Andy Denwood has edited a new illustrated version of a local history book written in the 1700s

NOT many parts of England are lucky enough to have a local history book written in the 1700s.

But the ancient parish of Warton — which used to include Carnforth and Silverdale — is one of them.

For more than 30 years, starting in 1710, schoolmaster John Lucas sat down after work to compile the book that became ‘A History of Warton Parish’. It covers everything from peat-digging and salt-making to the use of gunpowder in farming - not to mention funerals and harvests, fishing and fairies, meteors, school-days and football.

John Lucas was the son of a farmer from Carnforth and went to the grammar school in neighbouring Warton.

Parts of his book list the family trees of the posher families in the area, like the Midletons of Leighton Hall and the Bindlosses at Borwick.

But the best bits of the history tell us how the majority of local people lived, worked and played 300 years ago – like the behaviour of local boys at weddings in the parish. “The school boys.” writes Lucas, “make fast the church doors and demand a piece of money of the bridegroom and if he refuses they presently seize one of the bride’s shoes, which I have seen done.”

He tells us about harvest time when “each village commonly hires a fiddler which…goes from one field to another, and plays to the reapers.”

The book includes a very early description of an annual football match involving the boys at Warton school, where “the parties engage each other…with their utmost strength and courage” while parents and villagers assemble to watch.

Lucas also tells us a lot about the parish church of St Oswald’s. After funerals, he says, “there is distributed to everyone a penny wheaten loaf and a large shive of cheese and also a drink of ale”. When times were hard, says Lucas, there was no cheese.

As a writer he is especially good at describing people’s working lives: digging peat on the mosses, fishing on Morecambe Bay and making salt on the sands.

He explains how farmers used gunpowder to remove rocks from their fields. And his account of the new iron works at Leighton Beck— between Yealand and Silverdale — is particularly detailed.

“Behind the Furnace are placed two huge Pair of Bellows, each seven and a half Yards long, and one and a half broad,” he tells us. The iron works made everything from chimney backs and garden rollers to pots and pans for the kitchen.

This new industry was developing as teams of oxen were still ploughing the open field system in Carnforth and while young men still practised archery on Warton Crag. And that’s the great value of ‘A History of Warton Parish’ - John Lucas has left us a series of unique insights into a lost time and place, the story of a remote north country parish poised between the medieval and the modern periods.

l The new illustrated hardback edition of ‘A History of Warton Parish’ by John Lucas, is edited by Andy Denwood and is available, price £15, from local bookshops or online at www.andydenwood.com