South Pennines
The South Pennines is a region of moorland and hill country in northern England lying towards the southern end of the Pennines. In the west it includes the West Pennine Moors, it is bounded by the Greater Manchester conurbation in the west and the Bowland Fells and Yorkshire Dales to the north. To the east it is fringed by the towns of West Yorkshire whilst to the south it is bounded by the Peak District; the rural South Pennine Moors constitutes both a Site of Special Scientific Interest and Special Area of Conservation. The Southern Pennines National Character Area defined by Natural England includes the West Pennine Moors and is a landscape of broad moorland, flat-topped hills and fields enclosed by dry stone walls, it is formed from the Millstone Coal Measures of the Carboniferous age. Settlements built from local gritstone occupy river valleys with wooded sides. Peat soils and blanket bog on the moors store carbon while high rainfall fills many reservoirs supplying water to the adjacent conurbations.
The area is important for recreation having open access areas and historic packhorse routes. Settlements within the South Pennines include Addingham and Otley in the north, Keighley and Oxenhope, Sowerby Bridge, Hebden Bridge and Todmorden in the Calder Valley, Marsden in the south-east, Darwen and Rawtenstall in Lancashire, Horwich and Littleborough in Greater Manchester. Moorland in the South Pennines includes Rombalds Moor, Rishworth Moor, Haworth Moor, Turton Moor and Castleshaw Moor; the highest point of the M62 motorway, the highest motorway in England, is at 1,221 feet on Windy Hill near Junction 23. The rivers Aire and Colne drain the area to the east and the Roch and Irwell to the west; the Calder Valley provides a low-level route for road and the Rochdale Canal between Greater Manchester and Lancashire in the west and West Yorkshire to the east. The Huddersfield Narrow Canal and the Manchester to Huddersfield railway pass through the Standedge Tunnels and the A62 road crosses the moorland at Standedge.
The Leeds and Liverpool Canal passes through Keighley en route to Skipton. Natural England describes the South Pennine moorlands as the Watershed Landscape where the area's high rainfall fills a multitude of reservoirs; the South Pennines and its fringe has a population of more than a million people. Woodland covers about 4% of the terrain on steep valley sides; the South Pennines provide evidence of the late Bronze Age and Iron Age findings. The Romans built forts in Ilkley and at Castleshaw, they dug coal, further exploited during the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Steep-sided valleys with fast flowing streams provided power and water for the area's early mills and factories. Water-powered corn mills and fulling mills were used in medieval times and more fulling mills were built after the mid-16th century as the woollen industry grew. At the end of the 18th century, water powered mills were vital for industrial expansion of the textile industry for spinning cotton, but subsequently for woollens and worsteds.
Walking, mountain-biking and horseriding are common pastimes enjoyed in the area. Numerous walking trails have been established including, amongst many others, the Calderdale Way and the Bronte Way; the long-established Pennine Way passes through the area. The South Pennines Walk & Ride Festival which takes place annually in September is a two-week celebration of the area's landscape. Typical events include guided walks, mountain bike rides, horse rides, orienteering events and evening talks by noted speakers. South Pennine Moors South Pennines Regional Park Pennine Prospects South Pennines Regeneration Company South Pennines Campaign Network Southern Pennines National Character Area profile
Whitworth, Lancashire
Whitworth is a small town and civil parish in Rossendale, England, amongst the foothills of the Pennines between Bacup, to the north, Rochdale, to the south. It had a population of 7,500 at the 2011 Census. Whitworth spans the Whitworth Valley, a 7 square miles area consisting of Healey, Whitworth and Shawforth, linked by the A671 road. Several smaller hamlets are now part of Whitworth, such as Cowm Top, removed to make way for Cowm Reservoir. Whitworth is twinned with Germany; the early history of Whitworth is unclear. At the earliest period, Whitworth was at the edge of the famed and extensive Forest of Rossendale, which covered 22,000 acres and reached a point somewhere near Bacup. Flint arrows, stone hammers and spearheads found in the area point to the existence of Mesolithic man who roamed the bleak open moors. Whitworth has a substantial history, notably the Whitworth Doctors who occupied Whitworth House, a property still in existence in Whitworth Square. In those early years, Whitworth came within the ancient parish of Rochdale which, although vast, was itself a part of the hundred of Salford, one of the main divisions into which the historic county boundaries of Lancashire were divided during Norman times.
