Shaw and Crompton
Shaw and Crompton is a civil parish in the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham, Greater Manchester, England, and lies on the River Beal at the foothills of the South Pennines. It is located north of Oldham, south-east of Rochdale and north-east of Manchester City Centre. Its largest settlement is Shaw.
Historically in Lancashire, the area shows evidence of ancient British and Anglian activity. In the Middle Ages, Crompton formed a small township of scattered woods, farmsteads, moorland and swamp. The local lordship was weak or absent, and so Crompton failed to emerge as a manor with its own lord and court. Farming was the main industry of this rural area, with locals supplementing their incomes by hand-loom woollen weaving in the domestic system.
The introduction of textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution initiated a process of rapid and unplanned urbanisation. A building boom began in Crompton in the mid-19th century, when suitable land for factories in Oldham was becoming scarce. By the late 19th century, Crompton had emerged as a densely populated mill town with forty-eight cotton mills, some of the largest in the United Kingdom, in the area. At its spinning zenith, as a result of an interwar economic boom and the over-valuation of shares associated with the textile industry, Shaw and Crompton had more millionaires per capita than any other town in the world. Imports of foreign cotton goods saw a decline in the textile industry by the mid-20th century and the last mill closed in 1989.
Shaw and Crompton covers and is a predominantly suburban area of mixed affluence with a population of 21,065 as of 2011. The legacy of its industrial past can be seen in its three surviving cotton mills, all of which are home to large distribution companies, among them is Yodel based at Shaw National Distribution Centre, a major employer in the area.
History
Toponymy
The name Shaw is derived from the Old English word sceaga, meaning "wood". The name Crompton is also of Old English derivation, from the words crom or crumb, meaning "bent" or "crooked" and ton, for "hamlet or village". A local historian stated that "this name aptly describes the appearance of the place, with its uneven surface, its numerous mounds and hills, as though it had been crumpled up to form these ridges". The University of Nottingham's Institute for Name-Studies has offered the suggestion that the name Crompton means "river-bend settlement", which may reflect Crompton's location on a meander of the River Beal.The dual name of both Shaw and Crompton has been said to make the town "distinctive, if not unique", while preference of Shaw over Crompton and vice versa has been a minor local controversy and point of confusion. Today, the single name of Shaw seems to have won preference in the locality.
Shaw was originally a hamlet and sub-district of Crompton, where it appears to have originated as the commercial and ecclesiastic centre because of a small chapel sited there dating back to the 16th century. Before then, Whitfield had been the largest village in Crompton. In 1872, Shaw was noted as one of three villages in Crompton. However, due to Shaw's urbanisation following the construction of a major road from Werneth to Littleborough, and the establishment of a post office sub-district named and situated in Shaw, it came to dominate Crompton. Additionally, a separate ecclesiastical parish was created for the township in 1835, which was given the name Shaw because of the church's location on Shaw Moor, in Crompton. The names merged to form the present day Shaw and Crompton, which boundary markers have used since at least the 1950s.
Early history
An early type of axe known as a palstave has been discovered on Crompton Moor, providing evidence of Bronze Age human activity. It is believed that the area was inhabited by Ancient Britons, and that the Brigantes gave the River Beal its name. An ancient track, perhaps of Roman origin, crosses the modern Buckstones Road leading to Castleshaw Roman fort in neighbouring Saddleworth.In 616 Æthelfrith of Bernicia, an Anglo-Saxon king, crossed the Pennines with an army and passed through Manchester to defeat the Britons in the Battle of Chester. A wave of Anglian colonists followed this military conquest and their settlements are identified by the Old English suffix ton in local place names. Royton, Middleton, Moston, Clayton, Ashton and Crompton are localities northeast of Manchester which may have been founded during that colonisation, suggesting that Crompton as a settlement could date from the 7th century.
File:Whitfield Hall.jpg|right|thumb|Whitfield: during the Middle Ages, this cluster of homesteads was owned by the Knights Hospitaller and was the largest settlement in the area.
