Stately families of old Bolton

IN THE years after the Civil War, Thomas Marsden made a fortune from the cotton business. His representatives brought the raw material from London to Bolton; there Marsden had the cotton spun into yarn and the yarn woven into cloth by the many independent tradesmen who lived in crofts dotted about the town. The finished product was transported back to London and re-sold.

It was a sophisticated and profitable operation. In a three-year period Marsden did more than £50,000 worth of business, at a time when the headmaster of Bolton Grammar School made £50 per annum.

In 1670 Marsden bought Little Bolton Hall from Gilbert Ireland. Thomas Marsden had joined the stately families of old Bolton.

They were a varied lot, these country families, living in their big halls outside the town. They had money and power and enjoyed great prestige. Sometimes that prestige was worth fighting for.

Consider the case of Roger Lever and his feud with Sir Ralph Ashton.

In 1466 Sir Ralph brought a case before the Lancaster Assizes claiming that he was the rightful owner of the Great Lever estate, which had been in Roger Lever's family since 1200. Sir Ralph won the case and was awarded a deed of ownership, but Roger Lever was not a man to let a little thing like the law rob him of his inheritance.

He gathered together other members of the Lever clan and they broke into the castle and removed the deeds by force. Sir Ralph complained to the King and Parliament and got a copy of the vital document. In the meantime Roger had fortified himself in Great Lever with a large band of armed retainers and they resisted any attempt to move them. Guerrilla warfare erupted.

Lever and his men raided Ralph Ashton and his tenants, rustling their cattle and stealing everything that wasn't nailed down. In reply Ashton enlisted the help of Thomas Pilkington -- his mission, to capture Roger Lever, dead or alive.

This strange little local civil war went on for 11 years until the forces of the Crown stepped in on Ashton's side. Some of the old families were pillars of the community.

The Ashtons held onto the Great Lever estate until 1629, when they sold it to no less a person than Bishop John Bridgeman of Chester. The Bishop wanted a country house for himself and his family and set about building one on the site of Roger Lever's old place. It turned out a fine big hall with its own chapel and Samuel Pepys mentions the stained glass heraldic windows in his diary.

The Bishop's son was the splendidly named Sir Orlando Bridgeman.

He was a loyal supporter of the King during the civil war, and after the Restoration he became first an MP, and then Lord Chancellor from 1667 to 1672. The highest law officer in the land, presiding as he did over the House of Lords was thus also a Bolton gentleman. Unfortunately Great Lever Hall has not survived. A later Bridgeman demolished a large section of it in 1760. The rest of the building struggled on long enough for it to be photographed.

It was still standing in 1911 when the Victoria County History of Lancashire was published and interested readers can find two views of the old place opposite page 186 in volume five.

In the early 19th century Hulton Hall was grand enough to host great house parties which all the local country families attended, but now it's a memory, a blank space in the middle of the Hulton Park estate.

The family was ancient, highly respectable and long lasting.

The first Hultons, Iorweth and Madoc, came to Bolton from Wales in 1167 and the last of them. Sir Geoffrey, died only a few years ago.

Over 800 years the family only once blotted its copybook.

In 1819 it was William Hulton, magistrate, who ordered the Yeomanry Cavalry in to arrest Orator Hunt as he addressed the great demonstration at St Peter's Field in Manchester, thus setting in train the events which to the Peterloo Massacre.

Some of the old families of Bolton rebelled against the Crown. Sir Francis Anderton of Lostock had his large estate briefly confiscated by the government after he joined the Jacobites in 1715. The Andertons lived in a big black and white timbered hall in Lostock, which collapsed in the 1830s. But their stone Gatehouse survived and is now a private home.

Sir Christopher Anderton built it in a style, which is more Mediterranean than is usual in Lancashire halls. This is perhaps because this Catholic family sent its children abroad to be educated.

The Andertons were always loyal to their faith -- in the early 1600s it was rumoured that Lostock Hall was the site of a secret printing press which churned out propaganda pamphlets for the old religion.

Some of the old families were Puritan. The Levers of Darcy and Little Lever (relatives of the banished Levers of Great Lever) produced several protestant ministers with nationwide reputations, including Thomas Lever, Master of St John's College, Cambridge who fled abroad to escape the persecutions of Queen Mary. Equally devout were the Bradshaws of Bradshaw, to the extent that in 1595 when a man was needed to rigorously prosecute Catholics in the district, John Bradshaw of Bradshaw was the obvious choice. The family also included among its relatives and connections the lawyer John Bradshaw who was Lord President of the court, which in 1649 tried King Charles I and then sentenced him to death.

During the trial he became so fearful of assassination that he had steel plates sewn into his hat. In the event royal revenge came after his death. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Bradshaw's body was exhumed from its grave and hung at Tyburn.

Each of these families had a Hall. Darcy Lever Old Hall stood on high ground above Bradshaw Brook, near to its junction with the River Tonge. Bradshaw Hall, a handsome 17th century building, was also on the banks of Bradshaw Brook, but further north. Neither has survived but both were photographed.

Smithills Hall is still very much with us, a reminder that some of Bolton's old families were very grand indeed. Smithills was home to the Barton family in the 16th century. John Barton was the great benefactor who paid for the town's first schoolteacher and who later renounced his worldly goods and became an Observant Friar.

His grandson Robert was the magistrate who questioned George Marsh and provoked him into leaving the famous footprint, still to be seen to this day. The Bellasyses, who were the Viscounts Fauconberg, succeeded the Bartons at Smithills. After them came the Byroms, and then around 1820 the Ainsworths.

Which brings us neatly back to Thomas Marsden. He made a fortune from trade and joined the gentry, but he was by no means the first upwardly mobile business magnate. As a clothier and merchant, Marsden followed the trail blazed by Humphrey Chetham 50 years before. Chetham was the principal dealer at the Bolton Market for many years before the Civil War. As well as founding the Blue Coats School and establishing the world's first free lending library, he bought Turton Tower from the Orrells in 1628.

But the first man we know who clawed his way into the gentry from business origins was Lawrence Brownlow, who established his Fulling Mill on the banks of Eagley Brook in 1483. Brownlow built Halli i' th' Wood as a family seat and it is of course still with us.

When we look at it now we think of the great inventor Samuel Crompton, who grew up there and invented his spinning mule within its walls. But we should spare a thought for Lawrence Brownlow, the prototype Bolton industrialist turned gentry.