ABSTRACT
The period from 1660 onwards saw the expansion of the market town. Professor Everett in his study of the market town says that ‘each played a vital role in the lives of several thousand husbandmen and labourers’. By contrast, the Lancashire hundreds of West Derby and Salford were densely populated and contained the large towns of Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale and Wigan. Coal was being exploited and many men were operating a coal mine alongside agriculture. The borderland between Yorkshire and Lancashire was an area of wild, uncultivated moorland country, supporting a thinly spread population. Few farms exceeded 600 acres and many were less than 200, with an average acreage per farm of 20–50. Investigating contested wills has allowed an intimate knowledge of the attitudes, preoccupations and way of life of people from the middle to the bottom of the social scale.