During Anglo-Saxon England, it is assumed from toponymic evidence that the township of Crompton formed around a predominantly Anglian community with a few Norse settlers, and within the extensive Hundred of Salfordshire. Following the Norman conquest of England, Crompton was part of a vast estate given to Roger the Poitevin. It was unmentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086; the first recorded use of the name Crompton for the township was discovered in legal documents relating to Cockersand Abbey near Lancaster, dating from the early 13th century. The document outlines that Gilbert de Notton, a Norman who had acquired the land from Roger de Montbegon, granted his estate to Cockersand Abbey. The Knights Hospitaller and Whalley Abbey held small estates in the township. In 1234, about of land at Whitfield in Crompton were given to the Hospitallers, a religious order that provided care for poor, sick or injured pilgrims to the Holy Land. A medieval cross has been discovered in the ruins of a house at Whitfield.
During the High Middle Ages, Crompton was a collection of scattered woods, farmsteads, moorland, swamp and a single corn mill, occupied by a small and close community of families. The area was thinly populated and consisted of several dispersed hamlets, including Whitfield, High Crompton, Cowlishaw, Birshaw and Bovebeale. These hamlets were situated above the water-logged valley bottoms and below the exposed high moors. Owing to complicated local arrangements of land tenure, inheritance and absentee landlords, the local lordship was weak and Crompton failed to emerge as a manor with its own lord and court. This slowly facilitated comparative freedoms and independence for the early people of Crompton, which encouraged the influx of families from the neighbouring parish of Rochdale, including the Buckleys, Cleggs, Greaves and Milnes.
During the Late Middle Ages, the Buckley and Crompton families were recorded as the largest landowners in Crompton, owning land and farmsteads at Whitfield and Crompton Fold respectively. The Crompton family has a well-documented history and can be traced back to the time of Magna Carta, appearing in the Assize Roll for 1245. Crompton is indigenous to the township, and first appears as a family name in the 13th century, when the locality's principal landowner, Hugh de la Legh, changed his family name to "de Crompton", to reflect the estate he possessed. The family owned a large historic house by the name of Crompton Hall, on the site of Crompton Fold. Crompton Hall first appears in historical records as early as 1442, owned by Thomas de Crompton and his family. The original "medieval" Crompton Hall was demolished around 1848. A second Crompton Hall, set in its own prominent forested grounds, was erected by the family—by then an influential and affluent investor in the local cotton industry—but following the death of the last remaining family members, the site was sold and, in 1950, the house was demolished to make way for an exclusive development of bungalows.
Because of the poor soils and rugged terrain, Samuel Lewis said Crompton's inhabitants were "a race of hardy and laborious men". They have also been described as having a reputation for being a "hardy, frugal and somewhat independent breed", which has been attributed to the tradition of absentee landlords and self-sustenance in earlier times. There had been a chapel of ease at the hamlet of Shaw since at least the early 16th century, but, due to ecclesiastical arrangements for the parish of Prestwich-cum-Oldham, the inhabitants were obliged to contribute money towards Oldham Parish Church, which in turn had obligation to the mother Church of St Mary the Virgin at Prestwich. On several occasions during the 15th and 16th centuries, the Archdeacon of Chester had to intervene because Crompton's inhabitants refused to contribute towards holy bread and candles used at Prestwich. In 1826, a poll was taken regarding the re-building of Oldham Church. Not one person in Crompton voted in favour of the rebuilding and when a rate was levied to raise money for the new church at Oldham, the people of Crompton refused to pay.
