Bygone Burnley: St Peter's Church and School, Part One, with Roger Frost MBE
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00:00This morning we're in the churchyard of St Peter's in Burnley. This is the very old centre of Burnley.
00:10Where we're standing is the graveyard and you can see behind me St Peter's Church.
00:17The first reference to St Peter's is in 1122, but it's clear from that document that there'd been a church on the site
00:27for a period of time we can't determine. So I would guess it would be in the 8th century or possibly early 9th century.
00:37A date between about 760 and 820, something like that. But there's no record of it.
00:45However the document of 1122 tells us that there'd been a church there for some time.
00:51We're not even sure about the date 1122 because that has been determined, not by me, but by other historians
00:59who have had to look at the people who've signed the document and work out when they were born, when they died
01:05and what's the most likely date. The one thing we are certain of, it was in the reign of Henry I
01:12who was William the Conqueror's youngest son and that Henry reigned from 1100 to 1135.
01:27The area in which we are now, I said was the oldest spot of Burnley.
01:36Burnley gets its name because it is the town on the River Brougham. The Brougham is close by and if we go back to the Dark Ages
01:46what is supposed is that the site of the churchyard where we are now and the school to my right
01:54was dominated by a defensive construction, a mound of earth with a fence on top which linked the River Brougham together
02:06roughly where we are now and in that area, defended district, that was the church which was much smaller than it is
02:19The market square from 1294 was there, the town's first shops and inns were there and Burnley grew from this very small spot
02:33into the medium sized town that it is now. One other thing to say about it is that I've just mentioned the school
02:42This school has got a place in history, at least local history. It was the first school to be built in the area where people didn't have to pay to send their children
02:55and the incumbent of Burnley, the parson in other words of Burnley, who was Robert Moseley Master, he'd only just arrived in Burnley
03:05and he decided in 1828 to build St Peter's School which is the oldest primary school in Burnley or the oldest in the area