Directly connected with the whole world, through the medium of its
shipping and manufactures, Lancashire is commercially to Great Britain
what the Forum was to ancient Rome--the centre from which roads led
towards every principal province of the empire. Being nearer to the
Atlantic, Liverpool commands a larger portion of our commerce with
North America even than London: it is from the Mersey that the great
westward steamers chiefly sail. The biographies of the distinguished
men who had their birthplace in Lancashire, and lived there always,
many of them living still, would fill a volume. A second would hardly
suffice to tell of those who, though not natives, have identified
themselves at various periods with Lancashire movements and
occupations. No county has drawn into its population a larger number
of individuals of the powerful classes, some taking up their permanent
abode in it, others coming for temporary purposes. In cultivated
circles in the large towns the veritable Lancashire men are always
fewer in number than those born elsewhere, or whose fathers did not
belong to Lancashire. No trifling item is it in the county annals that
the immortal author of the _Advancement of Learning_ represented, as
member of Parliament, for four years (1588-1592) the town which in
1809 gave birth to William Ewart Gladstone, and which, during the
boyhood of the latter, sent Canning to the House of Commons.[1] In
days to come England will point to Lancashire as the cradle also of
the Stanleys, one generation after another, of Sir Robert Peel, John
Bright, and Richard Cobden. The value to the country of the several
men, the soundness of their legislative policy, the consistency of
their lines of reasoning, is at this moment not the question. They are
types of the vigorous constructive genius which has made England great
and free, and so far they are types of the aboriginal Lancashire
temper. Lancashire has been the birthplace also of a larger number of
mechanical inventions, invaluable to the human race; and the scene of
a larger number of the applications of science to great purposes, than
any other fragment of the earth's surface of equal dimensions. It is
in Lancashire that we find the principal portion of the early history
of steam and steam-engines, the first railway of pretension to
magnitude forming a part of it. The same county had already led the
way in regard to the English Canal system--that mighty network of
inland navigation of which the Manchester Ship Canal, now in process
of construction, will, when complete, be the member wonderful above
all others. No trivial undertaking can that be considered; no distrust
can there be of one in regard to its promise for the future, which has
the support of no fewer than 38,000 shareholders. Here, too, in
Lancashire, we have the most interesting part of the early history of
the use of gas for lighting purposes. In Lancashire, again, were laid
the foundations of the whole of the stupendous industry represented in
the cotton-manufacture, with calico-printing, and the allied arts of
pattern design. The literary work of Lancashire has been abreast of
the county industry and scientific life. Mr. Sutton's _List of
Lancashire Authors_, published in 1876, since which time many others
have come to the front, contains the names of nearly 1250,
three-fourths of whom, he tells us, were born within the
frontiers--men widely various, of necessity, in wit and aim, more
various still in fertility, some never going beyond a pamphlet or an
"article,"--useful, nevertheless, in their generation, and deserving a
place in the honourable catalogue. Historians, antiquaries, poets,
novelists, biographers, financiers, find a place in it, with scholars,
critics, naturalists, divines. Every one acquainted with books knows
that William Roscoe wrote in Liverpool. Bailey's _Festus_, one of the
most remarkable poems of the age, was originally published in
Manchester. The standard work upon British Bryology was produced in
Warrington, and, like the life of Lorenzo de Medici, by a
solicitor--the late William Wilson. Nowhere in the provinces have
there been more conspicuous examples of exact and delicate
philosophical and mathematical experiment and observation than such as
in Manchester enabled Dalton to determine the profoundest law in
chemistry; and Horrox, the young curate of Hoole, long before, to be
the first of mankind to watch a transit of Venus, providing thereby
for astronomers the means towards new departures of the highest
moment. During the Franco-Prussian war, when communication with the
interior of Paris was manageable only by the employment of
carrier-pigeons and the use of micro-photography, it was again a
Lancashire man who had to be thanked for the art of concentrating a
page of newspaper to the size of a postage-stamp. Possibly there were
two or three contemporaneous inventors, but the first to make
micro-photography--after the spectroscope, the most exquisite
combination of chemical and optical science yet introduced to the
world--public and practical, was the late Mr. J. B. Dancer, of
Manchester.
[1] _Vide_ Blue Book, 1878, Part I. p. 423. The first return of
Bacon for St. Albans was not until 1601. Roger Ascham, whose
influence upon education was even profounder than Bacon's, sat
for another Lancashire town--Preston--in the Parliament of 1563.
