Recent Additions
Counting Catholics
A census of Catholics in Preston carried out in 1820 by Fr Joseph Dunn provides a map of the distribution of members of the faith in the town. It suggests a possible sectarian divide at that time between the Church Street and Friargate districts. The social composition of the Catholic population can be sketched by linking information from four trade directories of the town compiled at the same time with the records in the census. Details here .
Henry Barnacle and the Transit of Venus
The claim to fame of an astronomer who served as principal of a Preston college at the beginning of the last century was based on a completely false depiction of the part he played in the scientific expedition to Hawaii to measure the Transit of Venus. The true account of his time in what were then known as the Sandwich Islands has been revealed in journals kept by other members of the expedition. Find out more here .
Hundreds of potted biographies of Cambridge men (and 16 women!) born in Preston or who came to the town for education or employment. They include (pictured above) Alexander Rigby, Mother Mary Cephas and Isaac Ambrose. Find more here .
Septimus Tebay
From the back streets of Preston to the back streets of Farnworth by way of Cambridge and headship of Rivington Grammar School, the life of Septimus Tebay is a remarkable story of clogs to clogs in one generation. See here .
A 17th-century Lancashire road map
Amongst an extensive collection of 17th-century Lancashire maps and plans found at Towneley Hall, including street plans of Lancaster and Preston, were road maps showing routes through the old county from south to north. Supplemented by an itinerary through the county prepared by the antiquarian Richard Kuerden, they provide a wealth of topographical information.
Stand Prick Lane – the forgotten Preston street name
Who owned Lancashire?
Who owned Lancashire?
Reforming Preston
When Margaret Spillane (or Ainscough, as she then was) became the first woman to graduate from Trinity College, Cambridge, her success was largely due to the dissertation she wrote on municipal reform in Preston. That was 40 years ago, when, during a summer spent researching at the Harris Library and the Lancashire Record Office, she benefited from the help and advice of the Preston historian Nigel Morgan .
The result of her researches was a masterly treatment of the transformation in the government of the town, changing the corporation from a self-selected body into an elected assembly. However, this did not result in a transfer of power from the Tories to the Liberals and Radicals as in most other boroughs. The drawing of the new ward boundaries effectively guaranteed Tory control of the council.
Reforming Preston
Reviews and Notices
It can be found here
Recent links
here .
The ‘first’ tram road .
By permission of H.J.G Bryan Lord of the Manor of Lytham As well as researching the 1768 election and the early Ribble Link, David Berry rendered sterling service to anyone interested in the history of Preston by transcribing all the town’s court leet records from 1653 to 1813. He has put his work to good use in a detailed account of the town’s pinfolds – the places where stray beasts were impounded until their owners could be found and fined. It is on the Wyre Archaeology website: Preston pinfolds .
Work in progress
Col Thomas Bellingham Bellingham/Rawstorne diaries The diaries of Thomas Bellingham and Lawrence Rawstorne open a window on life in 17th-century Preston, and reveal the web of family and social connections that enabled the gentry to govern Lancashire. Transcripts of Bellingham’s diary entries from 1 August 1688 to 12 September 1690 and those of Rawstorne’s from September 1683 to 25 December 1689 can be found here: Bellingham/Rawstorne diaries . They have been edited where they overlap, from August 1688 to October 1689: the period including the Glorious Revolution and the accession of William III. Editing is ongoing.
Preston after Domesday Preston’s pre-industrial landscape Preston’s pre-industrial landscape – introduction
The Preston Poor Tax Survey of 1732 Preston Poor Tax Survey The hundreds of references it contains to the people and places of early 18th-century Preston are being slowly mapped, as shown in the illustration above.
Articles
1685 Survey of Preston
A detailed survey of Preston was carried out at the end of the 17th century and the surveyors’ sketch plans have been preserved. Internal evidence suggests they were produced in 1685 and they have been loosely attributed to the antiquarian Richard Kuerden. The plans include the name of the owner/occupier of each property.
1732 Preston Poor Tax Survey
1774 Survey of Preston
A very disreputable Quaker
John Scansfield was suspected of being a Jesuit and an agent of James II when he visited Lancashire and the North in the 1680s. That was certainly how he was viewed in Preston when he appeared in the town in 1688.
Bellingham/Rawstorne diaries
‘Child murder’ in Victorian Preston
Clergy in khaki
Catholic priests from Preston volunteered to serve as army chaplains in the Great War. They included Fr Bernard Page (above) who saw service on the Western Front and in revolutionary Russia. On his return to Preston Fr Page produced a history of a Catholic charity that provides much interesting material on life for Catholics in the town from the early 18th century:When Preston’s Catholics had to lie under ye Bushel Fr Tom Baines , who died in France in 1918, and Fr John Myerscough .
Conflicted sexuality in Edwardian Preston
A rather sad tale of unrequited love gives a rare glimpse into the private lives of the well-to-do families living in the Winckley Square district of Preston at the beginning of the last century, revealing the extent to which homosexuality was viewed as unacceptable at that time.
de Hoghton property deeds
Notes on hundreds of Preston property deeds stretching in time from the reign of Edward I to that of Elizabeth I.
Desirable Dwellings – Nigel Morgan’s ‘lost book’
Domesday Preston
An attempt at a reconstruction of the Preston landscape shortly after the Norman Conquest.
Foster Square: Victorian Preston’s ‘worst slum’
A 19th-century census enumerator in Preston’s Little Ireland was so incensed by the conditions in which the residents in his district were forced to live that he used the cramped space of his census return to express his feelings.
