A series of 100 articles appeared in the Accrington Observer in 1925-1927 under the title Accrington A Century Ago. Written By Richard Shaw Crossley with the help of Richard Ainsworth, they featured life and personalities of Accrington in the early part of the 19th century. For anyone researching their ancestors in Accrington there is a wealth of information and biographical details.

Love, Hate, and the Law in Tudor England reconstructs the life of Ralph Rishton, a member of the sixteenth-century Lancashire gentry who was a child bridegroom and a serial wife-discarder, who bribed church officials to obtain a forged annulment, defrauded a kinsman out of his inheritance, and adroitly manipulated his own and other people's land. The dozens of lawsuits in which the Rishtons were involved, in many different courts, elucidate one family's engagement with law in Tudor England: how they used and misused law, how it shaped their perceptions of rights and mutual obligations, and how it framed litigants' and witnesses' language. Drawing upon trial and estate records, the core of this study is the central narrative of Ralph Rishton's three wives, of litigiousness and violence, marriage and property, and the pursuit of equitable resolutions to disputes, along with countless smaller narratives that vividly capture a culture in its time and place. Alongside that central narrative, L. R. Poos uses the Rishton stories as a starting-point to analyse child marriage, the construction of memory, and the development of local historical identity through antiquarians and the Victorian and Edwardian local press, demonstrating how - from the time of the Rishtons into the twentieth century - historical narratives were continually reshaped and repurposed.

This book of essays on British social and cultural history since the eighteenth century draws attention to relatively neglected topics including personal and collective identities, the meanings of place, especially locality, and the significance of cultures of association. Themes range from rural England in the eighteenth century to the urbanizing society of the nineteenth century; from the Home Front in the First World War to voluntary action in the welfare state; from post 1945 civic culture to the advice columns of teenage magazines and the national press. Various aspects of civil society connect these themes notably: the different identities of place, locality and association that emerged with the growth of an urban environment during the nineteenth century and the shifting landscape of twentieth-century public discourse on social welfare and personal morality. It is of interest that several of the essays take Manchester or Lancashire as their focus.

This book considers Section 21 of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 and its significant impact on previously invisible married women in the 19th century. Tens of thousands of women used this little-known section of the Act to apply for orders from local magistrates' courts to reclaim their rights of testation, inheritance, property ownership, and (dependent on local franchise qualifications) ability to vote. By examining the orders that were made and considering the women who applied for them, the book challenges the mistaken belief that Victorian England and Wales were nations of married, cohabiting couples. The detailed statistical analysis and rich case studies presented here provide a totally new perspective on the legal status and experiences of married women in England and Wales. Although many thousands of orders were granted between 1858 and 1900, their details remain unknown and unexamined, primarily because census records did not consistently record dissolved marriages and there is no central index of applications made. Using sources including court records, parliamentary papers, newspaper reports, census returns, probate records and trade directories, this book reconstructs the successful – and unsuccessful – experiences of women applying to magistrates' courts and the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes to protect their assets across regions and decades.

For almost a hundred years the academic study of migration concentrated on evolving standardised models of migration behaviour based on data from censuses or the registration of births, marriages and deaths. More recently, it has been realised that such models fail to take into account the decision-making behind migration and that better understanding will come from study of the behaviour of individuals as well as aggregate numbers. In this book the imaginative use of alternative sources DS for example, apprentice books, guild and craft records, legal and court documents, diaries and biographies DS gives fresh insights into the processes of movement to reveal much more complex circulatory behaviour than the standard models derived from census and registration sources alone have suggested.The first chapter confronts the issue of rural mobility in post-famine Ireland and is followed by a study centred on Alpine rural families which built impressive networks across pre-industrial Western Europe. Two chapters focus on the particular characteristics of worker groups: mining families of south Lancashire during the period of rapid increase in coal production in the eighteenth century; and the organised mobility of skilled labour in nineteenth-century central Europe. Next, an imaginative and rigorous deployment of the techniques of family reconstruction and record linkage embracing a variety of sources (vital event registers, wills, port books, apprentice records) teases out the migration histories of those who settled in eighteenth-century Liverpool. There are two chapters on female migrant behaviour, drawing attention in the case of eighteenth-century Rheims to the opportunities and restrictions on the life of migrant women at different points in their lifecycles; and showing how poor women struggled to survive in nineteenth-century Dublin. The final chapter uses family histories assembled by numerous genealogists and family historians to challenge the orthodox view of direct stepwise migration from a smaller to a larger town in the urban hierarchy.