The parliamentary borough (falling within the south-east county division) returns one member. The municipal borough of Hartlepool is under a mayor, 6 aldermen and 18 councillors, and has an area of 972 acres. The municipal borough of West Hartlepool is under a mayor, 8 aldermen and 24 councillors, and has an area of 2684 acres.
Built on the horns of a sheltered bay, Hartlepool (Hertepull, Hertipol), grew up round the monastery founded there in 640, but was destroyed by the Danes in 800 and rebuilt by Ecgred, bishop of Lindisfarne. In 1173 Bishop Hugh de Puiset allowed French and Flemish troops to land at Hartlepool to aid the Scots. It is not mentioned in Boldon Book as, being part of the royal manor of Sadberg held at this time by the family of Bruce, it did not become the property of the see of Durham until the purchase of that manor in 1189. The bishops did not obtain possession until the reign of John, who during the interval in 1201 gave Hartlepool a charter granting the burgesses the same privileges that the burgesses of Newcastle enjoyed; in 1230 Bishop Richard Poor granted further liberties, including a gild merchant. Edward II. seized the borough as a possession of Robert Bruce, but he could control it very slightly owing to the bishop’s powers. In 1328 Edward III. granted the borough 100 marks towards the town-wall and Richard II. granted murage for seven years, the term being extended in 1400. In 1383 Bishop Fordham gave the burgesses licence to receive tolls within the borough for the maintenance of the walls, while Bishop Neville granted a commission for the construction of a pier or mole. In the 16th century Hartlepool was less prosperous; in 1523 the haven was said to be ruined, the fortifications decayed. An act of 1535 declared Hartlepool to be in Yorkshire, but in 1554 it was reinstated in the county of Durham. It fell into the hands of the northern earls in 1563, and a garrison was maintained there after the rebellion was crushed. In 1593 Elizabeth incorporated it, and gave the burgesses a town hall and court of pie powder. During the civil wars Hartlepool, which a few years before was said to be the only port town in the country, was taken by the Scots, who maintained a garrison there until 1647. As a borough of the Palatinate Hartlepool was not represented in parliament until the 19th century, though strong arguments in its favour were advanced in the Commons in 1614. The markets of Hartlepool were important throughout the middle ages. In 1216 John confirmed to Robert Bruce the market on Wednesday granted to his father and the fair on the feast of St Lawrence; this fair was extended to fifteen days by the grant of 1230, while the charter of 1595 also granted a fair and market. During the 14th century trade was carried on with Germany, Spain and Holland, and in 1346 Hartlepool provided five ships for the French war, being considered one of the chief seaports in the kingdom. The markets were still considerable in Camden’s day, but declined during the 18th century, when Hartlepool became fashionable as a watering-place.
HARTLEY, SIR CHARLES AUGUSTUS (1825- ), English engineer, was born in 1825 at Heworth, Durham. Like most engineers of his generation he was engaged in railway work in the early part of his career, but subsequently he devoted himself to hydraulic engineering and the improvement of estuaries and harbours for the purposes of navigation. He was employed in connexion with some of the largest and most important waterways of the world. After serving in the Crimea as a captain of engineers in the Anglo-Turkish contingent, he was in 1856 appointed engineer-in-chief for the works carried out by the European Commission of the Danube for improving the navigation at the mouths of that river, and that position he retained till 1872, when he became consulting engineer to the Commission (see Danube). In 1875 he was one of the committee appointed by the authority of the U.S.A. Congress to report on the works necessary to form and maintain a deep channel through the south pass of the Mississippi delta; and in 1884 the British government nominated him a member of the international technical commission for widening the Suez Canal. In addition he was consulted by the British and other governments in connexion with many other river and harbour works, including the improvement of the navigation of the Scheldt, Hugli, Don and Dnieper, and of the ports of Odessa, Trieste, Kustendjie, Burgas, Varna and Durban. He was knighted in 1862, and became K.C.M.G. in 1884.
