Ten Things I Didn?t Know About Manchester (first posted 21st August 2007)
The subject of this article arose
from the research for two of my novels:- The Angel Stone, set in 1604,
and The Whispering Road, set in 1836.
The plot of The
Angel Stone is centred around Manchester cathedral.
The Angel Stone is the oldest carved stone in
Manchester. It was
discovered by Joseph Crowther in the mid 19th century when he
undertook the reconstruction of part of the cathedral. On it is the carving of
an angel, peculiarly angled, and Anglo-Saxon writing, which translates as ?Into
thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.? Estimates vary, but the stone may be
1,300 years old. It was actually retrieved from infill rubble
between two porch walls, but since the cathedral building dates from 1421, it
must have belonged to the earlier church which stood on the same site.
Little is known about
the earlier church, but the history of the present cathedral is well-documented
and fascinating.
After the Battle of
Agincourt in 1415, Thomas de la Warre, Lord of the Manor of Manchester and
Rector of the old Parish Church, applied to Henry V for a charter to
build a bigger church on the same site. The Battle of Agincourt was
the decisive battle of the Hundred Years War. Henry V defeated Charles VI of
France, married his daughter,
Katherine de Valois, and returned to England with immense revenues.
Unfortunately, he didn?t live long enough to inherit the French throne.
In 1422, he died of dysentery, aged 34. Had he lived, the course of
English history would have been very different. His son, Henry VI, was defeated
by Charles VII, who, at the instigation of Joan of Arc, drove the English out of
all French territory apart from Calais. The vast wealth gained at
Agincourt was lost, so it was fortunate that one
year before the death of Henry V, Thomas de la Warre petitioned the king for
money to build a Collegiate Church.
Henry V was of the
House of Lancaster, at that time the major city of Lancashire. Manchester itself was a small
and insignificant town. The building of a large Collegiate Church
did not necessarily signify that the king had great plans for Manchester, yet around it the
town grew. The changes that occurred during the Reformation
accelerated that growth.
Before the
Reformation, church attendance was expected but not enforced. After
Henry VIII declared himself head of the Church, however, refusal to attend was
potentially treasonable, and by 1593, any person of sixteen years and over who
had not attended church for the space of one month could be imprisoned and
dragged to the church in chains, or whipped through the streets. By
this time there were approximately two thousand people in the township of Manchester. Church services were held all
day to accommodate the population, some of whom would have travelled
considerable distances. In bad weather they needed overnight
accommodation, and a number of inns were built along Long Millgate.
Markets were established on Saturdays and Mondays, probably in response
to this fluctuating population. Thus, the presence of the church
precipitated the expansion of the town.
But the building
that is now the cathedral has an even more significant link to another battle in
English history. Seventy years after the Battle of Agincourt, the
Battle of Bosworth field brought the Wars of the Roses to an end, and
established the Tudor dynasty. This was the battle in which Henry
Tudor defeated Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, who was allegedly
responsible for the murder of the princes in the Tower. The
repercussions of this event were so far reaching that it is astonishing to
remember that the battle itself took only two hours.
Henry Tudor
landed at Milford Haven with a small force of French mercenaries.
He gathered support as he travelled towards Leicester, but still when the two armies met on a field
outside Market Bosworth, Richard?s force outnumbered Henry?s by approximately
three to one. What happened next was determined by the actions of
the Stanley
brothers, Sir William, and Thomas Lord Stanley.
These two
brothers were allies of the king, but as Richard?s army charged, they waited on
the hillside, finally entering the battle on Henry?s side. Thomas
Stanley?s soldiers hacked Richard to death, then Henry Tudor knelt as Thomas,
Lord Stanley, placed the crown on his head.
The apparent reason
for this defection was that Thomas Stanley was married to Margaret Beaufort,
mother of Henry Tudor, so that he was now stepfather to the new king.
And one of the homes
belonging to Thomas Stanley and Margaret Beaufort was Alport Lodge, which was
just off Deasngate.
Margaret Beaufort,
1443 ? 1509, was one of the most remarkable women of her time.
Known in her lifetime as ?a gentlewoman, a scholar and a saint?, she was
patron of the first printers, William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde, translator of
religious texts by important theologians such as Thomas a Kempis, and an
important beneficiary of the arts. She granted endowments for the
foundation of colleges in Oxford and Cambridge Universities and was indirectly responsible for the
foundation of the Manchester Grammar
School.
Thomas Stanley was her
fourth and final husband. She was married for the first time at the
age of seven, to the six year old John de la Pole, but the marriage was later
dissolved. At the age of nine, she picked Edmund Tudor as her
favoured choice for her second marriage. He died of the plague on
the first of November 1456, just a few weeks before Henry Tudor was born in late
January 1457. At the time of her son?s birth, Margaret Beaufort was
only thirteen years and eight months old.
