Lancaster has a long, fascinating history that, if I’m being honest, wasn’t top of mind when I was a teenager living a few miles north of here. Lancaster is actually a city but you would never guess that from walking around its streets. It feels much more like what it truly is, a small northern market town. Back in those youthful days, the big thrill of Lancaster was trying to persuade a university student to sign you into The Sugarhouse, the student union nightclub.
Lancaster has much more history than a town of just over 50,000 people has any right to be associated with. Even the name ‘Sugarhouse’ links to Lancaster’s most troubling historical period. It was the fourth largest English port involved in the Transatlantic slave trade (more of which in a separate post). Lancaster ships transported enslaved African men, women and children to the Caribbean and brought back sugar, amongst other valuable goods.
The Sugarhouse stands on the site of a building that was once used to store and refine sugar shipped to Lancaster from the West Indies: a literal sugarhouse. All of this passed over my 17 year old self but, from memory, the floor of the club was sticky enough to make you believe that they still stored sugar there. I walked past the entrance on my way into town and marvelled at how disappointing it looked in the cold light of day.
To anyone familiar with English history, the name Lancaster will resonate as one of the two competing sides in the War of the Roses. A war between the Houses of Lancaster and York lasting from 1455 to 1485, it was really two strands of the royal bloodline descended from King Edward III competing for who would be the next in line to the English throne.
It was a bloody war, and the conflict seesawed back and forth bétween the two houses. Eventually the Yorkist King Richard III claimed the throne. As any fan of Shakespeare will know, Richard was the last Plantagenet and Yorkist King of England. He was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, allowing the only remaining Lancastrian claimant to the throne, Henry Tudor, to become King Henry VII.
The town’s history goes much further back though. It was founded by the Romans (who else?), who built a fort on a hill overlooking the River Lune in 80AD. The town’s first recorded name was Lancastre in the Domesday book of 1086. It means ‘Roman fort on the River Lune’. An important Roman settlement, Lancaster sank into obscurity after Roman civilisation collapsed in the 5th century.
It remained this way until the Normans arrived and built a castle on the site of the Roman fort. Lancaster Castle is today one of the major sights in the town, and played a critical role in both defending the town from frequent Scottish attacks, and as a stronghold for the Parliamentarian forces in the English Civil War. In its role as a court and prison, it is also a central character in two infamous miscarriages of justice.
Separated by more than three and a half centuries, both the Pendle Witch Trials and the Birmingham Six trial took place in the grounds (and cells) of Lancaster Castle. I’ve written about the Pendle Witches before, but let’s just say that for a group of poor women from Lancashire, justice was not served at their so-called trial in 1612. The same can be said of the Birmingham Six.
A group of six Irishmen, that a British judge ruled ‘were in the wrong place at the wrong time’ when he released them in 1991 after 17 years in prison. Wrongly arrested and convicted for the murders of 21 people in two pub bombings in Birmingham in 1974 at the height of the conflict in Northern Ireland, they were tried and convicted at Lancaster Castle in 1975.
I spent a few days working in Lancaster and had the opportunity to mooch around and re-acquaint myself with it. It’s a pleasant town, although a little down at heel in places. The area around the castle, including the 14th and 15th century Priory Church, is lovely: filled with old houses on cobbled streets, and with views across the town to the Aston Memorial, a neo-Baroque folly in leafy Williamson Park.
The walk along the Lancaster Canal, known as the Black and White Canal because it was used to ship coal and limestone in the 18th and 19th centuries, is pleasant. Whether the now defunct port or the canal, the town is closely linked to water. No visit is complete without a trip to the Merchants pub dating from 1688, and the maritime connected Three Mariners, the town’s oldest pub dating to the 15th century. Both serve local beer.
While the history is intriguing to me as someone who was not familiar with the War of the Roses, what’s also intriguing is the weather when you were there. The glorious blue skies are definitely not what I associate England with, and the grayness I had during my trip to London in the summer of 2007 only further affirmed that.
To be truthful, out of four days in Lancaster only one was sunny. The rest of the time it rained or was grey and dull. Maybe it gives a false impression!