A History of Congleton

Congleton lies at the south-eastern rim of the Cheshire Plain, at the edge of the Peak District. It is located in the valley of the river Dane, where there have been settlements since Neolithic times. Above the town, a chambered tomb long barrow known as “The Bridestones” was constructed about 4,500 years ago; and a late Bronze Age hoard of hunting weapons was discovered in 1925 on the site of what is now Daven Primary School in New Street.

The first written evidence of Congleton comes from the Domesday Book of 1086, in which the settlement is named as Cogeltone, held (on behalf of the Earl of Chester) by Bigot, consisting of sufficient land to support four ploughs, and woodland worth four shillings.

It is possible there was a recognisable settlement here centuries earlier, in Roman times, around the Bent Lane and Wallhill area, because Astbury is said to mean “east of the camp” and Wallhill could be a corruption of “vallum”, referring to the earthworks of a Roman camp.

Again using place name evidence, there’s a theory that the town was originally founded round about the 7^thCentury, as both Congleton and Buglawton are said to be a mixture of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon words. Perhaps Congleton gradually took over as a settlement for trading from Davenport, further down the River Dane (Daven being the earlier name for the Dane).

The River Dane rises on Axe Edge in the Peak District and passes through Congleton on its way to joining the River Weaver. The streams joining the Dane, such as the Howty, the Dare, the Loachbrook, the Daneinshaw and Tommy’s Brook, were all important aids to settlement in the early days of what became the town.

CONGLETON’S CHARTERS
After the Norman Conquest, Cheshire, including Congleton, was granted to the Earl of Chester; but by 1272 Congleton was in the possession of Henry de Lacey, Earl of Lincoln. He granted the town its first charter, which allowed the town’s people the right to hold their land via rent rather than personal service, and for the town to elect a mayor. It also provided for a Saturday weekly market and for the holding of two annual fairs, later adding a Tuesday cattle market.

The 750^th anniversary of the granting of the charter will be celebrated in the town in 2022.

The descendants of Henry de Lacey rebelled against King Edward II in the 1320s, and their lands were seized, and by the end of the 14^th century the town became part of the Duchy of Lancaster Crown Estate. A new town charter in 1625 finally declared Congleton “for ever a free borough”, meaning no longer would certain buildings pay rent to the Crown.

EARLY INDUSTRY
A catastrophe occurred in the mid 15^th Century when the River Dane flooded its banks, destroying the watermill that ground corn. As a result, in 1451 the town’s inhabitants changed the course of the river by constructing another channel.

The mill, situated adjacent to the river on what is now Mill Green (one of the roads leading to the park), was an extremely important part of the town’s life and livelihood, and repairs to it and payments to the miller are mentioned regularly in the town’s accounts which survive from 1584, although the mill existed as far back as 1272 according to that year’s charter.

From early medieval times inhabitants of the town were involved in the cloth industry as mercers, drapers, glovers and weavers. Other local trades included the usual carpenters, butchers, bakers, inn-keepers, bell makers, tanners, skinners, shoe-makers, farmers and agricultural labourers. Leather working became a leading trade in the town, particularly leather gloves, purses and points – points being leather strips, often with a silver tip, similar to modern shoelaces and used to fasten clothes. Silver Street, off Canal Road, reminds us of this industry.

HARD TIMES
Life in these days was tough; and bad weather, as in the harsh winters of 1614-15 and 1634-35, added to it when the river was frozen solid. Plague, too, hit the town: in 1559, 1603-4 and 1641-42. There is still a “plague stone” on the parish boundary between Congleton and Astbury. The stone has a hollowed-out top where, so it’s said, coins to pay for essential supplies were deposited in vinegar, to ward off the plague. As in the current Covid-19 pandemic, travellers could be forced to go into quarantine so that they didn’t spread the plague further afield. Often all the poor could rely upon then were charitable bequests from individuals and the town council.

The Civil War also produced great distress. There was tension between Royalist and Parliament supporters in Congleton. For a time the Parnell family, who backed Parliament, held sway. (They were the ancestors of Charles Stewart Parnell, the 19^th century Irish Home Rule politician and 1^st Lord Congleton). Parliamentary forces passed through the town on their way to defend Nantwich in January 1643, but Congleton’s most renowned contribution to the war came through John Bradshaw, a Congleton lawyer who was Mayor in the 1630s, and High Steward when he moved to London in about 1642. There he rose to be president of the court which tried and condemned King Charles the First. He died after an illness in 1657, but after the Restoration his body was exhumed, hanged and beheaded, and his head exhibited on a spike outside Westminster Hall.

