ARTICLE - Moorland Methodism

My surname is Lumb, its a name with ancient origins. Probably first appearing historically in early medieval times. Though I imagine it could well go further back, before names were even set into their formulaic conjunctions. Surnames as we now  know them slowly established how they would be formed, around Anglo Saxon times. Based on parentage, an individual's skill, place of habitation, or the quality of landscape, these were intended as the primary building blocks of an individuals public identity. You came to be known through a group of associations, that told others something about you and your personal and ancestral origins. It's initial fluidity as an individual designation, gradually assumed a stabler structure carried down through the generations as the title for a specific family.

Lumb Bank

Lumb is a name not found much outside of the Pennine region between Lancashire and Yorkshire. There is even a village named Lumb on the borderlands of these two counties. Lumb has other surnames to which it is related, where the silent 'b' at the end has been completely lost. So you will also find Lumm, Lum. One particular variant - Lund, clearly reveals Lumb's linguistic origin as Scandinavian.  So whether Lumb or Lund, it is a word intimately associated with land. It contains within it a designation of a specific place. Lumb means a dwelling or dweller with a clearing by a pool or water source. Once upon a time an ancestor of mine took a piece of land, cleared it of trees and undergrowth with an aim to cultivate it. Its likely the surname Lumb is also linked to the word Lumber, as a term to denote fallen or felled trees. All this information is contained within one simple four letter surname, a word with origins in a time far beyond written history.

The Pennines as a landscape consists of craggy granite outcrops and coarse peaty moorland. Arable cultivation here would have been challenging, if not impossible. It's more likely my ancestor was clearing land in order to raise animals on it. All varieties of livestock, but mostly sheep and goats which coped better with the rugged terrain, the cold wind and torrential wet weather.

X is Uncle Brint taken in a workshop

My family inhabited the moorlands for centuries, either on a small holding or as farm workers. Only moving into the Pennine towns in the late 19th century. Within the living memory of my Father's generation, one wing of the Lumb family still lived on in one of the moorland villages. Everyone in the family referred to them as ' Uncle Brints lot' as though they were this entirely other species of Lumb. Which maybe indeed they were, an anachronistic remnant of a previous way of life. Brinton Lumb waa the brother of David Lumb, my Grandfather. Someone I never met because he died in his mid 50's before I was born.

Farm work could never be just the raising of sheep on the moorlands. It also meant butchering, selling meat and taking fleeces into the local market. And over the centuries they'd learned various bits of 'piece-work' - how to spin the wool into yarn, to dye and weave it into cloth, all done in house or within the village. A cottage weaving industry of this kind providing the only real possibility of gainful employment for women in the area. 

Halifax was the nearest large town to where my ancestors lived. In 1779 the town built a cloth hall, where all the local cloth makers, could bring their yarn or 'pieces' of cloth to sell to merchants. The Piece Hall, as it's now known, is a unique Grade 1 listed building. Much larger and unlike any other cloth hall in the West Riding. It is a vast classically colonnaded courtyard with small rooms on three levels that people could hire to trade from or trade too. 

The Piece Hall as it is now

As a building it represents the high point of sheep rearing and weaving in the Halifax District, and of the Agricultural Revolution itself. When new technology such as the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle loom arrived there had been local Luddite riots. Only wealthier farmers were able to afford to upgrade to these newer, faster machinery.  Setting up local weaving halls to make high quality woven fabric for half the cost and manufacturing time. With significantly less man power required. 

Depiction of a 'Luddite' riot

This revolution in the weaving industry however, would not stay in the hills. The next stage of mass manufacturing developed in the industrialised northern towns. This brought about the collapse of an already fragile rural economy. Hand woven cloth could never compete, so moorland women lost their livelihoods. Rearing sheep was not enough on its own to make a living out of.  Farmers lost both their land and workforce, as both automated weaving machines and people moved into the towns. A little over a century after it was built, with the rapid decline of small scale cloth making, the Piece Hall was convert into a wholesale vegetable and fruit market place

Halifax in the late 19th early 20th Century

So my family, as moorland dwellers, were not alone in eventually moving into Halifax to find employment. This migration from moor to town began in the 18th century. ending in a late flourish in the last decades of the 19th. This displacement either to a more hostile urban environment, or poverty and unemployment for those who stayed trying to find work in the moorland hills, had a huge consequence. Increased job insecurity, being matched by harsh alienating living conditions, brought on depressive states of mind. In turn this meant men in particular took to drinking, opioid use and gambling to excess, in order to cope, drown their sorrows, or to numb the psychological pain. Industrial towns and cities became synonymous with drug addled destitution and riotous debauchery. 

