Textiles and Reform: Halifax and its Hinterland

Abstract

That there was a correlation between textile areas and the progress of the Reformation has become a commonplace of the literature, and studies of later dissent in East Anglia and Gloucestershire have demonstrated the continuing link between radical ideas and the cloth industry, sometimes reaching as far back as Lollardy. It is, however, one thing to establish a correlation and quite another to describe a relationship, especially one which has been characterised by Professor Everitt as ‘something of a mystery’. One approach, and that most suited to the surviving sources, is to examine an established dissenting neighbourhood of the seventeenth century and to attempt to trace the origins of that tradition in the earlier history of the Reformation, and this provides the main historiographical focus of this chapter. The geographical focus will be the town of Halifax in the West Riding of Yorkshire, an area of the country with only a modest tradition of pre-Reformation radicalism.³