Generous and substantial designs for promoting the education of the
people, and their enjoyment,--habits also of thrift and of
self-culture, are characteristic of Lancashire. Some have had their
origin upon the middle social platform; others have sprung from the
civilised among the rich.[2] The Co-operative system, with its varied
capacities for rendering good service to the provident and careful,
had its beginning in Rochdale. The first place to copy Dr. Birkbeck's
Mechanics' Institution was Manchester, in which town the first
provincial School of Medicine was founded, and which to-day holds the
headquarters of the Victoria University. Manchester, again, was the
first town in England to take advantage of the Free Libraries Act of
1850, opening on September 2d, 1852, with Liverpool in its immediate
wake. The Chetham Free Library (Manchester) had already existed for
200 years, conferring benefits upon the community which it would be
difficult to over-estimate. Other Lancashire towns--Darwen, Oldham,
Southport, and Preston, for example, have latterly possessed
themselves of capital libraries, so that, including the fine old
collection at Warrington, the number of books now within reach of
Lancashire readers, _pro rata_ for the population, certainly has no
parallel out of London. An excellent feature in the management of
several of these libraries consists in the effort made to attain
completeness in special departments. Rochdale aims at a complete
collection of books relating to wool; Wigan desires to possess all
that has been written about engineering; the Manchester library
contains nearly eight hundred volumes having reference to cotton. In
the last-named will also be found the nucleus of a collection which
promises to be the finest in the country, of books illustrative of
English dialects. The Manchester libraries collectively, or Free and
Subscription taken together, are specially rich in botanical and
horticultural works--many of them magnificently illustrated and
running to several volumes--the sum of the titles amounting to
considerably over a thousand. Liverpool, too, is well provided with
books of this description, counting among them that splendid
Lancashire work, Roscoe's _Monandrian Plants_, the drawings for which
were chiefly made in the Liverpool Botanic Garden--the fourth founded
in England, or first after Chelsea, Oxford, and Cambridge, and
specially interesting in having been set on foot, in 1800, by Roscoe
himself.
[2] It is necessary to say the "civilised," because in
Lancashire, as in all other industrial communities, especially
manufacturing ones, there are plenty of selfish and vulgar rich.
The legitimate and healthful recreation of the multitude is in
Lancashire, with the thoughtful, as constant an object as their
intellectual succour. The public parks in the suburbs of many of the
principal Lancashire towns, with their playgrounds and gymnasia, are
unexcelled. Manchester has no fewer than five, including the recent
noble gift of the "Whitworth." Salford has good reason to be proud of
its "Peel Park." Blackburn, Preston, Oldham, Lancaster, Wigan,
Southport, and Heywood have also done their best.
In Lancashire have always been witnessed the most vigorous and
persistent struggles made in this country for civil and political
liberty and the amendment of unjust laws. Sometimes, unhappily, they
have seemed to indicate disaffection; and enthusiasts, well-meaning
but extremely unwise--so commonly the case with their class--have
never failed to obtain plenty of support, often prejudicial to the
very cause they sought to uphold. But the ways of the people,
considered as a community, deducting the intemperate and the zealots,
have always been patriotic, and there has never been lack of
determination to uphold the throne. The modern Volunteer movement, as
the late Sir James Picton once reminded us, may be fairly said to have
originated in Liverpool; the First Lancashire Rifles, which claims to
be the oldest Volunteer company, having been organised there in 1859.
In any case the promptitude of the act showed the vitality of that
fine old Lancashire disposition to defend the right, which at the
commencement of the Civil Wars rendered the county so conspicuous for
its loyalty. It was in Lancashire that the first blood was shed on
behalf of Charles the First, and that the last effort, before
Worcester, was made in favour of his son--this in the celebrated
battle of Wigan Lane. It was the same loyalty which, in 1644,
sustained Charlotte de la Tremouille, Countess of Derby, in the famous
three months' defence of Lathom House, when besieged by Fairfax.
