*See also grant of £13-18-8d made to Eliz. Gelles widow of Robert Gelles mayor of Pontefract for his support of the Earl of Surrey "pro subuction rebellium Regis I am torde rebellenum erga eundem"


The compotus of 1483 makes a brief mention of Roger Hopton, whose gravestone is now on the north wall of the church. He paid 10 shillings rent for his pasture land and 8d for fowling rights. The inscription reads 'orate pro animabus Rogeri Hoptonis, militis et Annoe uxoris suoe, qui obierunt Anno Domini 1506' pray for the souls of Roger Hopton, soldier, and of Anne his wife who died AD 1506.

The suppression of the monasteries and the seizure by Henry VIII of the church lands caused widespread dismay in the north. The ideas of the Reformation were much slower to take root in this part of England, remote as it was from London and the south, and the monks had for the most part been kindly and easy-going landlords. The rebellion against this policy was headed by one Robert Aske. Styling itself the Pilgrimage of Grace, the rebel forces marched through Ackworth and captured Pontefract Castle in 1536. They were defeated by the Royal Army sent against them by King Henry and the leaders hanged, notably Nicholas Tempest of Ackworth. The turn of the Priory of St. Oswald at Nostell came in 1540. It was surrendered to the King's Commissioners and subsequently bought by Sir Rowland Winn. The last prior, Robert Ferrar afterwards became bishop of St. David's, and was burned at the stake at Carmarthen during Queen Mary Tudor's persecution of the protestants in 1555. The same Mary Tudor presented the last Roman Catholic rector to the living of Ackworth in 1554. Thomas Hartyndon must have quickly adjusted himself to the new spirit of the age or else his congregation were slow to accept change, for Thomas continued as rector for 20 years into the reign of protestant Queen Elizabeth, until his death in 1578.

In 1629 Charles I whose quarrels with parliament kept him permanently short of money, mortgaged the manor of Ackworth to a group of London merchants, the advowson of the church being however retained by the Duchy of Lancaster. It was about this time, 1628, that Thomas Bradley D.D. became chaplain to his majesty at the age of 32. Three years later he married Frances, daughter of Sir John Saville, Baron Saville of Pontefract and was presented to the living of Ackworth in 1643, some months after the outbreak of the English Civil War.

This part of Yorkshire was strongly royalist. Four divisions of volunteers commanded by Colonel Richard Lowther were raised from Pontefract and the surrounding villages to garrison the castle. In Sir George Wentworth's division we find the name of the Rev Thos Bradley, parson of Ackworth. The war however soon went badly for the King. After the Royalist defeat at Marston Moor and the fall of York in 1644, Pontefract Castle withstood three successive sieges. In the third and final one in the last phase of the war, Cromwell set up his headquarters at Knottingley, while General Lambert bombarded the castle from Baghill.

As if this was not bad enough, there was another outbreak of the bubonic plague at Ackworth in 1645 in which 153 people died. The plague stone on Castle Syke Hill dates from this period. Tradition has it that the bodies were buried in the 'Burial Field' at the top of the large field crossed by the footpath from Ackworth to Hundhill. This place had been the scene of a sharp action between Roundhead and Royalist forces in the same year and had presumably already been used for mass burials. The Puritans were now in power and Thomas Bradley, along with 8,000 other Church of England clergy was turned out of his home and living. 'A more grinding and intolerable tyranny than that of the Puritans was never set up.'

Ackworth was occupied by Roundhead soldiers under Sir H Choimley in 1645 when they did some damage to the church - 'the antient front being destroyed and broken down ' and one Anthony Birkbeck ' a stiff rumped Presbyterian' being instituted to the living. Thomas was restored to his rectory after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, and as the inscription ("Thos Bradley Rectore") records, the font was rebuilt in 1663. Thomas Bradley continued as Rector until 1672. This is not clear from the church panel listing the rectors of Ackworth, where it would appear that the 'stiff rumped Presbyterian' remained in office until the appointment of Jeremiah Bolton in 1673.

The original Bradley Alms Houses date from this period as does the Masons Arms, the second oldest building in the village. The letters I, A. 1652 over the front door are thought to stand for John Askew who opened the first stone quarry in the parish. I and J are often interchangeable letters in old inscriptions. Green however states that stone was being quarried in Ackworth as early as 1611.

