TAYLOR. (extected from the main text)

Some two hundred years ago, Edward Taylor married a girl called Hester. They were my great, great, great, great grandparents, presumably born around 1769, the year James Watt's patented the steam engine. The days of England's predominately agricultural economy were numbered. The Industrial Revolutions was on its way. The appalling poverty and degradation into which the working class of rural Lancashire would be plunged didn't become apparent until the publication of the Children's Employment Commission of 1842. The record says that their wedding took place in Winstanley but where in Winstanley I cannot imagine. Their dates of birth and Hester's maiden name are unknown to me at present, perhaps they always will be. Records only go back so far and then become hazy. The parents of this couple may well have witnessed Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender, march by their homes at the head of the last Jacobite army in December 1745. They may even have been sympathetic, after all they were Catholic at a time when there weren't many Catholics in the area. Years of religious persecution had seen to that. In 1717 only ten out of one hundred and ninety-eight families in Billinge were listed as being Papist. Unfortunately for Catholic supporters, the Highlanders grew afraid in unfamiliar flat terrain as they ran out of hills in the Midlands. With the English armies overseas and London there for the taking, they turned back to face ultimate disaster at Culloden in 1746. England remained Protestant. In the backlash of that near catastrophe, Catholic persecution intensified domestically and terror was unleashed against the Scottish Highlanders. It may have been some small consolation that Protestant England had to finally concede to Pope Gregory's reformed calendar of 1558 by dropping the eleven days from September 3 -13 in 1752. Catholic emancipation would not happen until 1829.

Edward and Hester Taylor's children included William, born 14th December, in the dreadful winter of 1794, as England's troops fled across the frozen wastes of Holland before the ravaging Jacobin army of France, spawned by the Revolution, at the outbreak of what would evolve into the Napoleonic Wars. The following month, one third of the expiditionary force of 18,000 would perish, in four days, as the retreat disintergarated into chaos. Edward was the eldest of that large family, the other children being James, John, Margaret, Thomas, Henry, Joseph and Peter, the youngest, born 28th October 1811, a year in which Luddite disturbances were recorded in Yorkshire - the effects of the Industrial Revolution were not pleasing everyone.

There was no official Catholic Church at Birchley until 1828 so William, my great, great , great grandfather, was not married at St. Mary's. I can't find a record of the marriage at St. Aidan's either. Maybe he got married at Birchley Hall. There had been a clandestine chapel there since 1618. The events centred on the Catholic Anderton family's occupation of Birchley Hall, from its purchase by Christopher Anderton in 1558 to the death of Sir Francis Anderton in 1770, are probably the most historically significant occurrences in Billinge history. That recorded history goes back to the Angles settling the area around 550 AD. The Celts would have been there before the Angles but they left no trace. The Roman Road, running north to Hadrian's Wall, ran through Warrington, Wigan and Preston. There was also a Roman Road from Manchester to Wigan. The Romans mined some iron ore and coal at Orrell but they probably left Billinge alone. Who knows what went on in Billinge before the Romans came? Wherever and whenever the marriage took place, William Taylor married Joan Fairhurst some time around 1820. The village must still have been reeling from news of the nearby Peterloo Massacre and George IV had just ascended to the throne. Their second child, Esther, born 28th May 1822, was my great, great grandmother .