Mirfield in History

In the dim and distant past Mirfield must have been covered by dense forests. These forests were compacted over many thousands of years and were converted to coal which gave rise to the mining industry that flourished in and around Mirfield through the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries.

A written record of the existence of Mirfield appears in the Doomsday Book of 1086, which was a complete survey of the whole country ordered by William the Conqueror after his successful invasion of England in 1066. The word MIRFIELD is thought to mean a clearing near a swamp or mire. This had been incorporated into the Mirfield Coat of Arms in the motto - 'Fruges ecce paludis' - which translates to - 'Behold the fruits of the marsh'. However in Pobjoy's 'A History or Mirfield', he puts forward an alternative theory in that the prefix is from the Old English 'maer', meaning merry or pleasant. Choose which explanation you like.

Following the Norman Conquest, Mirfield and Hopton were among 214 manors, mainly in Yorkshire, that were given to Ilbert de Lacy who had been responsible for much devastation in the subjugation of those who resisted William's occupation. Ilbert is thought to have fortified his manor at Mirfield with a motte and bailey, using the mound and moat already in existence from earlier fortifications. This mound still stands beside the Parish church.

Mirfield Parish Church

The Early Church

The 1826 Church

Parish Church 1960

St. Mary's &
The Old Tower

The Mirfield Stone

The History of Mirfield

It has often been conceded by antiquaries that Mirfield boasts a local history more interesting than that of most towns of its size in the West Riding. Certainly, from its first appearance in the early written record of organised life in these islands, as an entry in the Domesday Book ("Mirefelt: Six carucates of land, each as much as two oxen can plough in a year"), it has caught quite a few of the facets of the English tale through the ages.

Until 1261, Mirfield had no parish church - only a chapelry because in Saxon days Dewsbury was the centre of the far-flung parish of no less than 400 square miles. Then a dispensation was granted and the first church was built in Mirfield. Its tower still stands beside the present fine parish church, designed by Sir Gilbert Scott himself, made and consecrated in 1871. It cost £22,000. Sir Gilbert made suggestions for the preservation of the tower of the old church after the nave and chancel had been pulled down, providing, incidentally, part of the stone from which the former Eastthorpe School, now Eastthorpe Visual Arts, was built.

The 14th century found Mirfield a flourishing centre of the woollen industry and already a place of some agricultural and industrial importance. In 1378, the Poll Tax in Mirfield was 59 shillings, which, it need hardly be stressed, represented a sum out of all proportion to today's money values! Huddersfield produced 19 shillings and fourpence and Halifax 12 shillings and eightpence. Many important families settled in Mirfield, the Hoptons, Saviles, Thornhills and Beaumonts among them, and the remains of some of the fine halls they built may still be seen. At Battyeford, near Warren House, were the butts where local men mastered the art of the longbow. During the Middle Ages, and later when the Civil War swept the country, the district seems to have raised its quota when military needs had to be met. One of the few relics of defence surviving in the district appears to be the mound near St. Mary's Parish church graveyard. Pontefract, a mediaeval historian, describes it as "a moat and baily castle made by Ilbert de Lacey (who owned Hopton Hall) as a minor stronghold to support his possession of manors, "The church was built in the courtyard of the castle."

In January 1642, the Civil War came near to the locality when Sir Thomas Fairfax wrote to the Constable of Mirfield ordering "all that be of able bodyes from the age of 16 to 60 to repair to Almondbury on Saturday with all weapons they can procure and provisions for five days" to assist "in driving out the Papist army," The Constable was warned "to fail not at your peril". The Pretender Charles threw his shadow across the neighbourhood, too, with more spectacular results. When he and his army were marching to Derby in 1745, he produced something like mass-panic in Mirfield. Fearful that the Scots were going to sack the town, men and women hurried with personal belongings and food which they hid in local coal workings.

The Rev. Joseph Ismay, Vicar of Mirfield from 1735 to 1778, who kept a most informative diary, or journal, recorded that "on the Sunday, few women attended the service for want of apparel". To Ismay, indeed, we own much for a picture of Mirfield as it apeared two centuries ago. He reminds us, for instance, that in 1755, with a population of 2,175, the district had 100 pairs of looms for weaving broadcloth, worked by 200 people, with 400 others engaged in carding, spinning, and other kindred occupations - many of these doubtless the ancestors of the people who today are engaged in the town's woollen industry. There were 40 pairs of looms in Hopton, where, says Ismay, "the men and boys employed themselves in the Christmas holidays in hunting the squirrel which gives them violent exercise in the woods and affords them excellent diversion".

