The Gentleman's Daughter (4 page)

At the level of the parish, however, the image of a profound cultural gulf yawning between the local elites of land and trade bears little resemblance to the teaming interactions of the marriage market and the dining-room. What follows is a detailed case study of elite social contact rooted in one particular area for which rich records survive. Let us turn to the moors and valleys of the Pennine north; in particular to the enormous parish of
Whalley, which embraced the towns of Colne, Burnley and Clitheroe.
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The land to the south of Pendle Hill was known for its poor soil, heavy rainfall and long-established textile manufactures. Its economy was heavily dependent on making cloth long before the period covered by this book and was to continue so long after. In the course of the eighteenth century production expanded and the types of cloth produced changed radically. These changes were partly a response to the introduction of new power machinery that is conventionally associated with the term Industrial Revolution. Neverthless, before 1830 work in the area's textile industries continued to be performed mainly by hand. A large number of independent clothiers produced woollen cloth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but from the early eighteenth century the production of woollens was increasingly superseded by the manufacture of worsteds under the putting-out system. The construction of a Piece Hall in 1775 was concrete proof of Colne's success in worsted marketing. In 1781 Colne and Rochdale were considered more important markets for worsted cloth than Manchester.
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However, from the 1780s cotton manufacturing was on the ascendant. The mechanization of cotton spinning made work for an army of hand-loom weavers. The shift was recognized by Aikin, visiting Colne in 1795: ‘The trade formerly consisted in woollen and worsted goods, particularly shalloons, calamancoes and tammies, but the cotton trade is of late introduced, the articles consisting chiefly of calicoes and dimities.’
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By the 1830s the area had become what it was to remain into the mid-twentieth century, the northern frontier of the Lancashire cotton district.

For all their economic buoyancy, eighteenth-century Colne and Burnley were remote from larger towns and the major north–south trade routes. In 1750 the area had no turnpike roads whatsoever and the inaccessibility of this Lancashire frontier was a proverbial joke. All this was shortly to change. A turnpike trust was established in 1755 for the building of a new road between Bradford and Colne (known as the Blue Bell turnpike), transforming the treacherous journey over the Pennines, or ‘the alps’ as they were locally dubbed. By 1770 Colne and Burnley had become local nodes in the turnpike network, with improved roads from Colne to Skipton, Keighley and Bradford and from Burnley to Halifax, Manchester and Preston.
¹⁰
A Navigation Act authorizing the cutting of the Leeds to Liverpool canal was passed in the late 1760s, but the canal did not reach Colne until 1796.
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These improvements opened up the area to outsiders and increased the mobility of natives, although in 1824 Baines still regretted that ‘there is in this tract much fine romantic scenery which, as it is at a distance from any of the principal roads of the kingdom is less visited than it deserves’.
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In the modern tourist imagination, of course, these blasted moors will eternally represent the outer reaches of ‘Brontë country’.

1 Piece Hall, Colne, Lancashire, 1950. It opened in 1775 as a market place for worsteds, though it was largely supplanted by the Halifax Piece Hall (1779) and the rise of cotton manufacturing. The Piece Hall also functioned as the local assembly rooms and hosted a gala series of oratorios and balls in August 1777. It was demolished in 1952.

2 Emmott Hall, near Colne, Lancashire,
c.
1890. This rare photograph depicts the home of the gentry family of Emmott. A large hall, originally built around 1600, its classical frontage was added in 1737, with new sash windows introduced in the cross wings at the same time. It was demolished in 1968.

