Walking Through Burnley History, Hurstwood, with Roger Frost 26-09-24
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00:00Today we're in Hurstwood, which is a village near Burnley, and it's a remarkable village.
00:07Normally you wouldn't associate it with Burnley, but every building in the village has got a story.
00:16It is, of course, an agricultural village. The main industry for centuries was farming,
00:22and there are still a few farms, two or three, in the immediate area which are still working.
00:28But it was also a handloom weaver's centre, and there's a row of property just in front of us
00:36which was occupied largely, though not entirely, by handloom weavers.
00:42This is Hurstwood Chapel. It has a longer history than the years in which it was built.
00:511870 was when the Baptist Chapel at Hurstwood was built.
00:56But there had been attempts to establish a Methodist chapel before that, which didn't come off.
01:03This building is Spencer's Cottage. It dates to the 16th century, although it's been slightly updated.
01:16It is a building which has got a real history.
01:21The Spencer family came to this village probably in the early 16th century.
01:30But one of them, who wasn't actually born here but was a cousin of the family that lived here,
01:38was Edmund Spencer, the great Tudor poet. He was the author of The Fairy Queen,
01:45a poem that I'm not too fond of, but he was also the author of another great poem called The Shepherd's Calendar.
01:54Now, it was when he was staying here with his relatives, according to tradition,
02:01that he got the idea to write The Shepherd's Calendar.
02:07This is Ivy Cottage. It is assumed to be an early 17th century building,
02:15but it's possible that there was something on the site before.
02:19It's interesting because although it looks like a house, in actual fact it is thought to have been a Catholic chapel
02:28in the time when being a Catholic was against the law.
02:33Catholics were persecuted. Some of them were executed.
02:38Some of them were fined for many years, like John Townley, for example.
02:43But here it's understood, and there's no direct proof of it,
02:49that this was the secret location of a rural Catholic chapel.
02:55And of course this area, in the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly the 17th,
03:01there were lots of secret Catholics around, led by the Townleys of Townley,
03:07who had their own Catholic chapel in the hall.
03:11Behind me now is Hurston Hall, which was built in the 1570s by Bernard Townley.
03:19He is understood to have been a natural son of John Townley, of Townley Hall.
03:28And for three generations the hall was in Townley ownership.
03:35Bernard Townley was an architect and builder.
03:39He was number two to Sir Christopher Wren in the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral.
03:46A very significant man in his own time.