The Abbot of Whalley Abbey held much of the land in this area. Saxton’s Map of Lancashire of 1577 does mark Whitworth, setting it between neat pyramid-like hills on either hand; the 16th century saw the beginnings of sheep farming, the growth of weaving and the first industry in the area, with coal mining being recorded in the 17th century Industrialisation, remained a "household" affair through the 18th century and the settlements of Whitworth and Shawforth remained villages. Impetus was given to the development of the area through the construction, during the middle of the century, of a turnpike road through the valley, it ran from Manchester via Rochdale and Whitworth to Bacup and on to Burnley and Skipton. It was one of the few such roads in East Lancashire and provided a ready means of conveying local goods to Manchester and Yorkshire; the road was of vital importance in Whitworth’s industrial expansion and with it, the settlements in the township thus began to grow. By the 19th century and coal mining were the chief industries although the manufacture of yarn remained important.
Towards the end of the 19th century a great deal of development was visible including the opening in 1881 of a rail link between Bacup and Rochdale. Passenger services on the railway stopped in 1947. Two reservoirs, at Cowm and Spring Mill, were completed in 1877 and 1887 to augment Rochdale’s water supplies. In 1910, a tram service was introduced by Rochdale Corporation, first to Whitworth and extended to Bacup. Buses replaced these in 1932; the population of Whitworth reached its peak of 9,574 in 1901 following which the recession in industry in the 1930s and the effects of the Second World War saw it decline. The first post war census in 1951 declared a population of 7,442 which declined further to 7,031 by 1961. Since however, the figure has risen to its present total of around 7,500, it is part of the Rossendale and Darwen constituency, with Jake Berry having been the Member of Parliament since 2010. Local government services in Whitworth are provided by three local authorities. Whitworth Town Council was formed in 1974 following the Local Government Act 1972, as part of the terms of successor parishes.
Prior to this date, Whitworth formed the Whitworth Urban District, the administrative unit of the valley but was abolished following the reorganisation. The history of local government in Whitworth began in 1874; the latter end of that century, as has been mentioned, saw a great deal of local development. As a result, a local board was set up in 1874 to administer Whitworth. Further independence arrived towards the end of the century with the creation of the Parish of Whitworth, one of nineteen new parishes carved out of the original vast Rochdale Parish. Complete independence came in June 1894; the first meeting was held on 3 January 1895 and the first chairman was William Ernest Whitworth. With this, Whitworth had administratively autonomous from its neighbour. However, in 1974 when Whitworth Urban District was abolished and Whitworth was absorbed into the newly created Rossendale Borough. Today the town council consists of a part-time town clerk, its mission statement is "To improve the quality of life for the community of Whitworth".
The town council acts as a pressure group upholding the rights and values of Whitworth, a sounding board for local opinion and a centre for promoting the town's historical and social identity. Whitworth's current mayor is Councillor Madeline De Souza and the current deputy mayor is Councillor Lynda Barnes, they lead a twelve strong council made of six councillors representing two wards. Facit and Shawforth to the north of the town, Whitworth and Healey to the south. Situated between the towns of Bacup to the north and Rochdale to the south, the town is a built around the Whitworth Valley in the Pennines. In April 1976, an area in and surrounding Healey Dell, at the south end of the valley became designated as a statutory local nature reserve. A prominent feature of Healey Dell is the railway viaduct which stands 150 feet above the River Spodden, which rises in the Lancashire Pennine hills above Whitworth and proceeds south through Healey Dell and on to Rochdale, where it merges with the River Roch.