If the parish of Whalley was remote from polite resorts it was not in want of polite families. A host of well-established families inhabited the valley of the Lancashire Calder; their lasting monuments are the wealth of modest mansions still standing in the vicinity of Burnley and Colne. Dispersed at two- or three-mile intervals across the valley's lower slopes, most of these gentry residences had originally been built in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, sometimes by prosperous yeomen, sometimes by the then smaller number of local gentry. In the course of the eighteenth century few entirely new gentry houses were erected, but most of the gentry's existing residences were substantially rebuilt to incorporate up-to-date interior schemes and symmetrical frontages with some classical detailing (see plates 2, 6 and 8, for example).
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With their dynastic pretensions, dignified halls and landed estates, the lesser gentry constituted the enduring heart of polite society in north-east Lancashire; they were well acquainted with each other and frequently intermarried. However, land was not the only litmus test of politeness. On equal terms with local lesser gentry were a number of professionals and their families. The doctors William St Clare the elder and William St Clare the younger, for example, acted as both friends and physicians to the northern gentry for over fifty years. That clerics, lawyers and doctors should be
personae gratae
in polite society is hardly surprising, given that many of them were themselves substantial landowners and the sons of gentlemen. Indeed, many prominent barristers on the northern circuit were not only the sons of gentlemen, but their principal heirs. In addition, the personnel of elite society extended to commercial families. Often such families were related to the landed gentry, something which was especially likely among the so-called genteel trades such as woollen merchant, wine merchant, wholesale draper and so on. Thus, local polite society incorporated minor gentry, professional and mercantile families; their enmeshed relationship is perhaps the most striking feature of family history in the Pennines. Indeed, many families were so ‘hybrid’ in status, that it seems artificial to assign them a single occupational label. Let us consider in detail the careers and contacts of three northern families who have left copious records: the Parkers, the Barcrofts and the Horrockses.

The Parkers of Alkincoats exemplify the links between the northern gentry and the textile trade. John Parker (1695–1754) was a scion of the Yorkshire gentry, who made his way as a London linen-draper, and married the daughter of an Essex merchant. In 1728 he inherited the Parker estate through a half-brother and so became master of Browsholme Hall in the West Riding, close to the Lancashire border, and of substantial farm lands worth almost five hundred pounds in annual rent.
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His only daughter married her second cousin Robert Parker of Alkincoats (1720–58), and removed thirteen miles across the county border to Alkincoats in Lancashire. Robert was hardly the glittering matrimonial prize that Elizabeth's family had hoped for, unable to support her in the ‘splendour & elegance’ they had envisaged.
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Her relatives complained about his small fortune (the Alkincoats estate comprised only 160 acres and yielded a comparatively modest £290 per annum in rent
¹⁶
), arguing ‘that a Coach & 6 was preferable to a double Horse’. Robert Parker himself conceded to his bride, ‘I can't make a large jointure, keep a coach & deck you out in pomp and splendour’. Nevertheless, Robert Parker was an acknowledged gentleman and county office holder, and, as he reasoned, ‘we shall have a sufficient competency, wch … will make us breath in [the] world’.
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He initiated rebuilding work at Alkincoats in 1751–2 in preparation for his bride's residence, intending, in his own words, to ‘make it a comfortable Convenient House but not grand’. Judging by friendly reactions, he succeeded in his aim, Elizabeth Parker being teased by richer friends that hers would be a ‘a good, though odd house’. As her best friend remarked, she had elected to ‘live in a narrow Compass to pass your days with the man you love’.
¹⁸

3 Arthur Devis,
The Parker Conversation Piece
, 1757. Edward Parker and his wife, Barbara, née Fleming, are shown on the terrace at Browsholme Hall, near Clitheroe. The stables, horse and groom to the right of the picture, along with Edward Parker's spurs and tilted hat, all allude to his sporting interests. However, the landscape in the background owes more to Claude than the topography of the forest of Bowland.

4 Browsholme Hall, near Clitheroe, 1808. Though a London linen-draper, John Parker inherited this Yorkshire estate through a half-brother in 1728. The
Gentleman's Magazine
described the house as an ‘old magnificent chateau, an extensive and venerable pile’.

5 (
facing page bottom
) Alkincoats Hall, near Colne, 1896. This large Pennine house on the outskirts of Colne, Lancashire, was built in the seventeenth century, refronted in the 1720s or soon after and modernized again in the 1750s. Elizabeth Parker came here some months after her marriage to Robert Parker in 1751. In his own estimation, Alkincoats was ‘a comfortable Convenient House but not grand’. The house was demolished in 1958.