Cass, Jonathan and Edmonds, Fiona and Tadmor, Naomi (2025) An Analysis of Transformations in West Lancashire's Economy and Society c1660-1740, Principally Sourced from Probate Records. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
This thesis presents an investigation into economic and social changes which were evolving in the west of Lancashire during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The agriculturally productive sub-region of the Lancashire plains, which lie to the north and south of the estuary of the river Ribble have formerly been somewhat under-represented in regional historiographies. Discussions have tended to focus either on the latter decades of the eighteenth century and/or the economic transformation of Manchester and its neighbouring towns in the centre and east. However, on the western plains the traditionally husbanded landscape of spatially integrated small ports and rural market towns had also been evolving its own gradual metamorphosis from which economic activities accelerated in the second half of the 1600s. In the following chapters, I have evaluated the compass of this evolution, principally through quantitative analyses of the livestock, crops, goods and activities evinced from male probate inventories. These have been selected as whole sets of extant records from six adjoining townships north and sixteen townships south of the river Ribble, with inventories from Ormskirk and Liverpool similarly transcribed and represented. The principal focus falls upon the decades between c.1660-1740, although the period south of the Ribble prior to the midcentury is referenced also. The inventories have been drawn from the depository of probate bundles held at Lancashire Archives. This resource, which otherwise remains largely untapped, contains inventories, wills, and administrators’ accounts. Analysis of these documents has been supplemented in the text by additional contemporaneous material in the form of diaries, ships’ provisioning ledgers and early town surveys. Each of these primary sources indicate that industrious and commercially focussed economic activities were evolving in rural townships in the seventeenth century to a greater extent than has formerly been acknowledged. This thesis demonstrates that the impetus for these transformative economic effects were founded upon a sound agrarian base during an extended period of relative economic buoyancy which, when coupled with the commercial opportunities occasioned by the inexorable rise of Liverpool from c.1670s onwards enabled even relatively small rural producers to thrive. Occasioned by the combined dynamics of agrarian rationalisation, trades specialisations, technological progress and the importation of novel goods and commodities through Liverpool, a consumer culture rapidly emerged. Analysis of whole sets of probate documents has provided opportunities for contextualisation with earlier regional discussions and facilitates engagement with more recent analyses concerning trades specialisations, the nature of rural industrialisation and urban integration. The temporal span also represents the core of an extended period of irreversible transformation, one which immediately preceded the rapid acceleration of industrialisation and urbanisation, which from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, occasioned economic and population expansion in towns across Lancashire. Therefore, evidence is presented herein which suggests that a sub-regional dynamism prevailed and evolved here in the early phases of the pre-industrial dawn. Such evidence suggests that revisions may need to be considered to established texts and that our inherited perceptions of the west of Lancashire during the early modern period require reorientation. Therefore, the activities and motivations of men and women during these decades of transition, before the factories and mills of Lancashire had been built is deserving of renewed analysis.