It was not uncommon to
give birth so young in this late mediaeval period. Anne Boleyn?s
grandmother, Margaret Butler, was twelve when she gave birth to her first son,
but in Margaret Beaufort?s case, the process seems to have caused physical
damage, leaving her infertile. Despite two further marriages, she
never conceived again.
She married
Thomas Stanley in 1472. Apparently she ?obtayned of him license to
live chaste?, though only in 1499, when she would have been 56.
The marriage seems to have been one of policy rather
than love, but there is little doubt that she was fiercely devoted to, and
ambitious for, her only son. Sometime before the Battle of
Bosworth, she entered negotiations with Elizabeth Woodville, mother of the
murdered princes. It is possible that a secret meeting took place, in which it
was agreed that Henry Tudor would marry Elizabeth Woodville?s daughter.
This was an alliance which would have a significant impact upon his claim
to the throne.
The importance of this
marriage becomes apparent when we consider the lineage of both Margaret Beaufort
and Edmund Tudor. The Beauforts were descended from the bastard
line of John of Gaunt and his mistress, Katherine Swynford. They
were legitimised by a statute of Richard II in 1397, but in 1407, Henry IV added
a rider which prevented the Beauforts and their heirs from ever inheriting the
crown.
Edmund Tudor similarly
came from an illegitimate line. He was one of the sons of Henry V?s
widow, Katherine de Valois, by the groom of her wardrobe, Owen Tudor.
When Henry Tudor took the crown, every single surviving Plantagenet had a
better claim to it than he did, so it was singularly important for him to make
the alliance with Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV. It
united the warring houses of Lancaster and York and helped to legitimise his
claim to the throne.
It was potentially
treason, however, for Margaret Beaufort to discuss this alliance, depending as
it did on the death of Richard III, and this in itself demonstrates the scope of
her ambition. Later scholars have associated her with the murder of
the two princes in the Tower, though this is unlikely and cannot be
verified.
Margaret Beaufort,
then, matriarch of both the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, had a huge impact on the
fate of the nation, but she also had a direct impact on Manchester itself.
She made generous contributions to the church and is said to have donated
the 14 stone angels in the roof of what is now the cathedral. It is
also said that when Edward VI?s soldiers came to ransack the church and destroy
the remaining evidence of Catholicism, they left quietly when told that the
Rector was saying prayers for the soul of Margaret Beaufort.
A scholar herself,
Margaret Beaufort began independently to teach boys in her own home near
Deansgate. One of the boys in whom she took a particular interest
was Hugh Oldham, later Bishop of Exeter. In 1515, Hugh Oldham founded the
Manchester
Grammar School, which is one
of the oldest in the country. Situated until 1930 in the Manorial
House close to the cathedral, it was administered by a Warden in conjunction
with twelve Fellows who were also responsible for the affairs of the church.
The
school was unusual in that it provided free education for the boys who
attended. They learned Latin, Greek, Grammar, Mathematics, sword
fighting and archery. Later, music and astronomy were added to the
curriculum by one of the most exotic characters ever to become Warden of a
school, Dr John Dee.
John Dee, (1527-1608),
was sometimes known as Queen Elizabeth?s Merlin. Scientist,
astrologer, alchemist, he is said to be the original of both Shakespeare?s
Prospero and Christopher Marlowe?s Faust. This in itself suggests
the reputation he had acquired. He became popularly known as an
occultist and necromancer. Unfortunately, this tended to obscure
his real achievements. He translated Euclid, for instance, and wrote the famous preface to
Euclid?s
Elements. He was the first to apply Euclidean geometry to
the art of navigation, and built the instruments which allowed the navy to apply
this knowledge. He trained the great navigators and developed the
maps charting the North East and North
West passages. He was said to have had the
greatest library in England, which had taken him over forty
years to acquire. This was estimated at between four and ten thousand books.
In 1579, however, he
met a rogue lawyer named Edward Kelly. Although even at the time
they met, Kelly had already had both ears cut off for forgery, fraud and
coining, he managed to convince John Dee that he could relate messages from
angels by a technique known as scrying, which involved gazing into a blank
surface such as an obsidian stone. In 1583 they produced together
the Book of Enoch which contained an ?angelic alphabet?
consisting of 2,401 letters set out in 98 tables. They claimed that
this was the original language of man before the Fall, and that it
directly encoded angelic wisdom.
In 1584, convinced
that Elizabeth I?s spymaster, Walsingham, was pursuing them, they fled to
Poland, then to the court of
the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II, in Prague. They were kept there on the
promise that they would reveal the secret of the Philosopher?s Stone ? the
ultimate goal of alchemy. In 1589 they parted company.
John Dee returned to England, but Kelly was imprisoned in Prague, apparently for failing
to deliver either gold or immortality to the Emperor. He later died
attempting to escape from prison. The date of his death is given
variously as 1593/5/7.
Dee was by now impoverished. He obtained a
licence from Elizabeth I to practice alchemy, and in 1595 was appointed Warden
of Manchester Grammar School.