During this period the Congleton silver-gilt mace was donated to the town by Richard Parnell. Whilst the wording on the mace (held in the Town Hall) indicates a date after the restoration of Charles II, because it apparently says “CR 1661 To the Freedome of England by God’s Blessing Restored”, it is actually dated 1651. The ‘freedom restored’ refers to parliament, not the king.

Peace finally resumed in Congleton, although in 1745 outliers of troops with Bonny Prince Charlie passed through and billeted in the town on their way to Derby, after which they turned around and headed back to Scotland.

ENTERTAINMENT

There were lighter sides to life. Touring troupes of players visited the town often; there were the Christmas festivities of the Lord of Misrule; as well as rush-bearing and the Congleton Wakes, an annual holiday for all workers usually held around the time of the town’s patron saint’s day. In earlier times the Wakes were welcomed by the religious ceremony of the “ringing of the chains” (leather belts containing loose clappers), although later the ceremony was corrupted by exhorting the populace to drink as much good ale as possible.

The town accounts also make regular mention of the popular medieval sports of cock-fighting and bear-baiting. Congleton was just the same as other towns in this regard, and had a ‘dancing bear’ to entertain the townsfolk during the Wakes. One year the bear died just before the Wakes, a great disappointment. The town’s Alderman therefore suggested making a loan, to pay for a new bear, from a fund set aside for a new town bible. This would be paid back later, starting with money raised during the festivities. Unfortunately, the tale was twisted and a mocking rhyme is still quoted: “Congleton Rare, Congleton Rare, Sold the Bible to buy a Bear”. Thus Congleton is known locally as Bear Town, but in modern times the town council has embraced the nickname; and is also now active in supporting bear rescue charities.

In the 20^th century, a particular entertainment was provided in the town by the Carnival. Many of the textile and other factories constructed fabulous floats for this huge event in the town’s calendar in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The 1972 Carnival was especially memorable – the Seven Hundredth anniversary of the town’s charter – climaxing with a rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with real cannons fired by the King’s Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery.

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Larger scale industry came to Congleton with the construction of the first silk mill in 1752, by John Clayton and Nathaniel Patterson. Notable for its great size, and later known as The Old Mill, it was partially demolished in the 1930s and met its final destruction in 2003.

By the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 Congleton was changing into a factory town based on silk, led by the production of the Old Mill. Later fustian cutting was introduced and, later still, synthetic fibres, providing jobs, particularly for women, well into the late 20^th century.

Cotton spinning came to the town by the 1780s, and ribbon-making during the later 18^th century. Berisfords, founded in the 1850s, and specialising in ribbon making, became one of the largest employers in the town and continues working to this day, albeit now owned by a company incorporated in Switzerland.

There were many other specialist trades in the town in the 1700s, including the clock-making family of Whitehursts. One of their number, John Whitehurst, who later moved to Derby was a polymath (clockmaker, geologist, philosopher), a Fellow of the Royal Society and a founding member of the Lunar Society together with others such as Erasmus Darwin (the grandfather of Charles Darwin), Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood and James Watt.

The Macclesfield Canal, a late-comer in the canal boom, opened for goods traffic in 1831 and the railway came to Congleton in the 1840s, but the station being out of the town centre as was the canal wharf, they did not impact on the town’s development in the same way as in some neighbouring boroughs.

RELIGION AND EDUCATION

Whilst the original mother church for the town was at Astbury, by the 15^th Century Congleton possessed two places of worship – the upper and lower chapels. The Lower Chapel was also called the Bridge Chapel because it was near the bridge over the River Dane that today is between Mill Street and Rood Hill. The Upper Chapel stood on or near the site of St Peter’s Church.

It can be seen that Congleton’s churches are largely Protestant, but the town has a historic figure of the Catholic faith. Margaret Ward was a Catholic born in Congleton in the 16th century. During the reign of Elizabeth I, she smuggled rope into a prison to help a Catholic priest escape but was captured herself. Despite being tortured, she refused to disclose the location of the priest or renounce her faith and was hanged at Tyburn in 1588. She was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970, as one of the ‘Forty Martyrs of England and Wales’.

By the early 17^th century the town had a Grammar School, adjacent to St Peter’s Church. Teaching Latin and Greek, and only to boys of course, it later expanded the curriculum to include writing, arithmetic, merchant’s accounts, French and geography. It closed in 1901, and boys went to Sandbach Grammar instead, while the Congleton County Girls’ Grammar School was finally opened in 1940.

