Lancashire

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‘Bounded on the east with the counties of York and part of Derby, on south with the River Mersey – which severeth it from Cheshire – on the west with the Irish Sea and on the north with the counties of Cumberland and Westmorland’, Lancashire, like most of the adjacent counties, was regarded by the godly as one of the ‘dark corners of the land’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 132; C. Hill, ‘Puritans and ‘the dark corners of the land’’, TRHS xiii.

‘Pleasantly seated’ at the point where a branch of the Great North Road crossed the River Lune, Lancaster was officially Lancashire’s chief administrative centre – although that role had largely been usurped by the more commodiously-situated Preston. It was described in the 1670s (echoing William Camden a century earlier) as ‘a place at present indifferent large ... not a town much frequented nor inhabited by tradesmen but chiefly by husbandmen, as lying in a good soil’. Infra, ‘Preston’; R.

Manchester was the largest and most important township in the parish that bore its name – an area of some 60 square miles covering much of modern greater Manchester. T.S. Willan, Elizabethan Manchester (Chetham Soc. ser. 3, xxvii), 1. The seventeenth-century town lay clustered along the banks of the River Irwell at the junction of the roads from London to Chester and from Chester to York. VCH Lancs. iv.

Clitheroe was one of northern England’s smallest and most isolated boroughs. Nestled in the Ribble Valley on the road from Preston into Yorkshire via the Craven Gap, it commanded (at that time) neither a crossing of the river nor a site of any great strategic importance. W.S. Weeks, Clitheroe in the Seventeenth Century (Clitheroe, 1927), 7; VCH Lancs. vi. 360. According to Richard Blome, writing in the 1670s, it was known only for its ‘white-lime’ and its castle. R.

‘Commodiously seated on the goodly River Mersey, where it affords a bold and safe harbour for ships’, Liverpool was the region’s ‘chief port ... a place of great resort’ and one of the main embarkation points for trade and troops to Ireland. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 133-4; Liverpool Town Bks. 1649-71 ed. M. Power (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. cxxxvi), 26; R. Muir, Hist.

Preston was described in the 1670s as ‘a great, fair and well inhabited and frequented borough town’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 135. Situated at the centre of Lancashire, where several major routes crossed the River Ribble, it was the seat of government for the duchy of Lancaster and a focal point for county society. The town was also the commercial centre for a considerable area of northern Lancashire, stretching from the coastal plain – the Fylde – eastwards into the Pennine valleys.

Located slightly to the north of, and roughly equidistant between, Manchester and Liverpool, Wigan commanded the point where the Great North Road from London crossed the River Douglas. Wigan parish had around 4,000 inhabitants in the early Stuart period, while the town itself contained 458 households in 1664, suggesting a population of approximately 2,000. Wigan was therefore Lancashire’s largest town after Manchester, although its Ship Money assessment was the highest of any urban centre in the county.

Newton-in-Makerfield – or Newton-le-Willows as it is known today – was described as a ‘little, poor market [town]’ in the 1530s, and it was still ‘hardly more than a village’ a century later. VCH Lancs. iv. 132; C.G. Bayne, ‘The first House of Commons of Queen Elizabeth’, EHR xxiii. 679. Situated within Winwick parish, about half way between Liverpool and Manchester, it lay on the main road between Warrington and Wigan and was the administrative centre for the fee or barony of Makerfield. VCH Lancs. iv.

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