On this day … 16 October 1454

October 16, 2023October 16, 2023 ~ Peter Smith

The first documentary evidence of a chapel at Fernyhalgh is provided by the granting of permission by the Archdeacon of Richmond to Nicholas Syngleton of Broughton and Margaret his wife for ‘an oratory in the chapel of Fernehall juxta Broughton, and in the said manor at pleasure.’

According to Fishwick in his History of Preston, the granting ‘at pleasure’ meant that it was originally a private chapel for the Singletons, but shortly after, it became recognised as a public chapel.

The traditional and apocryphal story of the foundation of the chapel involves a wealthy merchant facing the imminent sinking of his vessel in the Irish Sea, who prayed and vowed that if he survived, he would show his gratitude to God by making a very generous donation.

As Fishwick recounts:

‘He was ultimately landed on the Lancashire coast, where a miraculous voice directed him to a place called Fernyhalgh, where he would find a crab tree bearing fruit without cores and beneath its shade a spring of water ; all this he discovered and near the site he erected the chapel of Fernyhalgh.’

This story was found in the personal papers of the Rev Christopher Tootell, the priest at the chapel in the late seventeenth century (of whom more later). He was told it by members of his congregation.

Fishwick found very few references to the chapel between 1454 and the dissolution of the chantries by Edward VI a hundred years later, when the building was demolished and its timber used in the erection of nearby Whittingham House. Even after the building’s destruction, local Catholics would gather in secret to hold services at ‘Our Lady’s Well’ near the site of the old chapel.

Troubled times came to Fernyhalgh again in the early years of the eighteenth century when the Rev Christopher Tootell was priest at the new chapel there (built in 1685 and then, and now, named Ladyewell House), when Preston Catholics were once more facing persecution, especially at the hands of the Preston vicar, the Rev Samuel Peploe.

Tootell had charge of the Fernyhalgh mission at Preston from 1699 until his death in 1727. He was a member of the ancient Catholic family of Tootells or Tuttells who lived at Lower Healey Hall, Chorley, and were connected by marriage with many gentry families in the neighbourhood, including, in Preston, the Walls of Moor Hall.

He was in Preston some time before his move to Fernyhalgh. He is probably the priest arrested in the town in 1689 when troops were searching the homes of local Catholics, for Lawrence Rawstorne, in his diary entry for 28 May, records that he ‘comitted a Priest one Tuttell to Lanc. [Lancaster]’. What happened at Lancaster is not recorded.

Tootell had to go into hiding on at least two further occasions. In his letters, he describes a period of relative peace shortly before 1715 when Tories, who he describes as ‘truly Civil Magistrates’, controlled the quarter sessions. The Tories resisted an attempt by the Whig Peploe to indict several local Catholics, including Tootell, who wrote that the Tory magistrates ‘were so favorable as to discharge the Persons indicted, upon their appearing by an Attorney, and paying off the costs and charges of the Suite’.

When the Whigs gained control of Lancashire at the end of 1715, following the Jacobite Rebellion of that year, the change was swift, as Tootell writes, and in place of ‘the Quiet we had enjoy’d under the late Magistracie’ the succeeding Whigs were ‘active and severe in their Office’.