That non conformist chapels began to spring up all across the West Riding of Yorkshire from the mid 18th century onward is not coincidental. It was in response to the perceived spiritual needs of an increasingly lost and dissolute generation. Most Christian non conformist movements emerged into prominence in response to this economic and spiritual crisis. 

John Wesley Open Air Preaching

John Wesley came first to the West Riding, and Halifax in particular, around the same time as The Piece Hall opened, the late 1770's. No longer a young man, in his seventies, he nonetheless made repeated preaching tours across the West Riding, until his death in 1791. It would have been quite a feat for a man of his age, to travel around the Pennines, a frequently steep rugged and unforgiving terrain.  The 1780's to 90's were a time where Britain was unsettled by the possibility of the French Revolution spreading across the channel. The West Riding was considered one likely flare point for social unrest.

The Methodism he preached was initially met with suspicion and sometimes hostility. The speaking tours did, however, progress from being held in middle of the street to local homes and meeting halls. Eventually small Methodist chapels, built by local converts, began popping up across the West Riding 

Heptonstall Methodist Chapel up alongside the moors

His message, whilst always a biblically inflected one, also preached prohibitions, of taking personal control of the drug, drinking and gambling habits that were plaguing communities, large or small. That this chimed with the zeitgeist of its time is evident in the growing religious predominance of Methodism across the Pennine moorlands and industrial conurbations.

Both sides of my family were chapel going Methodists. It's hard to establish how far back the Lumb family and Methodism went. Probably much more than the three generations I know of. What is certain is that things generally changed slowly in the moor side hamlets and villages. So once you became a Methodist you generally would stay loyally Methodist.

West End Methodist Chapel that my family attended

When you moved from the moors to an industrialised town, you'd have to initially take work where ever you could. If you had weaving or dyeing skills you might have found it easier to get work in the weaving mills. Otherwise it would be whatever work you could find. If you had initiative you might be taken on as an apprentice to learn an entirely new trade. 

My Grandfather supported his wife and eight sons and daughters, through his trade as a specialist painter and decorator. Applying surface effects such as wood grain onto doors and Anaglypta. I imagine this would have required him to be taken on as an apprentice, in order to lean these skills of the trade. Because through this he would eventually be independent and self employed. 

This desire was informed by the Methodist ethos of self education and improvement, benefits requiring hard work and moral rectitude. Instilling an imperative to take the initiative, to control and drive your own future forward. The firm prohibitions of Methodism's earlier days mellowed over the centuries.The strength of the strictures on alcohol and gambling no longer required to be so severe. The gross consequences of the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution were becoming settled, more bedded in. People began to feel more accustomed to urban life and relatively affluent. Hence this more liberal and tolerant tone emerged, that instilled an 'everything in moderation' principle. 

That life principle and moral prohibitions were certainly still in the air of my parental home during my childhood. Plus a respect and tolerance for difference, another quality that is perhaps of more cutting edge importance when living in an urban context, than when subsisting in small close communities on a moorland edge. Methodist chapels in the Pennines are often simple solidly built, unfussy buildings. There is a part of me still that appreciates the pared back essentialism of a Zen Buddhist interior, because it bears echoes of the Methodist chapels of my youth. Another part reacts against it, by wanting its more extravagant catholic baroque opposite. I love bleak wild countryside, the moorland heaths of my childhood, which has echoes in the broad flat salt marshes of North Norfolk. All of these may be examples of ancestral flashbacks to a landscape and long forgotten lifestyle. One that my ancestors thrived in for countless generations. Until, of course, they no longer could.