Charlotte, a lady of French extraction, might quite excusably be
supposed to have had less care for the king than an Englishwoman. But
she was now the wife of a Lancashire man, and that was enough for her
heart; she attuned herself to the Earl's own devotedness, became
practically a Lancashire woman, and took equal shares with him in his
unflinching fervour. The faithfulness to great trusts which always
marks the noble wife, however humble her social position, however
exalted her rank and title, with concurrent temptations to wrongdoing,
doubtless lay at the foundation of Charlotte's personal heroism. But
it was her pasturing, so to speak, in Lancashire, which brought it up
to fruition. Of course, she owed much to the fidelity of her
Lancashire garrison. Without it, her own brave spirit would not have
sufficed. Lancashire men have always made good soldiers. Several were
knighted "when the fight was done" at Poitiers and Agincourt. The
Middleton archers distinguished themselves at Flodden. The gallant
47th--the "Lancashire Lads"--were at the Alma, and at Inkerman formed
part of the "thin red line." There is equally good promise for the
future, should occasion arise. At the great Windsor Review of the
Volunteers in July 1881, when 50,000 were brought together, it was
unanimously allowed by the military critics that, without the
slightest disrespect to the many other fine regiments upon the ground,
the most distinguished for steadiness, physique, and discipline, as
well as the numerically strongest, was the 1st Manchester. So striking
was the spectacle that the Queen inquired specially for the name of
the corps which reflected so much honour upon its county. In the
return published in the General Orders of the Army, February 1882, it
is stated that the 2d Battalion of the South Lancashire had then
attained the proud distinction of being its "best signalling corps."
The efforts made in Lancashire to obtain changes for the better in the
statute-book had remarkable illustration in the establishment of the
Anti-Corn-Law League, the original idea of which was of much earlier
date than is commonly supposed, having occupied men's minds, both in
Manchester and Liverpool, as far back as the year 1825. The celebrated
cry six years later for Reform in the representation was not heard
more loudly even in Birmingham than in the metropolis of the cotton
trade.
The pioneers of every kind of religious movement have, like the
leaders in civil and political reform, always found Lancashire
responsive; and, as with practical scientific inventions, it is to
this county that the most interesting part of the early history of
non-conforming bodies very generally pertains. George Fox, the founder
of the "Society of Friends," commenced his earnest work in the
neighbourhood of Ulverston. "Denominations" of every kind have also in
this county maintained themselves vigorously, and there are none which
do not here still exist in their strength. The "Established Church,"
as elsewhere, holds the foremost place, and pursues, as always, the
even tenour of its way. During the forty-three years that Manchester
has been the centre of a diocese, there have been built within the
bishopric (including certain rebuildings on a larger scale) not fewer
than 300 new churches. The late tireless Bishop Fraser "confirmed"
young people at the rate of 11,000 every year. The strength of the
Wesleyans is declared by their contributions to the great Thanksgiving
Fund, which amounted, on 15th November 1880, to nearly a quarter of
the entire sum then subscribed, viz. to about £65,000 out of the
£293,000. They possess a college at Didsbury; not far from which, at
Withington, the Congregationalists likewise have one of their own. The
long standing and the power of the Presbyterians is illustrated in
their owning the oldest place of worship in Manchester next to the
"Cathedral,"--the "chapel" in Cross Street,--a building which dates
from the early part of the sixteenth century. The sympathy of
Lancashire with the Church of Rome has been noted from time
immemorial;--perhaps it would be more accurately said that there has
been a stauncher allegiance here than in many other places to
hereditary creed. The Catholic diocese of Salford (in which Manchester
and several of the neighbouring towns are included) claimed in 1879 a
seventh of the entire population.[3] Stonyhurst, near Clitheroe, is
the seat of the chief provincial Jesuit college. Lastly, it is an
interesting concurrent fact, that of the seventy Societies or
congregations in England which profess the faith called the "New
Jerusalem," Lancashire contains no fewer than twenty-four.
[3] Namely, 209,480 Catholic, as against 1,437,000 non-Catholic.
The historical associations offered in many parts of Lancashire are by
no means inferior to those of other counties. One of the most
interesting of the old Roman roads crosses Blackstone Edge. Names of
places near the south-west coast tell of the Scandinavian Vikings. In
1323 Robert Bruce and his army of Scots ravaged the northern districts
and nearly destroyed Preston. The neighbourhood of that town witnessed
the Stuart enterprise of 1715, and of Prince Charles Edward's march
through the county in 1745 many memorials still exist.
The ruins of two of the most renowned of the old English abbeys are
also here--Whalley, with its long record of benevolence, and Furness,
scarcely surpassed in manifold interest even by Fountains. One of the
very few remaining examples of an ancient castle belongs to the famous
old town from which John o' Gaunt received his title.[4] Parish
churches of remote foundation, with sculptures and lettered monuments,
supply the antiquary with pleasing variety. Old halls are numerous;
and connected with these, with the abbeys, and other relics of the
past, we find innumerable entertaining legends and traditions, often
rendered so much the more attractive through preserving, in part, the
county speech of the olden time, to be dealt with by and by.