Brown Wardle is a hill between Whitworth and the village of Ward
Historic counties of England
The historic counties of England are areas that were established for administration by the Normans, in many cases based on earlier kingdoms and shires created by the Anglo-Saxons and others. They are alternatively known as ancient counties, traditional counties, former counties or as counties. In the centuries that followed their establishment, as well as their administrative function, the counties helped define local culture and identity; this role continued after the counties ceased to be used for administration after the creation of administrative counties in 1889, which were themselves amended by further local government reforms in the years following. Unlike the self-governing boroughs that covered urban areas, the counties of medieval England existed as a means of enforcing central government power, enabling monarchs to exercise control over local areas through their chosen representatives – sheriffs and the Lord-Lieutenants – and their subordinate justices of the peace. Counties were used for the administration of justice, collection of taxes and organisation of the military, for local government and electing parliamentary representation.
They continue to form the basis of modern local government in many parts of the country away from the main urban areas, although sometimes with altered boundaries. The name of a county gives a clue to how it was formed, either as a division that took its name from a centre of administration, an ancient kingdom, or an area occupied by an ethnic group; the majority of English counties are in the first category, with the name formed by combining the central town with the suffix "-shire", for example Yorkshire. Former kingdoms, which became earldoms in the united England did not feature this formulation. Counties ending in the suffix "-sex", the former Saxon kingdoms, are in this category. Many of these names are formed from compass directions; the third category includes counties such as Cornwall and Devon where the name corresponds to the tribes who inhabited the area. County Durham is anomalous in terms of naming and origin, not falling into any of the three categories. Instead, it was a diocese, turned into the County Palatine of Durham, ruled by the Bishop of Durham.
The expected form would otherwise be "Durhamshire", but it was used. There are customary abbreviations for many of the counties. In most cases, these consist of simple truncation with an "s" at the end signifying "shire", such as "Berks" for Berkshire or "Bucks" for Buckinghamshire; some abbreviations are not obvious, such as "Salop" for Shropshire, from the Norman-derived word for its county town Shrewsbury. Counties were prefixed with "County of" in official contexts, such as "County of Kent"; those counties named after central towns lost the -"shire" suffix, for example Yorkshire would be known as "County of York". This usage was sometimes followed where there was no town by that name, such as the "County of Berks"; the "-shire" suffix was appended for some counties, such as "Devonshire", "Dorsetshire" and "Somersetshire", despite their origin. There is still a Duke of Devonshire. Great Britain was first divided into administrative areas by the Romans, most following major geographical features such as rivers.
Before their arrival there were distinct tribal areas, but they were in a constant state of flux as territory was gained and lost. After the demise of Roman Britain around 410 these first divisions of land were abandoned, although traditional divisions taking the form of petty kingdoms such as Powys and Elmet, remained in those areas which remained British, such as south west England; the areas that would form the English counties started to take shape soon afterwards, with the Kingdom of Kent founded by settlers around 445. In southern England more shires emerged from earlier sub-kingdoms as part of the administrative structure of Wessex, which imposed its system of shires and ealdormen on Mercia after it came under West Saxon control during the 9th century. Once the Kingdom of England was united as a whole in 927 it became necessary to subdivide it for administrative convenience and to this end, earldoms were created out of the earlier kingdoms; the whole kingdom was divided into shires by the time of the Norman conquest.
Robert of Gloucester accounts for thirty-five shires and William of Malmesbury thirty-two, Henry of Huntingdon, thirty-seven. In most cases the counties or shires in medieval times were administered by a sheriff on behalf of the monarch. After the Norman conquest the sheriff was replaced and the shires became counties, or "areas under the control of a count", in the French manner. Although all of England was divided into shires by the time of the Norman conquest, some counties were formed later, up to the 16th century; because of their differing origins the counties varied in size. The county boundaries were static between the 16th century Laws in Wales acts and the Local Government Act 1888; each shire was responsible for gathering taxes for the central government. In southern England the counties were subdivisions of the Kingdom of Wessex, in many areas represented annexed independent, kingdoms or other tribal territories. Kent derives from the Kingdom of Kent, Essex and Middlesex come from the East Saxons, South Saxons and Middle Saxons.
Norfolk and Suffolk were subdivis
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, sometimes referred to as Britain, is a sovereign country located off the north-western coast of the European mainland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state, the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east, the English Channel to the south and the Celtic Sea to the south-west, giving it the 12th-longest coastline in the world; the Irish Sea lies between Great Ireland. With an area of 242,500 square kilometres, the United Kingdom is the 78th-largest sovereign state in the world, it is the 22nd-most populous country, with an estimated 66.0 million inhabitants in 2017. The UK is constitutional monarchy; the current monarch is Queen Elizabeth II, who has reigned since 1952, making her the longest-serving current head of state.