Frenchwood Tannery
One of the foulest of the many obnoxious trades of Victorian England was the tanning of leather. The Dixon family of Bank Parade, Avenham, developed Preston’s largest tannery on their own doorstep.
Friargate’s Catholic ‘chapels’ 1605-1990
Fulwood Forest
One of the major influences on the development of Preston in the Middle Ages was the imposition of the Forest of Fulwood by the Norman conquerors.
Gormanston Register
The Preston family, who took their name from the town in which they settled in the 13th century, established themselves in Ireland shortly after, becoming the Viscounts Gormanston. One of those Irish descendants collated the family property deeds at the end of the 14th century, including scores relating to Preston.
Great War conscription and Edwardian Preston’s ‘class ceiling’
Why did so very few conscripts from Preston’s working-class districts find a place in the officer’s mess, and what does it say about the class divide in Edwardian Preston?
Harris Library local studies material
Some of the material previously held at the Harris has been transferred to Lancashire Archives. It is as yet unclear what remains at the Harris and what is now housed at Bow Lane.
Historian Dorothy Marshall – a product of Preston’s Park School
One of the ‘overlooked’ female historians of the last century who, among her many more serious achievements, is credited with getting the future politician Roy Jenkins into Oxford.
Jacobins in Preston
Edward Baines: youthful revolutionary? E. P. Thompson, the celebrated historian of the English working class, wrote that the journalist and Whig MP Edward Baines was secretary of a Jacobin Club in Preston at the end of the 18th century.
Jacobins in Walton-le-Dale
Another writer produced a fictional autobiography of a Jacobin born in Walton-le-Dale who accompanied Thomas Paine to Paris at the time of the French Revolution. 20th-century historians treated the fiction as fact.
Kuerden’s Preston
The antiquarian Richard Kuerden left a detailed description of Preston at the end of the 17th century.
Lancashire land measurement
When is an ‘acre’ not an acre? When it is one of the several variations on the statute measure to be found on Preston documents well into the 19th century.
Moor Park – the first municipal park?
Preston’s claim to pre-eminence in the provision of public open space was, some years ago, called into question by a leading academic. Was he right?
Preston deeds in the Cockersand Cartulary
A list and abstract of the deeds to the properties Cockersand Abbey held in Preston at the end of the 13th century. They provide glimpses of the life and landscape of the medieval town.
Preston Guardian
Preston historian Henry L. Kirby compiled a four-volume digest of articles in the Preston Guardian covering the period from 1844 to 1905. He has left a valuable chronology of the town’s development. See also Anthony Hewitson’s Preston chronology 705-1883.
Preston Moor
Preston Moor was originally a part of Fulwood Forest that was separated from the forest and granted to Preston by a charter of 1252. It continued to play an important part in the economy of the town up until the 19th century.
Preston’s pre-industrial landscape
The pace of development of Preston’s landscape from the Middle Ages onwards was marked by slow organic growth until the dynamic and swamping impact of industrial development in the 19th century.
Public School Prestonians
‘Why were the newly rich businessmen of the Lancashire mills sending their children south to expensive schools, wondered the Taunton Commission, set up in 1864 to examine the public schools. It was so that “they may lose their northern tongue … and be quite away from home influences”.’
Reforming Preston
When Margaret Spillane (or Ainscough, as she then was) became the first woman to graduate from Trinity College, Cambridge, her success was largely due to the dissertation she wrote on municipal reform in Preston. That was 40 years ago, when, during a summer spent researching at the Harris Library and the Lancashire Record Office, she benefited from the help and advice of the Preston historian Nigel Morgan (see below).
The result of her researches was a masterly treatment of the transformation in the government of the town, changing the corporation from a self-selected body into an elected assembly. However, this did not result in a transfer of power from the Tories to the Liberals and Radicals as in most other boroughs. The drawing of the new ward boundaries effectively guaranteed Tory control of the council.
Reforming Preston
Social and Political Leadership in Preston 1820-60
The Preston historian Nigel Morgan’s postgraduate thesis on the political history of the town in the early 19th century. An essential source for the period of the town’s most dynamic changes.
Septimus Tebay
From the back streets of Preston to the back streets of Farnworth by way of Cambridge and headship of Rivington Grammar School, the life of Septimus Tebay is a remarkable story of clogs to clogs in one generation. See here .
Stephenson Terrace – what’s in a name?
The name of the famous Stephenson has for more than 150 years been wrongly attached to this elegant terrace.
Street name origins
Back in 1992 in faraway New Zealand a professor of botany published The Street Names of Preston to mark the 80th birthday of the author of the book, his Prestonian father, John Bannister.
The story of Tulketh and Tulketh Hall
Kim Travis has traced the history of the district from pre-Norman times up to the present day. It is a marvelously detailed reconstruction.
Trade directories
The Preston directories are a rich source for historians, providing the raw materials for mapping the changing social geography of the town from the beginning of the 19th century well into the 20th.
Victorian Preston’s Men from the Pru
At the end of the nineteenth century a small army of insurance agents was tramping the streets of Britain. They were collecting weekly contributions on the millions of policies taken out by working class savers anxious to protect their dependants from the terrible consequences of the sudden loss of a family breadwinner. The lives of the Preston contingent of that army are examined here.
When Preston’s Catholics had to lie under ye Bushel
Who owned Lancashire?
Who owned Lancashire?