[4] ..."Next to whom
Was John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster."
_King Henry VI._, Part 2d, ii. 2.
The _first_ Duke of Lancaster was Henry, previously Earl of
Derby, whose daughter Blanche was married by John of Gaunt, the
latter succeeding to the title.
In the sports, manners, and customs which still linger where not
superseded by modern ones, there is yet further curious material for
observation, and the same may be said of the recreations of the staid
and reflecting among the operative classes. It is in Lancashire that
"science in humble life" has always had its most numerous and
remarkable illustrations. Natural history, in particular, forms one of
the established pastimes in the cotton districts and among the men who
are connected with the daylight work of the collieries. Many of the
working-men botanists are banded into societies or clubs, which often
possess libraries, and were founded before any living can remember.
Music, especially choral and part-singing, has been cultivated in
Lancashire with a devotion equalled only perhaps in Yorkshire, and
certainly nowhere excelled. Both the air and the words of the most
popular Christmas hymn in use among Protestants, "Christians, awake!"
were composed within the sound, or nearly so, of the Manchester old
church bells. The verses were written by Dr. Byrom, of stenographic
fame;[5] the music, which compares well with the "Adeste Fideles"
itself,--the song of Christmas with other communions,--was the
production of John Wainwright. On a lower level we find the far-famed
Lancashire Hand-bell Ringers. The facilities provided in Lancashire
for self-culture have already been spoken of. That private education
and school discipline are effective may be assumed, perhaps, from the
circumstance that in October 1880 the girl who at the Oxford Local
Examinations stood highest in all England belonged to Liverpool.
[5] Originally published in the _Manchester Mercury_, 19th
October 1752.
Not without significance either is it that the coveted distinction of
"Senior Wrangler" was won by a Lancashire man on five occasions within
the twenty years ending February 1881. Three of the victors went up
from Liverpool, one from Manchester, and one from the Wigan
grammar-school. Lancashire may well be proud of such a list as this;
feeling added pleasure in knowing that the gold medal, with prize of
ten guineas, offered by the Council of Trinity College, London, for
the best essay on "Middle-class Education, its Influence on Commercial
Pursuits," was won in 1880 by a Lancashire lady--Miss Agnes Amy
Bulley, of the Manchester College for Women.
The list of artists, chiefly painters, identified with the county
appears from Mr. Nodal's researches to be not far short of a hundred,
the earliest having been Hamlet Winstanley, of Warrington, where he
died in 1756. Many of his productions, family portraits and views in
the neighbourhood, are contained in the Knowsley collection. Two of
these Lancashire artists--Joseph Farrington, R.A., and William
Green--were among the first to disclose the beauties of the Lake
District, by means of lithography or engraved views prepared from
their drawings. Farrington's twenty views appeared in 1789. Green's
series of sixty was issued from Ambleside in 1814. A very curious
circumstance connected with art in its way, is that Focardi's
well-known droll statuette, "The Dirty Boy," was produced in
Lancashire! Focardi happened to be in Preston looking for employment.
Waiting one morning for breakfast, and going downstairs to ascertain
the cause of the delay, through a half-open door he descried the
identical old woman and the identical dirty boy! Here at last was a
subject for his chisel. He got £500 for the marble, and the purchasers
acknowledge that it was the most profitable investment they ever made.
The scenery presented in many portions of the county vies with the
choicest to be found anywhere south of the Tweed. The artist turns
with reluctance from the banks of the Lune and the Duddon. The largest
and loveliest of the English lakes, supreme Windermere, belongs
essentially to Lancashire: peaceful Coniston and lucid Esthwaite are
entirely within the borders, and close by rise some of the loftiest of
the English mountains. The top of "Coniston Old Man"--_alt maen_, or
"the high rock"--is 2577 feet above the sea. The part which contains
the lakes and mountains is detached, and properly belongs to the Lake
District, emphatically so called, being reached from the south only by
passing over the lowermost portion of Westmoreland, though accessible
by a perilous way, when the tide is out, across the Morecambe sands.
Still it is Lancashire, a circumstance often surprising to those who,
very naturally, associate the idea of the "Lakes" with the homes of
Southey and Wordsworth, with Ambleside, and Helvellyn, and Lodore.