The United Kingdom's capital and largest city is London, a global city and financial centre with an urban area population of 10.3 million. Other major urban areas in the UK include Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire conurbations, Greater Glasgow and the Liverpool Built-up Area; the United Kingdom consists of four constituent countries: England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Their capitals are London, Edinburgh and Belfast, respectively. Apart from England, the countries have their own devolved governments, each with varying powers, but such power is delegated by the Parliament of the United Kingdom, which may enact laws unilaterally altering or abolishing devolution; the nearby Isle of Man, Bailiwick of Guernsey and Bailiwick of Jersey are not part of the UK, being Crown dependencies with the British Government responsible for defence and international representation. The medieval conquest and subsequent annexation of Wales by the Kingdom of England, followed by the union between England and Scotland in 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, the union in 1801 of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Five-sixths of Ireland seceded from the UK in 1922, leaving the present formulation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. There are fourteen British Overseas Territories, the remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in the 1920s, encompassed a quarter of the world's land mass and was the largest empire in history. British influence can be observed in the language and political systems of many of its former colonies; the United Kingdom is a developed country and has the world's fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It has a high-income economy and has a high Human Development Index rating, ranking 14th in the world, it was the world's first industrialised country and the world's foremost power during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The UK remains a great power, with considerable economic, military and political influence internationally, it is sixth in military expenditure in the world. It has been a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council since its first session in 1946.
It has been a leading member state of the European Union and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, since 1973. The United Kingdom is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, the Council of Europe, the G7, the G20, NATO, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Trade Organization; the 1707 Acts of Union declared that the kingdoms of England and Scotland were "United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain". The term "United Kingdom" has been used as a description for the former kingdom of Great Britain, although its official name from 1707 to 1800 was "Great Britain"; the Acts of Union 1800 united the kingdom of Great Britain and the kingdom of Ireland in 1801, forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Following the partition of Ireland and the independence of the Irish Free State in 1922, which left Northern Ireland as the only part of the island of Ireland within the United Kingdom, the name was changed to the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
Although the United Kingdom is a sovereign country, Scotland and Northern Ireland are widely referred to as countries. The UK Prime Minister's website has used the phrase "countries within a country" to describe the United Kingdom; some statistical summaries, such as those for the twelve NUTS 1 regions of the United Kingdom refer to Scotland and Northern Ireland as "regions". Northern Ireland is referred to as a "province". With regard to Northern Ireland, the descriptive name used "can be controversial, with the choice revealing one's political preferences"; the term "Great Britain" conventionally refers to the island of Great Britain, or politically to England and Wales in combination. However, it is sometimes used as a loose synonym for the United Kingdom as a whole; the term "Britain" is used both as a synonym for Great Britain, as a synonym for the United Kingdom. Usage is mixed, with the BBC preferring to use Britain as shorthand only for Great Britain and the UK Government, while accepting that both terms refer to the United K
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery; the Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early and Late Middle Ages. Population decline, counterurbanisation, collapse of centralized authority and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in Late Antiquity, continued in the Early Middle Ages; the large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, an Islamic empire, after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete.
The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire, Rome's direct continuation, survived in the Eastern Mediterranean and remained a major power. The empire's law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or "Code of Justinian", was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became admired in the Middle Ages. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions. Monasteries were founded; the Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty established the Carolingian Empire during the 8th and early 9th century. It covered much of Western Europe but succumbed to the pressures of internal civil wars combined with external invasions: Vikings from the north, Magyars from the east, Saracens from the south. During the High Middle Ages, which began after 1000, the population of Europe increased as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and the Medieval Warm Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase. Manorialism, the organisation of peasants into villages that owed rent and labour services to the nobles, feudalism, the political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the right to rent from lands and manors, were two of the ways society was organised in the High Middle Ages.
The Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation-states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant. Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, by the founding of universities; the theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings of Giotto, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo, the Gothic architecture of cathedrals such as Chartres are among the outstanding achievements toward the end of this period and into the Late Middle Ages. The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine and war, which diminished the population of Europe. Controversy and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the interstate conflict, civil strife, peasant revolts that occurred in the kingdoms. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period.
The Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history: classical civilisation, or Antiquity. The "Middle Ages" first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or "middle season". In early usage, there were many variants, including medium aevum, or "middle age", first recorded in 1604, media saecula, or "middle ages", first recorded in 1625; the alternative term "medieval" derives from medium aevum. Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the "Six Ages" or the "Four Empires", considered their time to be the last before the end of the world; when referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being "modern". In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua and to the Christian period as nova. Leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People, with a middle period "between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of city life sometime in late eleventh and twelfth centuries".
Tripartite periodisation became standard after the 17th-century German historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods: ancient and modern. The most given starting point for the Middle Ages is around 500, with the date of 476 first used by Bruni. Starting dates are sometimes used in the outer parts of Europe. For Europe as a whole, 1500 is considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date. Depending on the context, events such as the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Americas in 1492, or the Protestant Reformation in 1517 are sometimes used. English historians use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period. For Spain, dates used are the death of King Ferdinand II in 1516, the death of Queen Isabella I of Castile in 1504, or the conquest of Granada in 1492. Historians from Romance-speaking countries tend to divide the Middle Ages into two parts: an earlier "High" and late
England
England is a country, part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to Scotland to the north-northwest; the Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south; the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century, since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world; the English language, the Anglican Church, English law – the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world – developed in England, the country's parliamentary system of government has been adopted by other nations.
The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's terrain is chiefly low hills and plains in central and southern England. However, there is upland and mountainous terrain in the west; the capital is London, which has the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. England's population of over 55 million comprises 84% of the population of the United Kingdom concentrated around London, the South East, conurbations in the Midlands, the North West, the North East, Yorkshire, which each developed as major industrial regions during the 19th century; the Kingdom of England – which after 1535 included Wales – ceased being a separate sovereign state on 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union put into effect the terms agreed in the Treaty of Union the previous year, resulting in a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles"; the Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages. The Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea; the earliest recorded use of the term, as "Engla londe", is in the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The term was used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "the land inhabited by the English", it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was part of the English kingdom of Northumbria; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that the Domesday Book of 1086 covered the whole of England, meaning the English kingdom, but a few years the Chronicle stated that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient sense.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its modern spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used; the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars. How and why a term derived from the name of a tribe, less significant than others, such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people is not known, but it seems this is related to the custom of calling the Germanic people in Britain Angli Saxones or English Saxons to distinguish them from continental Saxons of Old Saxony between the Weser and Eider rivers in Northern Germany. In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England. An alternative name for England is Albion; the name Albion referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus the 4th-century BC De Mundo: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean that flows round the earth.
In it are two large islands called Britannia. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, i.e. it was written in the Graeco-Roman period or afterwards. The word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins, it either derives from a cognate of the Latin albus meaning white, a reference to the white cliffs of Dover or from the phrase the "island of the Albiones" in the now lost Massaliote Periplus, attested through Avienus' Ora Maritima to which the former served as a source. Albion is now applied to England in a more poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend; the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximate
Rochdale (ancient parish)
Rochdale was an ecclesiastical parish of early-medieval origin in northern England, administered from the Church of St Chad, Rochdale. At its zenith, it occupied 58,620 acres of land amongst the South Pennines, straddled the historic county boundary between Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. To the north and north-west was the parish of Whalley. Anciently a dependency of Whalley Abbey, the parish of Rochdale is believed to be of Anglo-Saxon origin, as evidenced by historical documentation and its dedication to Chad of Mercia. Urbanisation, population shifts, local government reforms all contributed towards the gradual alteration and ultimate dissolution of the historic parish boundaries. Today, the territory of the former parish lies within Lancashire, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire. Rochdale was recorded in the Domesday Book as Recedham. From a early stage in its history, Rochdale consisted of five divisions or townships: in the Lancashire part of the parish was Butterworth, Castleton and Spotland.
Hundersfield was parted into four townships. Manchester
