An Analysis of Transformations in West Lancashire's Economy and Society c1660-1740, Principally Sourced from Probate Records.
Creators: name: Cass, Jonathan
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2025

description: This thesis presents an investigation into economic and social changes
 which were evolving in the west of Lancashire during the seventeenth and
 early eighteenth centuries. The agriculturally productive sub-region of
 the Lancashire plains, which lie to the north and south of the estuary of
 the river Ribble have formerly been somewhat under-represented in regional
 historiographies. Discussions have tended to focus either on the latter
 decades of the eighteenth century and/or the economic transformation of
 Manchester and its neighbouring towns in the centre and east. However, on
 the western plains the traditionally husbanded landscape of spatially
 integrated small ports and rural market towns had also been evolving its
 own gradual metamorphosis from which economic activities accelerated in
 the second half of the 1600s.
 
 
 In the following chapters, I have evaluated the compass of this evolution,
 principally through quantitative analyses of the livestock, crops, goods
 and activities evinced from male probate inventories. These have been
 selected as whole sets of extant records from six adjoining townships
 north and sixteen townships south of the river Ribble, with inventories
 from Ormskirk and Liverpool similarly transcribed and represented. The
 principal focus falls upon
 
 the decades between c.1660-1740, although the period south of the Ribble
 prior to the midcentury is referenced also. The inventories have been
 drawn from the depository of probate bundles held at Lancashire Archives.
 This resource, which otherwise remains largely untapped, contains
 inventories, wills, and administrators’ accounts. Analysis of these
 documents has been supplemented in the text by additional contemporaneous
 material in the form of diaries, ships’ provisioning ledgers and early
 town surveys. Each of these primary sources indicate that industrious and
 commercially focussed economic activities were
 
 evolving in rural townships in the seventeenth century to a greater extent
 than has formerly been acknowledged. This thesis demonstrates that the
 impetus for these transformative economic effects were founded upon a
 sound agrarian base during an extended period of relative economic
 buoyancy which, when coupled with the commercial opportunities occasioned
 by the inexorable rise of Liverpool from c.1670s onwards enabled even
 relatively small rural producers to thrive. Occasioned by the combined
 dynamics of agrarian rationalisation, trades specialisations,
 technological progress and the importation of novel goods and commodities
 through Liverpool, a consumer culture rapidly emerged. 
 
 
 Analysis of whole sets of probate documents has provided opportunities for
 contextualisation with earlier regional discussions and facilitates
 engagement with more recent analyses concerning trades specialisations,
 the nature of rural industrialisation and urban integration. The temporal
 span also represents the core of an extended period of irreversible
 transformation, one which immediately preceded the rapid acceleration of
 industrialisation and urbanisation, which from the mid-eighteenth century
 onwards, occasioned economic and
 
 population expansion in towns across Lancashire. Therefore, evidence is
 presented herein which suggests that a sub-regional dynamism prevailed and
 evolved here in the early phases of the pre-industrial dawn. Such evidence
 suggests that revisions may need to be considered to established texts and
 that our inherited perceptions of the west of Lancashire during the early
 modern period require reorientation. Therefore, the activities and
 motivations of men
 
 and women during these decades of transition, before the factories and
 mills of Lancashire had been built is deserving of renewed analysis.