The geological character of this outlying piece being altogether
different from that of the county in general, Lancashire presents a
variety of surface entirely its own. At one extremity we have the
cold, soft clay so useful to brickmakers; on reaching the Lakes we
find the slate rocks of the very earliest ages. Much of the eastern
edge of the county is skirted by the broad bare hills which constitute
the central vertebræ of the "backbone of England," the imposing
"Pennine range," which extends from Derbyshire to the Cheviots, and
conceals the three longest of the English railway tunnels, one of
which both begins and ends in Lancashire. The rock composing them is
millstone-grit, with its customary gray and weather-beaten crags and
ferny ravines. Plenty of tell-tale gullies declare the vehemence of
the winter storms that beat above, and in many of these the rush of
water never ceases. Those who seek solitude, the romantic, and the
picturesque, know these hills well; in parts, where there is moorland,
the sportsman resorts to them for grouse.
In various places the rise of the ground is very considerable, far
greater than would be anticipated when first sallying forth from
Manchester, though on clear days, looking northwards, when a view can
be obtained, there is pleasant intimation of distant hills. Rivington
Pike, not far from Bolton, is 1545 feet above the sea-level. Pendle,
near Clitheroe, where the rock changes to limestone, is 1803. The
millstone-grit reappears intermittently as far as Lancaster, but
afterwards limestone becomes predominant, continuing nearly to the
slate rocks. It is to the limestone that Grange, one of the prettiest
places in this part of the country, owes much of its scenic charm as
well as salubrity. Not only does it give the bold and ivied tors which
usually indicate calcareous rock. Suiting many kinds of ornamental
trees, especially those which retain their foliage throughout the
year, we owe to it in no slight measure the innumerable shining
evergreens which at Grange, even in mid-winter, constantly tempt one
to exclaim with Virgil, when caressing his beloved Italy, "Hic ver
assiduum!"
The southernmost part of the county has for its surface-rock chiefly
the upper new red sandstone, a formation not favourable to fine
hill-scenery, though the long ridges for which it is distinguished, at
all events in Lancashire and Cheshire, often give a decided character
to the landscape. The highest point in the extreme south-west, or near
Liverpool, occupied by Everton church, has an elevation of no more
than 250 feet, or less than a tenth of that of "Coniston Old Man."
Ashurst, between Wigan and Ormskirk, and Billinge, between Wigan and
St. Helens, make amends, the beacon upon the latter being 633 feet
above the sea. The prospects from the two last named are very fine.
They are interesting to the topographer as having been first resorted
to as fit spots for beacons and signal-fires when the Spanish Armada
was expected, watchers upon the airy heights of Rivington, Pendle, and
Brown Wardle, standing ready to transmit the news farther inland. It
is interesting to recall to mind that the news of the sailing of the
Armada in the memorable July of 1588 was brought to England by one of
the old Liverpool mariners, the captain of a little vessel that
traded with the Mediterranean and the coast of Africa.
Very different is the western margin of this changeful county, the
whole extent from the Mersey to Duddon Bridge being washed by the
Irish Sea. But, although maritime, it has none of the prime factors of
seaside scenery,--broken rocks and cliffs,--not, at least, until after
passing Morecambe Bay. From Liverpool onwards there is only level
sand, and, to the casual visitor, apparently never anything besides;
for the tide, which is swift to go out, recedes very far, and seldom
seems anxious to come in. Blackpool is exceptional. Here the roll of
the water is often glorious, and the dimples in calm weather are such
as would have satisfied old Æschylus. On the whole, however, the coast
must be pronounced monotonous, and the country that borders on it
uninteresting. But whatever may be wanting in the way of rocks and
cliffs, the need is fully compensated by the exceeding beauty in parts
of the sandhills, especially near Birkdale and St. Anne's, where for
miles they have the semblance of a miniature mountain range.
Intervening there are broad, green, peaty plateaux, which, becoming
saturated after rain, allow of the growth of countless wild-flowers.
Orchises of several sorts, the pearly grass of Parnassus, the pyrola
that imitates the lily of the valley--all come to these wild sandhills
to rejoice in the breath of the ocean, which, like that of the
heavens, here "smells wooingly." Looking seawards, though it is seldom
that we have tossing surge, there is further compensation very
generally in the beauty of sunset--the old-fashioned but inestimable
privilege of the western coast of our island--part of the "daily
bread" of those who thank God consistently for His infinite bounty to
man's soul as well as body, and which no people in the world command
more perfectly than the inhabitants of the coast of Lancashire. Seated
on those quiet sandhills, on a calm September evening, one may often
contemplate on the trembling water a path of crimson light more
beautiful than one of velvet laid down for the feet of a queen.
