PRESTON'S HISTORY

History of Preston:

Historical Preston, as long ago as the Bronze Age, some one to two thousand years before Christ, scattered groups had settlements along the banks of the river Ribble in the neighbour hood of Preston.

A new chapter in local history opened when advancing Roman legions reached the Ribble at Walton-le-Dale about 150 AD. There they set up a military supplies depot and constructed a main route to the north cross and a ford in the river, and onward over the land now occupied by Moor Park. Strangely, they did not set up any settlement on the strategic hill now occupied by the town centre of Preston.

Preston was born and apparently gained its name in the Dark Ages, some time after the withdrawal of the Romans in the early 5th century. Its' name is said to come from the town being owned by monks hence the name "Priest Town".

Following the battle of Hastings Preston had a period of troubled times until the 13th century, during this time the town probably gained most if not all its' privileges. Whenever Preston gained its Guild Merchant and associated privileges, it certainly transformed the town economically. Its freeman were exempt from taxes, and above all its Town Council had control of who could trade within its boundaries. To be named on the Guild Roll was almost a licence to print money. In 1343 Preston was recorded as being richer than any other city or town in Lancashire, and in those days that included Manchester and Liverpool.

In 1322 the Scots army of Robert the Bruce set fire to the town. Later the town was a major battlefield in the Civil War as Royalist and Parliamentarian forces struggled for supremacy around the town.

1768 saw Richard Arkwright perfect the first practicable powered spinning machine and put Preston at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. In 1777 the first cotton mill in the town was erected. By 1857 there were seventy-five cotton spinning and manufacturing establishments and ranks of workers' terraced housing, spread over vast tracts of land. This brought the ills of dreadful living conditions and diseases which combined to bring about the highest infant mortality rate in the kingdom.

In the mid-nineteenth century Preston experienced a succession of traumatic events, beginning with the cotton depression and the shooting of five strikers in Lune St. in 1842. With these conditions came social unrest culminating in the "Great lock out" of 1853 and 1854 when a third of the population of the town were made idle in what was described at the time as "a ruinous conflict now waging between labour and capital" because workers demanding pay increases were locked out of the mills by the masters, this became internationally famed - Marx thought that revolution might start here and said that "our St. Petersburg is at Preston".

The calm of the last half of the 19th century a new gothic town hall was built followed in the 1880's of the Harris Free library, Museum and Art Gallery. The Miller Arcade (shopping arcade) was started in 1896 and five years later the Sessions House (court house). Other projects of the were the Central Post Office and the Albert Edward Dock that linked up with the railway system which was without equal in the country.

This century has seen the decline and disappearance of the great cotton empires and the closure of the dock. But this was only a phase in the history of the town. The present age as witnessed the rise of a new prosperous Preston.