Description
Leigh Borough Council, [No date: circa 1958]. Hardcover, 360 pp.; 22 cm; illustrated with 17 leaves of black-and-white plates, including township maps, portraits and document facsimiles.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Good condition, no dust jacket. Green cloth boards with gilt lettering on spine. Mild shelf wear with a partial ring stain on front cover and some soiling to front and rear covers. Bumping to top corners of both covers and to top edge of front cover. Some color loss along edges. Binding tight. Tape residue on front and rear pastedowns. Pages mildly toned with occasional light spotting. Otherwise unmarked.The first history of Leigh ever attempted on a major scale, commissioned by the Borough Council and written by Dr. John Lunn (1902-1973), an Astley coal miner's son who took a Cambridge doctorate and spent his life documenting the townships west of Manchester. Compiled almost entirely from manuscript sources: some 40,000 separate deeds and papers, gathered from the Public Record Office, Somerset House, the cathedral registries of Lichfield, York, Chester and Manchester, Chetham's and the Rylands, and from private hands as far afield as the Low Countries and California. Its foundation is the T. R. Dootson Collection of transcribed local documents, presented to Leigh Corporation in 1952; the originals of many had already perished by then, so Lunn's text preserves their substance in print where the documents themselves no longer survive. Covers Pennington, Westleigh and Bedford to 1875, when the Leigh Local Board extinguished the three sister townships, and Leigh from that year forward. Illustrations include Justice Ireland's 1632 warrant to the constables of Pennington, a 1785 broadsheet distributed in Leigh against Richard Arkwright, and the title page of Richard Crompton's "Mansion of Magnanimitie" (1599), dedicated to the Earl of Essex.Contents: Pennington; Westleigh; Bedford; Leigh; Appendices.