The oldest building in the village is the Old Hall, 1641. The 18th century ushered in a more peaceful time for the village. Robert Lowther whose family had played a prominent part in the life or the village for a hundred years died unmarried in

1720. The Ackworth branch of the Lowthers was continued only by his brother Ralph and died out altogether in the mole line in the next generation. It fell to Mistress Mary Lowther to create a lasting memorial to the family when on 20th November 1741 she signed the trust deed establishing the Alms Houses, which still exist and bear her name.

THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL

The Foundling Hospital at Ackworth was a branch of the London Foundling Hospital founded by Capt. Thomas Coram as early as 1741. The infant foundlings were sent to be reared by the cottages at Ackworth, notably at Seaton's Farm. The connection between a fashionable London Charity and Ackworth is somewhat mysterious. Sir Rowland Wynn of Nostell certainly interested himself in the project, and became the first Governor of the Ackworth branch when building began in 1757, but the reception of London foundlings can be traced back to a certain Rev. Thomas Trant, Headmaster of Archbishop Holgate's School, Hemsworth. In the committee minutes of 18th February 1741, Mr. Taylor White was asked to write to the Rev. Trant to ask if he could provide nurses in his neighbourhood for 10 to 12 children at 8/- a month. On 21st March, Taylor White was desired to pay the Rev. Trant £10 on account for the charges for 7 nurses sent from Doncaster to London'. When the Rev. Trant died in 1759, Dr Lee, who had become Rector of Ackworth in 1744, took his two apprentices for household services. What induced the Rev. Trant to take foundling children from London as early as 1740 is not known?

When the decision to erect a branch Hospital or Orphanage at Ackworth was finally taken in 1746, Sir Rowland, despite his influence in the district, had difficulty enough in finding colleagues, for as he later wrote in 1757 when building began 'The country gentlemen in these parts do not like to give themselves much trouble.'

Jonathan Seaton's farm with 58 acres of land was bought for £2050. The total cost of the land, buildings and equipment was £20,807. The lamb with the sprig of thyme in its mouth surmounting the East Wing Cupola was designed by the painter Hogarth, one of the governors of the London Foundling Hospital. This device features on the programme cover of an early London performance of 'Messiah'. The composer Handel, also a life-long governor and benefactor, donated the whole of the proceeds of this gala performance to the Foundling Hospital.

Saywell states that the Ackworth Branch, which was the first to be founded and the last to close, was shut down 'after a comparatively useless existence of 12 years'. He blames high mortality among the children and the difficulty of finding suitable and humane masters to which the children could be apprenticed. There were certainly cases recorded of barbarous cruelty and callous neglect, towards some children who were apprenticed some distance away, but of the 2664 children who passed through the institution in those years, 160 died, that is a death rate of about 6% and certainly no more than the national average for those days. It is probably true to say that only the healthiest infants would be sent on the long and arduous journey to Yorkshire, especially in winter, and only the hardiest could expect to survive it. In a small inward-looking village community, there may have been a tradition to hostility to an Institution which brought in outsiders to fill the few local labour vacancies that might otherwise have been taken up by Ackworth children.

As to the usefulness of the Foundation, it is recorded that in the last year of its activity, the Ackworth branch produced cloth to the value of £500. It was good cloth too, as the following interesting announcement suggests -"Turk's Head Tavern, 1760. We whose names are hereunto subscribed do agree to appear next 5th November at the Artists Feast at the Foundling Hospital in a suit of clothes manufactured by the children of the Hospital at Ackworth in Yorkshire."

The reason for the with-holding of the parliamentary grant was that due to a change in the admission rules, the London branch was literally being swamped by applicants and by 1773 could no longer afford to maintain the county branches. The statistics for Ackworth were - 2365 apprenticed, 11 returned to parents, 10 left, having come of age, 169 died, 109 returned to London. Total 2664.

