Bygone Burnley: Higham, with historian Roger Frost MBE 17-2-25
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00:00Today we're in Highham, and the village is one of the most interesting villages in the
00:04Burnley area. In fact, I think it should be in Burnley rather than Pendle, because its
00:11history is intertwined with Burnley's, not Pendle, at least in a political sense. Anyway,
00:19be that as it may, we are in front of what is probably these days the best known building
00:26in Highham, the Four Halls, and of course it's a well-known public house, it also serves
00:33good food, but it's famous for its Inn sign. I'll stop there. The Inn was built in 1792,
00:44which is at the beginning of the industrial revolution in Burnley and Burnley District.
00:51The village was a centre for agriculture and also for textiles. There are a lot of
01:01handloom weaver's cottages in the village, and this is the place which they came to,
01:07to get their work. Their work was doled out from the Four Halls. But the name is what
01:16is most interesting about the pub. If you look at the sign, you'll see that there are
01:24four people, and I'm going to have a look at it now. On the sign you've got a clergyman
01:33who is praying for all, you've got a king who governs all, you've got a soldier, he
01:42fights for all, but you've got a poor handloom weaver, or a poor, it looks like a labourer there,
01:50he pays for all. So you might say, what does that all mean? Well, Highham was a centre of
02:01great Chartist activity in the 1840s. Lots of the handloom weavers and workers in the other
02:09industries that existed, like shuttle making and things like that, blacksmith shops,
02:16they were all radicals. And the sign was put there because it was their view, and it remains
02:24the view of all radicals, that the poor man is the easiest man to tax, the poor man has got less
02:34means of stopping taxation taking place, and so pub signs like this occur all over England. In fact,
02:41there's one called the Five Halls, and I've forgotten what the Fifth Hall is, but the Fifth
02:47Hall was another oppressor of the working classes, and although Highham now is a bit upmarket,
02:54it has got a very radical history. Right, we're beside the Four Halls, and what we've got here
03:04is a remarkable survivor of the same period that we were talking about before, the early
03:12Industrial Revolution. This is a water trough, not for humans to drink the water, we've got one of
03:19those just round the corner. This is a packhorse water trough. You see, the village was quite a
03:26substantial village by the early industrial period, and lots of business was carried out here.
03:35There were farms, I mentioned shuttle making, handloom weaving, blacksmith shops, there were
03:44also several village shops by the early 19th century, so the area was quite a little centre.
03:53It was also historically an administrative centre for the Forest of Pendle, and there were law courts
04:02at Highham Hall, so it has a tradition of being at the centre of things, and this is where
04:11the packhorse trains met, watered the horses, and then set off on the journey, perhaps to Halifax
04:21or Heptonstall, where there were cloth halls. The handloom weavers would have woven the cloth,
04:28and then you had to have it valued, and it was undertaken at places like Colne, where there was
04:34another cloth hall, and as I mentioned Halifax and Heptonstall. This is the spout, and it was
04:43instigated in the mid-19th century, it says since the 1850s, but I've seen references to
04:52a spout in Highham before that, and it supplied untreated spring water for the villages of Highham
05:00in the days when there was no pipe water. It was one of several springs that existed in and around
05:07the village, but this one has survived. In the village Pinfold here, and a pinfold was a community
05:16facility that dates back to the Middle Ages. In the early days, lots of residents in Highham would
05:25have kept their own animals, cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, and the village would have been largely
05:32self-reliant, but the animals, cattle and sheep in particular, were allowed to feed on the grasslands
05:43around the village, and at the end of the day they were brought back to the village and
05:51placed here until the family had finished the daily work, and they would come and collect them
05:57and take them to wherever they lived. If there were cattle, they would be taken home and milked,
06:02and there was a good supply of milk. If there were sheep, of course sheep were particularly
06:09useful for the wool, because before cotton was the main textile industry of Highham, there were
06:18two or three mills here in Highham, wool was the main industry, so the sheep were farmed,
06:27brought to the Pinfold, looked after by the Pinder, and then redistributed to their owners
06:33at the end of the day. Now Highham is full of interesting buildings, and I could have chosen
06:41any of them. There's a church, there is a village hall, there is the old co-op shop which is
06:50interesting as well, but we're in front of Jacksonfold now, and we're here because I have
06:56a really good photograph of Jacksonfold when there was a shop here, and signs showing you what the
07:04shop traded in. It was a village grocer's, and they had a very good reputation in the village
07:14for the quality of the food that they managed to sell, but of course in the past Highham wasn't
07:21the wealthy village, relatively wealthy village, that it is now. It was a poor village full of
07:28handloom weavers, and of course a shop was essential to that. I've mentioned that
07:36Highham is quite well known for two people, the first one of whom was a handloom weaver.
07:46Now his name was William Varley, and what made him significant is that he wrote a diary.
07:53The diary was printed in the back of the third volume of Bennett's History of Burnley,
07:59so everybody can read it. The book is fairly common, you can get hold of it and read it,
08:06only covers a number of pages, but it involves the period of the early 1820s which was
08:14a very bad time for handloom weavers. In 1824 the local bank collapsed, and that resulted in
08:24about 90% of the handloom weavers being unemployed. He mentions these hard times,
08:31but what is even more important about him, one of his books of documents about what he bought,
08:42his sort of cash book survives, and that Bennett didn't put in the back of volume three,
08:52but it survives. A copy exists in Burnley Library, I've used it on several occasions,
08:58and it tells you how much food cost, who he bought it from, he went to shops all over the
09:05districts buying vegetables, seeds to plant himself in his own garden, and so on. You get an
09:14idea of what life was like as a handloom weaver just from William Varley. The other man was Sir
09:23Jonas More. You might say, after all I've said about the village, why should we be talking about
09:30Sir Jonas More? Well, remarkably, he was a man who lived in the 17th century. He became a
09:39scientist, he was knighted, he was involved in lots of the experiments of the time by a Lancashire
09:49group of scientists who made very important advances in various branches of science. But
09:57he came from a Higham family, and people forget that Higham is in the midst of the Lancashire
10:06witch country. Sir Jonas's ancestors were connected to the Covenant witches that met
10:14just outside Higham at Pendle Hall. Pendle Hall is to the south of Higham,
10:21virtually in Highton Hill. But the family were members, they gave evidence at the witch trials
10:28of 1612, and remarkably, Sir Jonas, who was the grandson of one of the people who gave evidence
10:37at the trial, became, because he was an educated lad, in education being paid for by the townies
10:46and other local families, went to grammar school, went to university, and the most significant
10:53thing he did in his life, especially if you come from East Anglia, was that he was the man
11:02who drained the present agricultural land of Norfolk, Cambridge, South Lincolnshire and Suffolk.