HARTLEY, DAVID (1705-1757), English philosopher, and founder of the Associationist school of psychologists, was born on the 30th of August 1705. He was educated at Bradford grammar school and Jesus College, Cambridge, of which society he became a fellow in 1727. Originally intended for the Church, he was deterred from taking orders by certain scruples as to signing the Thirty-nine Articles, and took up the study of medicine. Nevertheless, he remained in the communion of the English Church, living on intimate terms with the most distinguished churchmen of his day. Indeed he asserted it to be a duty to obey ecclesiastical as well as civil authorities. The doctrine to which he most strongly objected was that of eternal punishment. Hartley practised as a physician at Newark, Bury St Edmunds, London, and lastly at Bath, where he died on the 28th of August 1757. His Observations on Man was published in 1749, three years after Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, in which theories essentially similar to his were expounded. It is in two parts—the first dealing with the frame of the human body and mind, and their mutual connexions and influences, the second with the duty and expectations of mankind. His two main theories are the doctrine of vibrations and the doctrine of associations. His physical theory, he tells us, was drawn from certain speculations as to nervous action which Newton had published in his Principia. His psychological theory was suggested by the Dissertation concerning the Fundamental Principles of Virtue or Morality, which was written by a clergyman named John Gay (1699-1745), and prefixed by Bishop Law to his translation[1] of Archbishop King’s Latin work on the Origin of Evil, its chief object being to show that sympathy and conscience are developments by means of association from the selfish feelings.
The outlines of Hartley’s theory are as follows. With Locke he asserted that, prior to sensation, the human mind is a blank. By a growth from simple sensations those states of consciousness which appear most remote from sensation come into being. And the one law of growth of which Hartley took account was the law of contiguity, synchronous and successive. By this law he sought to explain, not only the phenomena of memory, which others had similarly explained before him, but also the phenomena of emotion, of reasoning, and of voluntary and involuntary action (see [Association of Ideas]).
By his physical theory Hartley gave the first strong impulse to the modern study of the intimate connexion of physiological and psychical facts which has proved so fruitful, though his physical theory in itself is inadequate, and has not been largely adopted. He held that sensation is the result of a vibration of the minute particles of the medullary substance of the nerves, to account for which he postulated, with Newton, a subtle elastic ether, rare in the interstices of solid bodies and in their close neighbourhood, and denser as it recedes from them. Pleasure is the result of moderate vibrations, pain of vibrations so violent as to break the continuity of the nerves. These vibrations leave behind them in the brain a tendency to fainter vibrations or “vibratiuncles” of a similar kind, which correspond to “ideas of sensation.” Thus memory is accounted for. The course of reminiscence and of the thoughts generally, when not immediately dependent upon external sensation, is accounted for on the ground that there are always vibrations in the brain on account of its heat and the pulsation of its arteries. What these vibrations shall be is determined by the nature of each man’s past experience, and by the influence of the circumstances of the moment, which causes now one now another tendency to prevail over the rest. Sensations which are often associated together become each associated with the ideas corresponding to the others; and the ideas corresponding to the associated sensations become associated together, sometimes so intimately that they form what appears to be a new simple idea, not without careful analysis resolvable into its component parts.
Starting, like the modern Associationists, from a detailed account of the phenomena of the senses, Hartley tries to show how, by the above laws, all the emotions, which he analyses with considerable skill, may be explained. Locke’s phrase “association of ideas” is employed throughout, “idea” being taken as including every mental state but sensation. He emphatically asserts the existence of pure disinterested sentiment, while declaring it to be a growth from the self-regarding feelings. Voluntary action is explained as the result of a firm connexion between a motion and a sensation or “idea,” and, on the physical side, between an “ideal” and a motory vibration. Therefore in the Freewill controversy Hartley took his place as a determinist. It is singular that, as he tells us, it was only with reluctance, and when his speculations were nearly complete, that he came to a conclusion on this subject in accordance with his theory.
See life of Hartley by his son in the 1801 edition of the Observations, which also contains notes and additions translated from the German of H. A. Pistorius; Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (3rd ed., 1902), and article in the Dictionary of National Biography; G. S. Bower, Hartley and James Mill (1881); B. Schönlank, Hartley und Priestley die Begründer des Assoziationismus in England (1882). See also the histories of philosophy and bibliography in J. M. Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1905), vol. iii.