"If you had seen these roads before they were made,
You would lift up your hands and bless General Wade."
[The Virgin's Head of Halifax.]
In the romantic and somewhat sterile region of south-western Yorkshire, verging on the county of Lancaster, lies a valley, or rather what has the aspect of a valley, from its nestling under the shadows of some hills of considerable height. On the slope of an aclivity stands the modern town of Halifax, with its forest of lofty chimneys, its pretty park, and its many palatial structures, devoted to charitable and philanthropic purposes, due chiefly to the benevolence of the Crossleys, who, from a humble origin, have, within the memory of living persons, become manufacturing princes of the locality, and who, in consideration of their mercantile enterprise and the philanthropic use of the wealth they have acquired, have been honoured with a baronetcy. It is one of the most flourishing, or what Leland would term "quick," towns of the Yorkshire clothing district, and in recent times has increased rapidly in population, wealth, and importance. It is not even mentioned in Domesday-Book, nor does its name appear in any record until the twelfth century, when Earl Warren made a grant of the church to the priory of Lewes, in Sussex. About the middle of the fifteenth century it consisted of but thirteen houses, which during the following hundred years increased to 520. In 1764, the parish, which, however, is very extensive, being seventeen miles in length by an average width of eleven, contained 8,244 families; and in 1811 the population numbered 73,815, that of the town being 9,159, since which period of eighty years it has been more than nontupled, the census of 1891 giving the population at 82,900.
The town of Halifax owes its prosperity to its mineral wealth. It is certainly not the place for the agriculturist or the cattle breeder. In an Act passed temp. Philip and Mary, it is recited, "whereas the parish of Halifax, being planted in waste and moors, where the ground is not apt to bring forth any corn or good grass, but in rare places and by exceeding and great industry of the inhabitants; and the same inhabitants altogether do live by cloth making, and the greatest part of them neither getteth corn nor is able to keepe horse to carry wools, etc.;" and Camden, in 1574, observes that there are 12,000 men in the parish, who outnumber the sheep, whereas in other parts we find thousands of sheep and but few men, "but of all others, nothing is so admirable in this town as the industry of the inhabitants, who, notwithstanding an unprofitable, barren soil, not fit to live upon, have so flourished in the cloth trade, which within these seventy years they first fell to, that they are both very rich and have gained a reputation for it above their neighbours, which confirms the truth of the old observation that a barren country is a great whet to the industry of the natives."
For the first three or four centuries after the Conquest, England was a great wool-growing but not a wool-manufacturing country. Sheep-breeding was a great source of income to the Cistercians, who, with all the private wool-growers, exported their produce to the spinners and weavers of the Low Countries. It was not until King Edward III., with great sagacity, foreseeing that England might manufacture as well as produce the raw material, and thus share in the profits arising out of that industry, invited over a number of Flemish artisans and settled them in Norfolk and Yorkshire, prohibiting the exportation of wool excepting under a tax of 50s. per pack. This was the foundation of the clothing industry of the West Riding, which has since then expanded so enormously; and Halifax was one of the first places to apply itself to the spinning and weaving of wool. As stated above, although poverty-stricken in an agricultural point of view, it possessed great mineral wealth in the shape of almost limitless deposits of coal, which was a valuable essential even in those primitive times, but which has become an absolute essential since the introduction of steam-power looms.
It is supposed that the manufacture was introduced into Halifax about the year 1414; but it was then on a very limited scale, and it was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that the first great advance took place, by the erection of looms for the weaving of shalloons, everlastings, moreens, shags, etc., since which time damasks, and more recently still, carpets, have taken prominent places in the industries of the town; indeed, Halifax has absorbed a considerable portion of the trade which belongs legitimately to Kidderminster.
Although the town of Halifax is of comparatively modern origin, the name is unmistakably Saxon, indicating that previously to the Conquest there was a village or hamlet of some description to which that appellation was given. One tradition asserts that there was a hermitage dedicated to St. John the Baptist, in the valley, and that within it was preserved the face of the saint, which attracted vast numbers of pilgrims, and caused the name of the place of resort to be called Hali-fax, or Holy-face; and there may possibly be some substratum of truth in this, as the parish church is dedicated to the same saint. Dr. Whitaker partially adopts this theory, but his etymologies are frequently rather fanciful. He refers to this hermitage of St. John, "whose imagined sanctity attracted a great concourse of people in every direction, to accommodate whom there were four separate roads from different points of the compass, which converged in the valley, and hence the name Halifax, which is half Saxon and half Norman, signifying the Holy-ways, fax in Norman-French being an old plural noun, denoting highways."