The River Calder yielded, in Ismay's time, "salmon, trout, smelts, graylings, dace, perch, eels, chub, parbles, and gudgeon, and about it are found wild duck, widgeon, tea, coots and several sorts of water hens, especially in great frosts". There was a great frost too, in 1772 when the diary relates: "The country was seized with so great a freezing that people did skate on the Calder all its length from Mirfield to Brigg House and carts and horses did pass freely across without danger thereto." London had its Great Plague in 1665, but a similar scourge had taken a deadly toll in Mirfield 34 years earlier. Workmen digging for foundations for a new house at Snake Hill uncovered a pit almost filled with human bones - without doubt those of some 130 men, women and children who died when a pestilence struck the town in 1631. A woman was thought to have brought the infection from the south of England and records tell us, "pits were dug at Littlemoor and Eastthorpe Lane wherein were interred a vast numbers of bodies. Some were put to rest in the churchyard, but many did bury their dead near their houses". A stone memorial, formerly in the old church and now preserved in the Parish church, records the plague with which, it declares "it pleased God to correct ye Parish of Mirfield".

That the Mirfield people, like the rest of the human kind, were deemed in the old days to stand in need of correction from time to time, is shown by the fact that, until last century, the town stocks were in use near the Parish Church - the stone uprights today support a wooden seat. Nearby, across the road from the well preserved half-timbered Old Rectory, was the ducking stool which, in Ismay's day "at uncertain and necessarily irregular intervals is used for the correction of scalds, viragoes and similar unquiet women, likewise bakers of sour bread, to the delectations of persons watching the punishment". A 1657 entry in the Quarter Sessions record recalls that two men were convicted "of drinking and tippleing upon the Sabbath at ye house of an alehousekeeper for which offences they have forfeit 10 pence or else to sitt in ye stocks six hours". We have the testimony of no less a reliable authority than John Wesley to the fact that Mirfield had its share of tough customers 200 years ago. He visited the locality five times between 1742 and 1784, often staying with his great friend Benjamin Ingham, of Blake Hall. After one such visit to Huddersfield and District, this entry appears in the Wesley diary: "A wilder people I never saw in England... they were, however, tolerably quiet while we preached and only a few pieces of dirt were thrown."

Nevertheless, John contrived to open Mirfield's first Methodist Church at Knowl in 1780. And that there were other God-fearing folk in the area then is graphically proved by the fact that Tamar Lee, wife of an ardent Hopton Congregationalist, rode the thief-infested roads to London on horseback in 1732 with an appeal for funds for the building of her denomination's first church. She returned with £52 8s 6d. In 1816, too, the first Baptist meetings were held in Mirfield, in the old Tythe Barn in Towngate, and the first Baptist Church was opened in 1830. The Moravians built their first church in the town in 1751. Christ Church was consecrated in 1839, (destroyed by fire in 1971), St. John's (Hopton) in 1846, St. Peter's (Knowl) in 1874, and St. Paul's Eastthorpe) in 1881. While today, Mirfield is known throughout the Anglican world as the home of the Community of the Resurrection, with its neighbouring training college. Those two illustrious co-founders of the Community, Bishop Gore and Bishop Frere, have their last resting places in the Community precincts at Mirfield.

Educationally, Mirfield comes into the picture in 1667 when Richard Thorpe, a local parson of independent means, endowed a free school "for teaching fifteen poor children of the inhabitants of the parish till they can read English well". This foundation later became Mirfield Grammar School (now The Mirfield Free Grammar). A baker's boy at Wellhouse Moravian Board School towards the end of the 18th century, was passionately fond of poetry. His name was James Montgomery. With 3s 6d in his pocket he ran away to Wath in South Yorkshire, later settling down in Sheffield after a sojourn in London. He became one of our greatest hymn-writers, his works including Hail to the Lord's Anointed, Angels from the Realms of Glory and Prayer is the Soul's Sincere Desire. Years later, a student from the same school became Prime Minister - the first Earl of Oxford and Asquith.

Roe Head, once a school for refined young ladies, a former training college and now home to Holly Bank School for youngsters with physical and learning difficulties, had strong connections with the Brontes. In 1831 Charlotte Bronte of Haworth arrived and later became a teacher there, her sisters Emily and Anne were among pupils there. Anne was later employed as a governess at Blake Hall by the Ingham family. Background and "atmosphere" gained during their stay in Mirfield found their way, very naturally into a number of the three sisters' famous writings.

Mirfield not only shared in the benefits of the Industrial Revolution but also in the disorders which its early stages brought, at a time when local textile workers feared that the new power looms must inevitably mean unemployment and misery for themselves and their families. There seems little doubt that Mirfield men were among the Luddites who gathered near the Three Nuns Inn, not far from Robin Hood's reputed burial place in Kirklees Park, one night in 1812. They marched across the fields and attacked Rawfolds Mill in Cleckheaton where the new looms had been installed. The military had been warned, the raid failed and numbers of Luddites were hanged at York. Inevitably, however, the machine age developed - and so did Mirfield, not only industrially, but also as a communications centre. It had been served by the canal since 1766 and the railway which reached the town in 1848 eventually brought additional employment as well as advancing commercial prosperity.