Taken from Wikipedia, this details a history of Chorley, which I hope to use as a feature in my travel guide, to provide the reader with a little bit of history and background.
Chorley is a market town in Lancashire, in North West England. It is the largest settlement in the Borough of Chorley. Chorley is located 8.1 miles North of Wigan and 19.5 miles north west of Manchester. As with the Lancashire and Greater Manchester region, the town's wealth came principally from the cotton industry. As recently as the 1970s the skyline was dominated by numerous factory chimneys, but most are now demolished: remnants of the industrial past include Morrison's chimney and a few other mill buildings, and the streets of terraced houses for mill workers. Chorley is known as the home of the Chorley cake.
[edit]History
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The name Chorley came from Anglo-Saxon Ceorla-lēah = "the peasants' clearing".
[edit]Early and Roman history
The area around Chorley has been inhabited since at least the Bronze Age. The earliest find came from 3500 BC on Anglezarke Moor at Round Loaf. A farmer at Astley Hall Farm found a pottery burial urn from this period in 1963. This find was followed up with further excavations, with further artifacts being found. Objects from these excavations are on display at the hall's museum.[citation needed]
During the Roman era a Roman road ran near Chorley towards Wigan. It is believed that Romans settled at Brindle to the north of the town, as Roman remains were discovered there in the late 1950s.
[edit]Late Middle Ages
A market charter was granted to the town in the 1250[citation needed] and there is evidence from 1498 that the market was actually taking place[citation needed] Nowadays, the town has two markets, the Flat Iron Market and the Covered Market. For one weekend each year, French market traders sell their produce in the town, with Chorley's merchants returning the favour in France. The market has a number of specialist cheesemongers who purvey the local Lancashire cheese in various forms. Chorley is also famous for its famous Chorley cake.
During 1442 a local noble named Sir Rowland Standish (a relative of Myles Standish, Mayflower passenger and military commander of Plymouth Colony), who had fought atAgincourt, brought back to Chorley the skull and bones of Saint Lawrence and interred them at an altar at the parish church. With the bones interned there the church was renamed St. Lawrence's. Records of this are mentioned in the Harleian Manuscripts. The bones were not of the 3rd century saint but are believed to be the bones of Lorcán Ua Tuathail, a saint canonised as St. Laurence from Dublin, who died in Normandy in the 12th century. The bones went missing in the Reformation under the rule of King Henry VIII.
[edit]17th and 18th centuries
According to the apocryphal story, James I after a good meal, officially knighted Sirloin steak ("Sir" loin) at Hoghton Tower, a large stately home to north east of the town, whereWilliam Shakespeare once worked. Astley Hall is a more central stately home, set in the middle of the town's largest park, Astley Park. Oliver Cromwell visited here on his trek through the region.
On 27 November 1745 when Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobites passed through Preston and Wigan on their way south to Manchester and Derby in the hope of taking London and the Crown, Chorley was a mustering point for the Government scouts tracking them. The Prince and his Army marched through Chorley itself on 10 December on the way back toCarlisle and Scotland and their dreadful day of destiny on Culloden Moor near Inverness the following 16 April. There was considerable local support in the town for that famous lost cause.
[edit]19th, 20th to 21st centuries
Chorley, like most Lancashire towns, gained its wealth from the industrial revolution of the 19th century which was also responsible for the town's growth. Chorley was a vital cotton town with many mills littering the skyline. Today only three mills still remain working.
Also Chorley in its location on the edge of Lancashire Coalfield was vital in coal mining. Several pits existed in Duxbury Woods, the Gillibrand area and more numerously in Coppull. Chisnall Hall Colliery at Coppull was considered the biggest Lancashire pit outside of Wigan and one of many located in the Chorley suburb. The last pit in the area to close was the Ellerbeck Colliery in 1987 which was located south of Chorley, between Coppull and Adlington.
The town played an important role during the Second World War, when it was home to the Royal Ordnance Factory, a large munitions manufacturer in the village of Euxton about 2 miles (3.2 km) from the town centre. A smaller factory was also built near the Blackburn-Wigan railway line in Heapey.
In the 1970s Chorley was designated as part of Central Lancashire new town, together with Preston and Leyland. The original aim of this project was to combine the three settlements into a single city with a population of around half a million. Although this never came to pass, and the project has since been abandoned, Chorley benefited from the urban renewal commonly associated with new towns. Examples include a bypass of the town centre, and the Market Walk shopping centre.
Chorley saw the completion of the largest Mormon temple in Europe in 1998, known as the Preston England Temple.
[edit]Governance
In 1837, Chorley joined with other townships (or civil parishes) in the area to become head of the Chorley Poor Law Union which took responsibility for the administration and funding of the Poor Law in the area.[2] Chorley became incorporated as a municipal borough in 1881 by its first mayor William Augustus Smethurst. The town's population remained roughly static in the 20th century, with the 1911 census showing 30,315 people and the 1971 census showing 31,665. Under the Local Government Act 1972, Chorley became the core of a larger non-metropolitan district on 1 April 1974. The present Borough of Chorley has forty-seven councillors, representing twenty electoral wards.
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