On this day … 30 October 1776

A court leet was held before the mayor of Preston, Edward Pedder, at which the various officers of the court and their titles were named. Those titles hark back to the town’s medieval times, while some of the persons holding those offices or fined by those officers were to play important roles in taking Preston to the forefront of the industrial revolution.

These titles may all look backwards, but 1776 was the year in which Alderman Atherton one of the affeerers (see below) and the mayor Edward Pedder opened the town’s first bank, known later as Pedders Old Bank. The bank flourished for more than fifty years before its spectacular crash, financing many of the textile enterprises of the nineteenth century.

The Atherton family of the old Greenbank House on Fylde Road were slaveholders who owned a vast sugar plantation in Jamaica. The inheritor of the family’s wealth was reckoned to be one of the richest women in Britain when she died at the end of the nineteenth century.

Among the many people fined by the court was John Watson the elder. He was the man who opened Preston’s first cotton mill on Moor Lane the following year, and later had the Penwortham cotton factory, later the now-demolished Vernon-Carus mill. Like the Athertons, he ran his enterprise as a family business, and like the Pedders his business collapsed in the nineteenth century.

While the Pedders, Athertons and Waltons were steering Preston into the modern industrial age, the court leet was still looking back to its medieval origins, as its list of officers shows:

𝐕𝐢𝐞𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐅𝐢𝐬𝐡 & 𝐅𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐡: the equivalent of today’s public health inspectors
𝐀𝐥𝐞 𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬: which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as officers ‘appointed to test the ale brewed in a particular area’.
𝐀𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐫𝐬: these were the people who decided what fine those guilty of breaking the rules of the court should pay.
𝐓𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐨𝐨𝐫 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬: as the name suggests, they funded the apprenticeships of poor teenagers.
𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐋𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐬 for Church Gate, Fishergate & Market Place, and Fryergate: six men appointed to ‘police’ in pairs their assigned districts of the town looking out for infringements of the court rulings.
𝐏𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬: two appointed to impound stray animals in the pinfold at the bottom of Friargate.
𝐁𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐥𝐞: the man charged with punishing petty offenders.
𝐒𝐜𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐬 for the Market place, for ffishergate, from Cocker Hole to Church gate barrs, for Cheapside and Old Shambles from Mr Greens corner to Cocker Hole with St John’s wiend, for Backweend & Back Lane and ffriergate: street cleaners.

Among those fined by this court was ‘Henry Lutwidge, of Walton, Esquire’. The Luwidges were to become major landowners in Preston in the nineteenth century, shaping the development of much of Ribbleton.

This Ludwidge was fined for ‘not sufficiently amending and repairing the Street or Road near the Mill in Molyneux’s Square, and in the said Square’. He had inherited this land, through which the present Lancaster Road runs, when he married Lucy Molyneux, a few years earlier.

The Molyneuxs who gave their name to the square had been major landowners in the town at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and their Molyneux Square and the Lancaster Road Shambles was the first of the many ‘redevelopments’ the town was to witness in the course of the next centuries.

Henry Lutwidge’s other claim to fame was that his granddaughter married her cousin, a Charles Dodgson, in 1827 and their first son Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in 1832. He was better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland.

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Sources
David Berry’s transcription of the Preston Court Leet records: http://www.wyrearchaeology.org.uk/index.php/areas-of-interest/preston?view=article&id=162
The Atherton family
The Pedders and their bank
The Lutwidges and Lewis Carroll