Into the Ribble, at no great distance below this ancient parish, protruding like a wedge into the County Palatine, flows the Calder, coming from the south-east, and from a district once as wild as Longridge Fell and Bowland Forest, but now reduced to modern uses by the cotton and worsted mills, calico works, and foundries of thriving Burnley, through which ran a Roman way once upon a time. It has an indirect relation with the Ribble, being placed on the Brun, the Calder intervening. Never had manufacturing town a finer “lung” than is furnished by Pendle Hill, which offers a climb of 1,800 feet above sea-level to the dwellers in a district which is in touch also (near or far) with Sawley Ruins, Blackstone Edge, and the Vale of Craven. Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, was so carried away with delight in his travels thereabouts that he declares he was moved by the Lord to go up to the top of Pendle Hill, and in the clear atmosphere saw the sea shining beyond the Lancashire coast.
Amongst many old houses of which Lancashire is proud is Towneley Hall, seat of a family one of whose ancestors was first dean of Whalley Abbey, the ruins of which are one of the most valued relics on the banks of the Calder. This takes us back to a century and a half before the Conquest; and it was one of this ilk who was the last of the deans. The original hall of the Towneleys appears to have partly stood somewhat south of the mansion which is the subject of one of the illustrations to this chapter (page [273]). Whitaker, the great authority on Lancashire history, was unable to ascribe a date to the Hall, but it is evident to the modern observer that portions are of considerable antiquity. Many must have been the changes, however, since the six-feet walls were built. The work of Richard Towneley in 1628 is known, and the addition was by W. Towneley in 1741. A still later member of the family removed turrets, gateway, chapel, and sacristy to their present position, but the rebuilding had been begun a few years earlier. The portraits, as is often the case, tell in great measure what the Towneleys were in their day and generation: one died at Wigan Lane, another at Marston Moor; one was an eminent antiquary, another translated “Hudibras” into French, another collected art treasures, secured to the trustees of the British Museum by means of a Parliamentary grant.
LANCASTER (p. [282]).
Some of the most interesting of the old Towneley relics were believed to have been brought from Whalley Abbey, built upon a spot which, before streams were polluted by factories, yielded fish from the river, and feathered game from the woods and heather, whilst the forest and park around the old Hall furnished abundance of venison. Burnley then must have been a delightful town, lying in its hollow, environed by swelling moors and crystal streams. This is the country of which Philip Gilbert Hamerton often pathetically speaks in his “Autobiography,” though “the voice of Nature,” to which he refers in one of his poems, must even in his young days have been thickened here and there by the smoke of tall chimneys, and marred by the echo of raucous sounds from foundry and loom.
“Proud Preston” is an appellation which had its significance in another generation, and was indicative of the loyalty of the town to old traditions, to the Grown, to its own independence. The hundred in which it was situated was attached, in the reign of Athelstan, to the Cathedral Church of York: hence Priests’ Town, or Preston. This is evidence of a satisfactory old age; and in 1840 more was forthcoming from a rude box dug up from the alluvial soil on the banks of the Ribble, containing a precious store of coins, rings, and ingots, including nearly 3,000 Anglo-Saxon pieces. Higher up the stream was the still older settlement of Ribchester, the Roman station of Coccium, which declined into nothing as Preston increased in importance. The sweep of country surveyed from Red Scar, where the river curves into a horseshoe course under a precipitous bank, or from the popular point of look-out in Avenham Park, is studded with points around which history clings.
The lonesome moor where Cromwell routed Sir Marmaduke Langdale and his Royalists has become an open space for the recreation of the people; the Jacobite rebellions and the temporary sojourn of Charles Edward on that disastrous Derby campaign are remembrances dimmed by the remarkable rise of Preston in modern times as a manufacturing and commercial town. This is owing to its position at the head of the Ribble estuary. There are two things in the present century of which even “Proud Preston” need not be ashamed: it was here that the first total abstinence pledge was taken in England, the signatories being Joseph Livesey and half a dozen brother-abstainers; and it was here that the practical working of the vote by ballot was tested in 1872.
For more than thirty years the flourishing town, standing 120 feet above its river, has been undergoing improvements, carried out with great public spirit. Sir Gilbert Scott designed for it the French-Gothic Town Hall which rises gracefully above the other buildings; County Hall, Free Library, and Museum have been added; even the parish church has been rebuilt, and the once steepleless town now boasts, in St. Walburge’s Roman Catholic Church, the loftiest spire erected in England since the Reformation. An unbroken link with the past is the Guild-Merchants’ Festival, celebrated since 1397 (half a century before the first charter was granted); and for the last 400 years the “Preston Guild” has been observed with intense fervour every twenty years, the next coming due in 1902. The present writer was in Preston during, probably, the saddest circumstances under which such a celebration could occur. It was in 1862, when the cotton famine was sore in Lancashire; but the Prestonians threw themselves with energy into the traditional observance, and made it a memorable success. Rose festivals, morris dances, and other old English revelries retain their hold here, as in other parts of Lancashire, and are likely long to prevail.