THE QUAKER SCHOOL

The splendid Georgian buildings lay empty and desolate for six years. It is said that a fox raised a litter of cubs in one of the West Wing rooms. In 1777 John Fothergill, a famous London Quaker physician, bought the buildings for £7,000 to set up a school "for Friends not in affluence". The school was opened in the 18th October 1779, a day still commemorated by the pupils as Founders Day. The first Head was John Hill and the first two pupils were Barton and Ann Gates from Dorset - their journey took 3 days. There were 49 pupils by the end of the year, 300 by 1780 (180 boys and 120 girls). Two hundred and ten years later there were pupils from all parts of the British Isles and over 50 foreign pupils. There are at present Ackworth Old Scholars living in 23 foreign countries.

With the turn of the century, England, and particularly the north of England, stood at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. With the invention of steam engines to pump out the mines and drive the machinery in factory and mill, and most important the steam trains which could move people and goods swiftly and cheaply over long distances, the old rural mould of existence that had lasted for almost a thousand years was broken for ever. As is inevitable men's thought patterns did not always keep pace with rapidly changing social conditions. This was certainly the case with the last Rector of Ackworth to play a part on the national stage. The Rev. William Hay was for 20 years chairman of the Manchester and Salford Magistrates. A son of the Governor of Barbados, aristocratically connected and married to a wealthy wife, he could hardly be expected to have much in common with the teeming politically excluded world of the workshop and the loom, the coal seam and the shovel which fell within his jurisdiction in industrial Lancashire. He had the confidence of the then Home Secretary and a reputation of being always ready for trouble and quick to prevent it. The trouble came in August 1819 when some 50,000 industrial workers demanded reform and marched with drums beating and banners unfurled into what was then St Peter's Fields, Manchester. It was what would now be called a 'demo'. To the horrified eyes of the Manchester magistrates it looked like a replay of the French Revolution, which had taken place only 20 years before, and whose horrors were still very much in the minds of the English propertied classes. There was of course no regular police force to keep order, only the regular army and a half-trained volunteer yeomanry, who were accordingly sent galloping in to disperse the crowd and arrest the speaker. In the ensuing carnage, 11 people were killed and some four or five hundred injured. The Peterloo Massacre, as it was dubbed by the radical press, caused an immense uproar. It was played down by the government who in the words of the Rev. Saywell some 70 years later thought that 'Manchester owed much to the firmness and admirable coolness and decision of Mr Hay' who in the event decided to accept the livings of Rochdale and Ackworth. He soon retired to the latter place to live out his days in peace and quiet. He was Rector from 1820 to 1639 and is buried on the northwest side of the churchyard.

The gulf that separated parson from people in rural communities is clearly demonstrated when we find that whereas the Ackworth incumbents would occasionally write the marriage banns in scholarly Latin, a survey conducted by the Briti8h and Foreign Bible Society in 1813 found that of 430 Ackworth inhabitants questioned, 200 were unable to read English.

The population, however, was beginning to rise. At the time of the Duke of Gloucester's visit to 'Mrs Bland of Houndhill Hall' in 1823 (she was the mother of T D Bland Esq, for whose child he was to stand sponsor) there were 1,575 people living in Ackworth. Eighteen years later, the figure stood at 1828.

The old ways were beginning to die out before the onrush of the new England, but for some time the old jostled uneasily with the new. An attempt at bull-baiting in High Ackworth in 1832 was stopped by Rachel Howard, and the nonconformist conscience. John Wesley had never spoken at Ackworth but he had been busy out at Leeds and Wakefield some 50 years before.


The eminent scientist Luke Howard and the famous John Bright MP celebrated the passing of the Slavery Emancipation Bill in the Meeting House of Ackworth Schoo1 in 1834, but 30 years later people were still being put in the village stocks - the last time was 1863.

Gas light was introduced into Ackworth School in 1837, but the amenity was still being voted down in the village in 1886. Nonetheless, the development to coal-mining and quarrying together with the vastly improved means of transport and the ever-increasing population, was slowly but surely merging Ackworth, along with many other previously self-sufficient little villages, into the life of the region as a whole. The process was enormously speeded up with the invention of the internal combustion engine at the turn of the century.

Ackworth has as yet, however, been spared the final indignity that has overtaken so many pleasant villages - a total loss of identity as a suburb of a neighbouring large town -though that fate may yet lie ahead.