leath conventions, and he understood that if Anna so passionately abetted him it was partly because, as she owned, she wanted his liberation to coincide with hers.
She seemed to feel her son's hovering and discriminating presence, and she gave Darrow the sense that he was being tested and approved as a last addition to the Leath Collection.
It gave him an odd feeling of discomfort to think that she should have any of the characteristics of the late Fraser Leath: he had, somehow, fantastically pictured her as the mystical offspring of the early tenderness between himself and Anna Summers.
She had told him of her marriage to Fraser Leath, and of her subsequent life in France, where her husband's mother, left a widow in his youth, had been re-married to the Marquis de Chantelle, and where, partly in consequence of this second union, the son had permanently settled himself.
She had spoken also, with an intense eagerness of affection, of her little girl Effie, who was now nine years old, and, in a strain hardly less tender, of Owen Leath, the charming clever young stepson whom her husband's death had left to her care.
But this, again, was negatived by the fact that, during the afternoon's shooting, young Leath had been in a mood of almost extravagant expansiveness, and that, from the moment of his late return to the house till just before dinner, there had been, to Darrow's certain knowledge, no possibility of a private talk between himself and his step-mother.
Perhaps no one less familiar with her face than Darrow would have discerned the tension of the smile she transferred from himself to Owen Leath, or have remarked that her eyes had hardened from misty grey to a shining darkness.
Presently he was struck by the fact that Owen Leath and the girl were silent also.
Something was in fact passing mutely and rapidly between young Leath and Sophy Viner.
Above the fagged faces of the Parisian crowd he had caught the fresh fair countenance of Owen Leath signalling a joyful recognition.
He was glad when the bell called the audience to their seats, and young Leath left him with the friendly question: "We'll see you at Givre later on?
Anna's announcement had not come to him as a complete surprise: that morning, as he strolled back to the house with Owen Leath and Miss Viner, he had had a momentary intuition of the truth.
But Fraser Leath had grown so unimportant a factor in the scheme of things that these marks of his presence caused the young man no emotion beyond that of a faint retrospective amusement.
She had given herself to Darrow, and concealed the episode from Owen Leath, with no more apparent sense of debasement than the vulgarest of adventuresses.