Textiles and the Industrial Revolution
The manufacture of textiles in Crompton can be traced back to 1474, when a lease dated from that year outlines that the occupant of Crompton Park had spinning wheels, cards and looms, all of which suggest that cloth was being produced in large quantities. The upland geography of the area constrained the output of crop growing, and so prior to industrialisation the area was used for grazing sheep, which provided the raw material for a local woollen weaving trade. Wills and inventories from the 15th and 16th centuries suggest most families were involved with small scale pasture, but supplemented their incomes by weaving woollens in the domestic system and selling cloth, linen and fustians to travelling chapmen for the markets in Manchester and Rochdale. Despite its remoteness by the Pennines, by the Early Modern period the domestic system in Crompton had produced relatively wealthy inhabitants. The most affluent were those involved in cloth and linen, and their wealth was comparable to that of the merchants of Manchester and Salford.Until the mid-18th century, Crompton's textile sector had been closely linked with that of Rochdale and Saddleworth in the north and east; it was a woollen manufacturing district. However, as the demand for cotton goods increased, Crompton mirrored developments in Oldham and Manchester in the south and southwest, importing raw cotton and making cotton cloth. To ensure that the woollen trade was kept buoyant, a law existed from 1675 to 1814 to encourage Shaw and Crompton's wool production. It required that the deceased were to be buried in woollen garments.
In the second half of the 18th century, the technology of cotton-spinning machinery improved, and the need for larger buildings to house bigger, better and more efficient equipment became apparent. The profitability of cotton spinning meant that open land that had been used for farming since antiquity, was utilised for purpose-built weavers' cottages. Larger buildings were still desired, and construction of two water powered cotton factories can be traced to 1782. The construction of more mills followed—ten by 1789—facilitating a process of urbanisation and socioeconomic transformation in the region; the population moved away from farming, adopting employment in the factory system. The introduction of the factory system led to an increase of the township's population; from 872 in 1714 to 3,500 in 1801, mostly as a result of an influx of people from Yorkshire and Lancashire looking for employment in the cotton mills.
Power looms introduced in the early 19th century put an end to the last remnants of the domestic system in Crompton, but not without resistance. Weavers and spinners were paid according to the amount of cloth they produced; independent hand loom weavers saw a drop in their income, and could not compete with the mechanised mass production that was gathering pace in the township. Luddites rioted in the township in 1826, smashing 24 power looms at Clegg's mill at High Crompton in protest against their worsening standard of living.
Crompton's damp climate provided the ideal conditions for cotton spinning to be carried out without the cotton drying and breaking, and newly developed 19th century mechanisation optimised cotton spinning for mass production for the global market. When suitable land in nearby Oldham had become scarce in the 1860s, there was a mill building boom in Shaw and Crompton, giving rise to the area as major mill town. The local townscape became dominated by distinctive rectangular brick-built mills, and its former villages and hamlets agglomerated as a single town around these factories. Shaw and Crompton railway station and a goods yard was opened in 1863, allowing improved transportation of textile goods and raw materials to and from the township. Neighbouring Royton had begun to encroach upon the township's southern boundary, forming a continuous urban cotton-spinning district with Oldham, Lees and Chadderton—the Oldham parliamentary constituency—which was responsible for 13% of the world's cotton production.
The demand for cheap cotton goods from this area prompted the flotation of cotton spinning companies; the investment was followed by the construction of 12 new cotton mills from 1870 and 1900. In the post-war economic boom of 1919–20, investors did not have the time to build new mills and so were prepared to pay vastly inflated sums for shares in existing companies. Many mills were refloated at valuations of up to £500,000, or five times what they had cost to build before the war, resulting in the town being nicknamed "The Golden City" as the scramble for shares intensified. Because of this highly profitable share dealing, it was reported in the national press that Shaw and Crompton had more millionaires per capita than any other town in the world. The number of cotton mills in the township peaked at 36 in 1920.
Supplies of raw cotton from the United States were cut during the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861–1865, leading to the formation of the Crompton Local Board of Health in 1863, whose purpose was to ensure social security and maintain hygiene and sanitation in the locality. The Great Depression, and First and Second World Wars each contributed to periods of economic decline in Shaw and Crompton. Although the industry endured, as imports of cheaper foreign yarns increased during the mid-20th century, Shaw and Crompton's textile sector declined gradually to a halt; said to have over-relied upon the textile sector, cotton spinning reduced in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the early 1980s only four mills were operational. In spite of efforts to increase the efficiency and competitiveness of its production, the final cotton was spun in Shaw and Crompton in 1989, in Lilac and Park mills. Of the 48 cotton mills that have occupied Shaw and Crompton, only three are still standing, all of which are now used as distribution centres.