Religious Changes in Cheshire, 1750–1850

Abstract

The county of Chester between 1750 and 1850 affords an interesting field of study into the impact on religion of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent great, mainly urban, population growth. In the east where the Cheshire plain swells to low foothills, which in turn give way to the gaunt moorlands and windswept heights of the Pennines, in the early stages of the Revolution factory villages were established in places where streams provided water power; in the lower part of the curious salient of the county which sunders Lancashire from Derbyshire by thrusting up to Holme Moss, cotton mills, print works, and collieries sprang up as the basis of a fairly dense population in what had hitherto been a district of small importance. By 1800 Stockport with its power spinning and hand weaving of cotton, its bleaching, printing, and hatting industries, had surpassed the ancient city of Chester in population. Ten miles to the south lay Macclesfield in which the older manufacture of silk buttons had been largely eclipsed by silk throwing and weaving. In a maturer phase of the Revolution, from about 1820, for the first time the western part of the county became involved. The expanding population of Liverpool crossed the Mersey in the recently introduced steam ferries to occupy the opposite shore at Birkenhead. Until that time the Wirral peninsular (of which Birkenhead is a part) had remained remote and undeveloped and notably conservative in religion. In 1850 the rest of the county, interspersed with quiet country towns such as Northwich, Knutsford and Congleton, was still overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. Thus, Cheshire affords within itself a contrasting variety of rural life and of earlier and later industrialism.