This was an extremely
controversial appointment, especially since the Warden had duties in the church,
and was expected to take church services. John Dee?s reputation had
preceded him and people were scandalised that a known occultist had been given
clerical responsibilities. They believed that the town had actually been cursed
by his appointment. So unpopular was he that when plague broke out
in 1605, a mob broke into his rooms in what is now the Chethams Library and
destroyed his magnificent collection of books and manuscripts. John
Dee himself had mysteriously disappeared. He never returned to
Manchester, but died
in his home in Mortlake in 1608. His disappearance might be
explained by the rumour that there are secret passageways and tunnels linking
the cathedral and the college. It is also said that because the two
rivers which meet behind the library flooded persistently, the present town is
built above the earlier town. If archaeologists were to dig beneath
the surface of Manchester, they would uncover whole streets,
houses and shops extending all the way to King Street, preserved from this earlier
time.
Manchester?s plague was in its
own way as devastating as the Great Plague of London. It was
responsible for the deaths of over a thousand people at a time when the
population is estimated at between two and three thousand. In line
with common practice the town was sealed off ? no one was permitted to enter or
leave. The rich, however, had already left, escaping to their
alternative homes in the country, so it was mainly the poor who remained trapped
in the town, and there was much looting of the shops and larger houses.
So many people died
that there was no room to bury them. Bodies were dug into the field
now known as Angel Meadow. Heavy rain fell all summer, churning the
field, and grotesquely, the bodies of the plague victims began gradually to
surface, and to drift towards the river.
Manchester is not good at
commemorating its pre-industrial history. Extensive records exist
in the cathedral and the library (which is the first public lending library in
the world) but there is no easy public access or display. Many more
records exist from the time of the Industrial Revolution, when Manchester was said to be
responsible for producing the wealth not only of the nation, but of the
world.
The Whispering
Road is set in 1836. At this time Manchester had not yet been incorporated into a
municipal town, and the cathedral was still the Collegiate Church.
It was rapidly burgeoning into an industrial city, containing over 100
factories and a population of circa 300,000, yet it was still being run along
the lines of a feudal village.
Manchester was owned by the
Mosley family, who bought it in 1596 for £3,000.00. All rents were
paid to this family, who were in theory responsible for street and bridge
repairs, water supplies, policing, street lighting etc. It was an
antiquated system, and wholly inadequate to meet the demands of the growing
population.
Several written
accounts testify to the appalling conditions of the time. One of
the most comprehensive and graphic was written by Dr James Kay (1804-77).
In his Moral and Physical Conditions of the English Working
Classes, (1832) he wrote that entire families of sixteen or eighteen people
were crammed into a single, flooded cellar room with their pigs and chickens;
that in any tenement block there would be up to a thousand children who had no
name, and that in Ancoats, the world?s first industrial suburb, average life
expectancy was only fourteen. Other writers such as Alexis de
Tocqueville, compare Manchester directly to hell, a place of
?darkness, smoke and flame?, where even on the brightest day it was not possible
to see the sun. Factories poured out their fumes and their chemical
waste directly into the rivers, which were so polluted that small animals could
walk across them. The people, of course, took their water directly
from the rivers, and this caused the major cholera outbreaks of the 1830?s.
In these unimaginable
conditions there are several inspiring stories of individual heroism.
There is only space here to mention one of these stories; that of Abel
Heywood (1810-93) the son of a weaver, who became a political activist and
later, mayor of the city.
Abel Heywood?s father
died when he was nine years old, and he came to the town centre to work in one
of the factories. He was educated at a Sunday School in Bennett Street, and in
1828 he established his radical paper, The Poor Man?s Guardian, in the
cellar of a shop on Oldham
Street. This was a prodigious
undertaking. He wrote and edited the paper himself, printing
articles by such writers as William Cobbett and Richard Cobden, and distributed
it secretly all over the city, in boxes bearing the labels of tea and coffee or
biscuits. He was imprisoned twice, and twice fined for this
activity, because of the Stamp Act. This declared that a tax of 4d
a copy was payable on each issue of any newspaper or magazine. Abel
Heywood wanted his paper to be read by the working men of the city, the poorest
of whom only earned five shillings a week, so he kept his costs down by
operating secretly and illegally. Only when the Stamp Act was fully
repealed in 1836 was he able to run his paper openly. He then went
on to have a long and illustrious career, becoming alderman of the city in 1853,
and mayor in 1862, but he refused all other titles, and remained firmly on the
side of the urban poor.
Abel Heywood is
commemorated in Manchester?s Town Hall, unlike many of the
invisible people who dedicated their lives to the city and contributed to its
rich and varied history. It is a remarkable history, and deserves
more commemoration. Manchester has reinvented itself many times, most
recently since the IRA bomb in 1996. Its cultural identity has
changed so rapidly that its true stature and importance in English history is in
danger of being lost. Only certain aspects of it are outlined here,
but even in this rough sketch I hope that it is possible to see the city?s
history as a dynamic process, a continuously unfolding drama linking Manchester to the rest of the
nation, and to the world.
