The 1715 Battle of Preston at The National Archives

2015 saw the commemoration of the 300 year anniversary of the Battle of Preston, thought to be the last battle to take place on English soil. The anniversary was marked with events across Preston including re-enactments, talks, tours and workshops, and included participation from local history and community groups, cultural services, the University of Central…

Lancaster and the West Indies in the Eighteenth Century

  Among the documents deposited at Lancashire Archives by the Governors of Queen Mary’s Grammar School, Clitheroe, is a log book of five voyages made by the big or brigantine Dolphin between Lancaster and the West Indies from 1774 to 1778. Unfortunately, there is no certain information as to how this book came to be among these…

Lancashire’s Manorial Records

If you are interested in the history of a particular place and the people who lived there long ago, manorial records are an invaluable resource. The manorial system had its roots in the mists of time and certainly predated the Norman Conquest. It put a Lord (or very occasionally a Lady) in control of a specific…

All of Life, Once a Quarter

The Petitions to Quarter Sessions in the Lancashire Record Office [Ref: QSP] are an extremely large and varied collection of documents beginning in 1606, and apart from a small number of gaps for individual sessions, and a gap in all sessions from 1642/3 to 1646 owing to the Civil War, extend to 1908. They also…

A Colourful Past

It might be just me, but I really struggle to imagine the  past in colour. Everything pre-1960 for me is pretty much black and white (or sepia) with the occasional smattering of red. So, when I see archives that show the colours people saw around them in the early nineteenth century, it brings me up short, particularly when…

The Letters of Richard Hodgkinson of Atherton

[This article first appeared in the Lancashire Record Office Annual Report for 1961] In 1792 Louis XVI of France had been dethroned and was shortly to be guillotined : in England George III had already reigned for 32 years, the American Colonies had been lost and the country was preparing for the long war with…

The Scarisbrick Estates

  The Scarisbricks were an old Roman Catholic Lancashire family who rose to some prominence in the early nineteenth century as the recipients through marriage of the estates of two other leading Catholic families, the Ecclestons of Eccleston and Sutton, and the Dicconsons of Wrightington and Parbold. The latter were an industrious yeoman family who…

God’s Draper – James Foster of Preston

James Foster (1840-1896) was very much a self-made man and the W and J Foster collection at Lancashire Archives (DDX 438), which includes his personal papers, gives a real sense of the ambition, energy and enquiring mind which led to his success. Above all else though it shows how strong religious conviction underpinned every aspect of Foster’s…

Dolly Clayton’s Diary, 1777-1833

  Dolly Clayton was something of a diarist and through the kindness of Captain R.L.B. Cunliffe of Bury St. Edmunds her surviving diaries (for the years 1777, 1783, 1791, 1801-1811, 1812-1823, 1825-1829, 1831-1833) are now in the Lancashire Record Office [this is a slightly edited version of an article first published in the annual report of…

The Wanderings of Martha

Among the many thousands of documents in the Quarter Sessions Petitions at Lancashire Archives is this one, from 1724, which speaks for itself. The examinacion of Martha Proctor, aged between 8 and 9 years… being fround wandering and begging in the township of Eccleston and taken up by Leonard Higham, constable of the said township, who (being…