Population growth had necessitated the construction of additional Church of England churches – St James’, St Stephen’s, St John’s at Buglawton and Holy Trinity at Mossley. Other denominations were also served: Roman Catholics at St Mary’s in West Road, different branches of Methodists in a number of locations – John Wesley included Congleton many times in his preaching tours in the mid 1700s. Independents, Baptists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians were all catered for in various locations around the town, and in the late 20^th century the New Life church added to the religious life of the town.

Many of these religious establishments had accompanying Sunday schools, or day schools, such as St James’ from the 1840s. There were also many private schools, and Dames’ Schools, as well as including “Ladies Academies” in Wagg Street, Chapel Street and Moody Street. The future suffragist, and life-long champion of girls’ education, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, first came to Congleton in 1867, bringing her girls’ private boarding school from Worsley, Manchester.

Congleton High School and Eaton Bank Academy continue to provide education on the sites of the two post-war ‘secondary moderns’ at Box Lane and Eaton Bank.

POLITICAL AND CIVIC LIFE

Nationwide causes were reflected in Congleton, including Chartist marches and demonstrations. Elections in the mid 19^th Century, when there was no secret ballot, were hard-fought contests. A typical election pamphlet claimed ….

“We have intimidation, bribery and corruption in their worst forms, used and sanctioned by those whose office and station ought at least to induce a more modest and unblushing use of means. They stand by and see men carried away in a state of helpless drunkenness, to be herded together for a week like swine, to be bought on the polling day to record their independent and unbiased votes.”

Votes for women were still some way in the future despite the efforts of the Congleton suffragist, Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy.

Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy was born in the 1830s in Greater Manchester and came to Congleton in the 1860s to run a girl’s boarding school, having already founded the Manchester School Mistresses Association. She lived in Buglawton, dying in 1918. She helped found the Women’s Franchise League, the Women’s Emancipation Union and, with Emmeline Pankhurst, the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union). She resigned from the WSPU in 1913 after that organisation participated in activities that Elizabeth (a life-long pacifist) considered could be a danger to life. She was a very active campaigner for, amongst many other causes, the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act which discriminated against women – the Act was repealed in 1886, and the Guardianship of Infants Act of 1886. There is a Blue Plaque at Elizabeth’s former home in Buglawton and she is one of the women commemorated on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett, another campaigner for Women’s rights, in Parliament Square in London. In 2022 with monies raised by The Elizabeth Group a bronze statue of Elizabeth was erected in Congleton town centre.

Public health became more of a concern of the borough council as the 19^th Century wore on and a medical officer of health was appointed in 1873. The Workhouse, final destination of the desperate and destitute, was provided with medical support, including by Dr Isaac Fern, who practised in Lawton Street and became mayor of Congleton twice in the early 20^th century.

In 1834 the town already had gas supplies and later sewers were constructed (depositing into the River Dane!) and a water works for water supply was constructed by 1881. The medical officer reported the virtual elimination of typhoid by 1888.

Congleton Park opened in 1871, with the addition of a pavilion marking Victoria’s jubilee in 1887, restored as a Millennium project. A new Town Hall, replacing an earlier ‘Guildhall’ with dungeons and a market, was officially opened in 1866, designed in the popular Victorian Gothic style, built to impress, and still housing the town council today, its clocktower dominating the townscape.

THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES

As everywhere in Great Britain, the cataclysm of the First World War changed Congleton as men failed to return from the bloody conflict. A War Memorial was erected in 1923, and sadly more names were added after the Second World War. It has transpired that many names were omitted, and a new memorial is planned, to be opened in 2021. Nearby is the statue of Congleton’s VC, George Harold Eardley.

The War Memorial hospital was opened in 1924, following public subscription, and “homes fit for heroes” (council houses) were constructed in the 1920s, removing old slum areas such as “Gibraltar Rocks”, at the bottom of Park Lane. And electricity finally became generally available in the town by 1931.

A bandstand had been opened in the park in 1914, and by 1936 townspeople could also make use of an outdoor swimming pool. It was another forty years before the Leisure Centre opened, with its indoor pool; and around the same time the town got a new Library.

During the Second World War children from the cities were evacuated to Congleton; and Dutch and American troops were stationed in the town prior to the liberation of Europe. Some Dutch soldiers returned to marry locals, resulting in a small proliferation of Dutch surnames, and the town was for a long time twinned with Oosterhout in the Netherlands, and with Trappes in France.

Over the 20^th century, the town’s population increased to 26,000 and further developments included new main roads, the creation of Daneside Theatre and the Museum, as well as a new shopping centre – the subject of further plans – and the loss of some important buildings. Now undergoing rapid change in the 21^st century, the town is being extended in all directions with the proliferation of new housing estates, and a ‘link road’ to be completed shortly: we can only surmise what the future will hold!