Inheritance and Identity in Pennine Lancashire: The Stansfields of Inchfield, Walsden, 1591-1767

The case study of the Stansfields of Inchfield, Walsden (Transactions, 159, 2010) illuminated the worlds of a Lancashire yeomanry family during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by utilising their (six) surviving wills and (four) inventories to explore their kinship networks, religious perspectives, and farming practices. Following discovery of a further (seventh) family will and (fifth) inventory and other evidences, it is possible to amend assumptions and ameliorate evaluations. The testament and inventory of John Stansfield (d. 1681) facilitates (re-)construction of broader family relationships as well as evaluation of farming interests, usury, and literacy; whilst the case of the (unproven) will of Abraham Stansfield IV (1712- 1741) - as recorded in the notes of the antiquary F.R. Raines - raises questions concerning inheritance and identities.

Morris Ranger: The Rise and Fall of the Liverpool Cotton Market’s Greatest Speculator, 1835 to 1887

In the period 1878 to 1883 there was heavy speculation in the Liverpool raw cotton market associated with a trader named Morris Ranger. Little has previously been written about Ranger and his background. Ranger was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1855. He initially traded in tobacco but branched out into cotton during the American Civil War. He settled in Liverpool in 1870. His cotton speculations were enormous, but he fell bankrupt in 1883. The speculations associated with Ranger involved other Liverpool traders and drew heavy criticism from the spinning industry. The speculations played a part in a reorganisation of the Liverpool market and attempts to circumvent it, including the building of the Manchester Ship Canal.

Researching War-time Evacuation with Belmont Primary School Children

The Lancashire village of Belmont was created at the start of the nineteenth century to house workers for the bleaching and dyeing works built by industrialist Thomas Ryecroft and landowner Rev. Charles Wright. By the 1930s it had been incorporated into Turton Urban District and although very much rural still functioned as an industrial village. The 1939 National Register records that the majority of the population was working in the local bleach works or paper mill with just 10% farmers or workers on the land. It had a tiny school with just 75 pupils, which was more than doubled in size by the arrival of 80 infants from Temple School, Manchester in September 1939. This was Belmont’s quota of Turton’s allocation of 1,600 evacuees. Today the village is technically part of Blackburn with Darwen, and the parish consists of around 300 homes. It has a lively primary school with a good reputation for supporting pupils with disabilities and high-quality work in the Arts.

Anglican Nuns Come to Liverpool

Incorporated into Liverpool as part of the town’s southward expansion during the second half of the nineteenth century, the corner of Upper Parliament Street and Princes Road in Toxteth boasts three places of worship built to cater to the religious needs of those expected to populate the area.1 The sesquicentenary of one of these, St Margaret’s Church, provided an opportunity to examine documents relating to an associated church school and to the rediscovery of an almost-forgotten Church of England sisterhood which managed a local orphanage. Further enquiries uncovered the activities of other sisters working elsewhere in the town.2 This article will trace the arrival and activity of these communities between 1864 and 1900, ask why local historians have shown little interest in them and consider ways in which their foundation was a function of the development of Anglo-Catholicism in the city and intersected with the growth of opportunities for women.

The Preston Cock, Adultery, Homophobia and the First Petition for Female Suffrage

Originally spurred by determination to bring the Manchester authorities to justice in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, Henry Hunt persisted in seeking to gain election for the popular constituency of Preston. Eventually successful in 1830, he entered parliament pledged to present every petition sent to him, including that from Mary Smith calling for female suffrage. Having provided a rational vindication of the rights of women, her petition descended into a diatribe against married men who indulged in homosexual acts to the despair of their suicidal wives. This was a thinly veiled reference to alleged goings on in the household of the radical journalist William Cobbett. This article seeks to place in context the allegations and subsequent heated controversy by examining the long-term relationship between Hunt and Cobbett, dating back to the early nineteenth century and their mutual conversion from loyalism to radicalism. Already strained by the longstanding animus of Cobbett’s wife towards Hunt on account of his adulterous domestic circumstances, the radical allies were increasingly at odds in the years after Peterloo, divided over political and personal issues in a bewildering and increasingly unrestrained manner. Jealous of Hunt’s electoral success at Preston and furious with his radical condemnation of the Reform Bill, Cobbett inveighed against the ‘Preston Cock’. Hunt responded in kind, repeating allegations soon taken up in Mary Smith’s petition. Historians have simply noted how the petition was greeted with derision, but as this article shows, it merits deeper study. An early milestone on the long journey to secure votes for women, Mary Smith’s petition reveals political, personal and sexual divisions in early nineteenth-century radicalism - over feminism, homosexuality and adultery - attitudes and prejudices which inhibited any decisive pre-Victorian advance beyond manhood suffrage. The article concludes with a postscript noting Hunt’s fall from favour as the Reform Bill was passed, losing his Preston seat in the first election under the new propertied franchise. He died shortly thereafter but was rehabilitated and revered a few years later by the Chartists. His presentation of the first petition for female suffrage has seemingly been lost from history.