著者

近藤 和彦

出版者

公益財団法人 史学会

雑誌

史学雑誌 (ISSN:00182478)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.97, no.3, pp.321-357,423-42, 1988

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Manchester in the eighteenth century has been associated with the coming of the industrial revolution. Certainly it would become one of the leading centres of the capitalist world economy in the nineteenth century, but it was still 'one of the greatest mere villages in England', famous for its textile trade, with a population of some twenty thousand, in the age of Defoe and Walpole. More significantly for the purpose of this paper the parish of Manchester was in the diocese of Chester, a part of the country notorious for party strife and as 'disaffected'. The collegiate parish church was a stronghold of high church clergymen, while the parish contained a sizeable cluster of dissenters (mainly presbyterians) which amounted to 422 families out of 3201, i.e. more than 13% of the whole and more than twice the national average of 6.2%. My analysis in this paper is focused first on the clerical quarrels within the collegiate church of Manchester from 1718 to 1728. Samuel Peploe (1668-1752), who had proved his spirit against the Jacobites in 1715 as vicar of Preston, was promoted by the whig government warden of Manchester in 1718 (and then bishop of Chester in 1726). He would have to face hard years in dealing with the high churchmen and non-jurors in the church and the parish. Secondly the workhouse project and the opposition in the town are analysed from 1729 to 1731. John Byrom (1692-1763), a high churchman of letters and stenographer, was one of the most active opponents of the scheme. His correspondence, diaries and poems, together with parliamentary and other sources, reveal a good deal of the hitherto hidden social alignments of the Mancunians and clarify other often misrepresented circumstances. Factious rivalry infected the town, and such public projects as an incorporated workhouse were doomed to failure by the opposition of high churchmen (tories), who feared that the alliance of low churchmen and dissenters (whigs) might dominate not only the incorporated trust, but also the administration and finance of the town. The intended bill for the workhouse became an issue of party politics in Parliament, and was defeated in April 1731 by an alliance of tories and whig opposition members. Byrom's return to Manchester on 10 June (the Pretender's birthday) was welcomed at the collegiate church, where Peploe remained beset as warden. The sources I rest upon are both local and central, unpublished and published, v. notes. I have edited the most relevant documents relating to the workhouse issue in the Bulletin of the Faculty of Letters, Nagoya University, vol.33 (1987). The article containing the selected documents is abbreviated as WH, and referred to on page 45 (note 4).