Bygone Burnley: St Peter's Church, Part Two, with historian Roger Frost MBE
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00:00We're in St Peter's Church now and it really is worth coming in to see because it's beautifully
00:07maintained and the history of the town can be told by looking at the memorials in the
00:13church. We are standing where the 19th century galleries were built. Rather than extend the
00:22church because the site was small, what we decided to do with the increased population
00:28of Burnley was to put galleries on either side of the church, above where we are now,
00:34and over on the other side of the church and that increased the number of people who could
00:40attend services enormously from about 1830 to 1840. But the pillars themselves, this is one,
00:51are Norman pillars tooled down to made to look as if they were constructed in the late 15th and
01:03early 16th century. You can see on the pillars where the original pillar was, the lower part,
01:10and the extensions, upper part of the pillar. And of course the church is famous for its
01:19magnificent window behind the altar. That's the master window and it is named after Robert Mosley
01:27Master who was the incumbent, the Parson of Burnley from 1825 to 1855. Okay, this is a memorial to
01:41General Scarlet who is the most famous of Burnley soldiers. Although he wasn't a Burnley man by
01:47birth, he was born near Guildford in the south of England. But as a young soldier he came to Burnley
01:54with his regiment because Burnley was a barracks town and he was very fortunate to meet the heiress
02:05to the Hargreaves Colliery Company. Now when he married Charlotte Hargreaves, incidentally Charlotte
02:13became Charlotte Scarlet because of that, which I always think is slightly amusing. But he inherited
02:17a vast estate, became very wealthy and lived here in Burnley for the rest of his life from about the
02:27age of 40 until he was in his 70s when he died in 1872. The other thing about him that made him
02:36famous is that he was the leader, the commander of the most successful military incident of the
02:45Crimean War. Just because he led the most successful military campaign in the Crimean War.
02:54The most famous is the Charge of the Light Brigade which Tennyson wrote about and that was an utter
03:01disaster. General Scarlet led the Charge of the Heavy Brigade which was a complete and utter
03:08success and he became very famous in his own lifetime. He was a personal friend of Queen
03:15Victoria. She insisted on giving him a baronetcy and he was a very well respected person in Burnley
03:29until his death in 1872. And he's buried at Clivager I believe. Yeah he's buried at Clivager,
03:36right in front of the main entrance to the church because the family, the Thursbys and the
03:44Scarlets, their main house was Omrod Hall which was in Clivager. General Scarlet lived at Bank
03:52Hall which is almost in Burnley Centre. We're in the Stansfield or Scarlet Chapel at the moment
04:00and behind me is the oldest grave memorial in Burnley. At one time there would have been quite
04:07a lot of old memorials, perhaps even effigies in here. None of those appear to have survived. But
04:16this is the gravestone or the grave marker of Oliver de Stansfield who was the Lord of the
04:25Manor of Worsthorne. His house was at Rewley, or one of his houses was at Rewley, but he lived
04:33in Heshamford Hall or Heshamford House which is still standing in Heshamford in Burnley. It's a
04:42grave marker, probably on top of the grave, and it shows a cross, obviously the religious symbol,
04:50and if you look at the cross there is a sword. He was a knight, he was the constable of the
04:57D'Lacey castles in Yorkshire and the main castle in Yorkshire they had was at Pontefract and he
05:06was constable of Pontefract under the D'Lacey family which did a lot to keep this church in
05:15good condition in the early Middle Ages. This is Caroline Augusta Parker, Townley Parker was her
05:25full name, and she was the wife of one of the big landowners in this area. The Parker family
05:31originally owned Monk Hall in Braggcliffe, then they built Exterus Hall in the Elizabethan times,
05:38they inherited the estate of the Townleys of Royal in the late 18th century, and then by
05:48additional marriages they had estates in the Preston and Chorley area. They were a very wealthy
05:55family. However, when Caroline died, her husband, who was by then based in Preston, insisted that
06:04the burial should be here, and the two of them look across time as it were, facing each other
06:11in the church, because ahead of me is the magnificent memorial of Robert Parker, Robert
06:21Townley Parker, and they, as I say, they face each other for a time in memorial with the whole
06:27length of the church between them.