At the northern extremity of the county, as near Ulverstone, there are
rocky and turf-clad promontories; but even at Humphrey Head, owing to
the flatness of the adjacent sands, there is seldom any considerable
amount of surf.
The most remarkable feature of the sea-margin of Lancashire consists
in the number of its estuaries. The largest of these form the outlets
of the Ribble and the Wyre, at the mouth of the last of which is the
comparatively new port of Fleetwood. The estuary of the Mersey (the
southern shore of which belongs to Cheshire) is peculiarly
interesting, on account of the seemingly recent origin of most of the
lower portion. Ptolemy, the Roman geographer, writing about A.D. 130,
though he speaks of the Dee and the Ribble, makes no mention of the
Mersey, which, had the river existed in its present form and width, he
could hardly have overlooked.[6] No mention is made of it either in
the Antonine Itinerary; and as stumps of old oaks of considerable
magnitude, which had evidently grown _in situ_, were not very long ago
distinguishable on the northern margin when the tide was out, near
where the Liverpool people used to bathe, the conclusion is quite
legitimate that the level of the bed of the estuary must in the Celtic
times, at the part where the ferry steamers go, have been much higher,
and the stream proportionately narrow, perhaps a mere brook, with
salt-marshes right and left. "Liverpool" was originally the name,
simply and purely, of the estuary, indicating, in its derivation, not
a town, or a village, but simply water. How far upwards the brook,
with its swamp or morass, extended, it is not possible to tell, though
probably there was always a sheet of water near the present Runcorn.
Depression of the shore, with plenty of old tree-stumps, certifying an
extinct forest, is plainly observable a few miles distant on the
Cheshire coast, just below New Brighton.
[6] Unless, possibly, as contended by Mr. T. G. Rylands in the
_Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society's Proceedings_
for 1878, vol. xvii. p. 81, following Horsley and Keith
Johnston, Pliny intended the Mersey by his "Belisama." But West,
Professor William Smith, and authors in general, consider that
the "Belisama" was the modern Ribble.
In several parts of Lancashire, especially in the extreme south-east,
the surface is occupied by wet and dreary wastes, composed of peat,
and locally called "mosses." That they have been formed since the
commencement of the Christian era there can be little doubt, abundance
of remains of the branches of trees being found near the clay floor
upon which the peat has gradually arisen. The most noted of these
desolate flats is that one called Chat, or St. Chad's Moss, the scene
of the special difficulty in the construction of the original
Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Nothing can exceed the dismalness of
the mosses during nine or ten months of the year. Absolutely level,
stretching for several miles, treeless, and with a covering only of
brown and wiry scrub, Nature seems expiring in them. June kindly
brings a change. Everything has its festival some time. For a
short period they are strewed with the summer snow of the
cotton-sedge,--the "cana" of Ossian, "Her bosom was whiter than the
down of cana"; and again, in September, they are amethyst-tinted for
two or three weeks with the bloom of the heather. During the last
quarter of a century the extent of these mosses has been much reduced,
by draining and cultivation at the margins, and in course of time they
will probably disappear.
Forests were once a feature of a good part of Lancashire. Long
subsequently to the time of the Conquest, much of the county was still
covered with trees. The celebrated "_Carta de Foresta_," or "Forest
Charter," under which the clearing of the ground of England for
farming purposes first became general and continuous, was granted only
in the reign of Henry III., A.D. 1224, or contemporaneously with the
uprise of Salisbury Cathedral, a date thus rendered easy of
remembrance.
Here and there the trees were allowed to remain; and among these
reserved portions of the original Lancashire "wild wood" it is
interesting to find West Derby, the "western home of wild animals,"
thus named because so valuable as a hunting-ground.[7] No forest, in
the current sense of the word, has survived in Lancashire to the
present day. Even single trees of patriarchal age are almost unknown.
Agriculture, when commenced, proceeded vigorously, chiefly, however,
in regard to meadow and pasture; cornfields have never been either
numerous or extensive, except in the district beyond Preston called
the Fylde--an immense breadth of alluvial drift, grateful in almost
all parts for good farming.
[7] Retained to this day as the name of one of the principal
Lancashire "Hundreds," it is West Derby which gives title to the
Earls of the house of Stanley, and not, as often supposed, the
city in the midland counties.