00:00Today we're in Downham and this is one of the most historic villages in East Lancashire.
00:07And we started right in front of the porch at the parish church.
00:14And the reason why we started here is because Queen Mary of Tech, who was the wife of George V,
00:21visited Downham once, came out of the church, roughly where we're standing now.
00:27She looked across the churchyard to Pendle in the background and said,
00:33this must be one of the most beautiful views from an English country churchyard in the country.
00:40And I don't think anybody could disagree with this splendid view.
00:45The trees in the foreground, Pendle rising up in the distance.
00:52The only thing I would say about it is that I was born on the other side of Pendle,
00:56and I much prefer the view on the other side to this one.
01:00But it's a spectacular view.
01:02You've got a small part of the village to the left, with the woodland and field boundaries clearly marked out.
01:14It is a splendid view.
01:18This is Downham Church.
01:21It's been a parish church for approaching 500 years,
01:26although it was originally a chapel of the church in Worley.
01:33The building itself is not all that old really, because it was rebuilt.
01:40Just looking at the building itself, the church, the nave, the chancel, they're early 19th century.
01:48But the tower, have a look at the difference in the stonework, completely different, random stone.
01:56The tower is 14th century, the same era as St. Peter's Church in Burma, although St. Peter's is somewhat bigger.
02:08When they came to look at the future of the church, they decided that the medieval church,
02:17which had been altered in the 16th century, was beyond repair.
02:23So what they did, quite cleverly, was to build a church which matched the part that was still secure, the tower.
02:34And what you've got is a very attractive church,
02:37although there are 500 years between the building of the tower and the building of the nave and the chancel.
02:46Right, this is the Ashen Arms, a very well known pub in North East Lancashire.
02:52In fact, it's more than a pub, because it's a good restaurant as well.
02:56However, it has a long history.
02:59Originally, it wasn't called the Ashen Arms, it's a Georgian Dragon.
03:03And it was in the Georgian Dragon that the Downen Men's Benevolent Society started its activities.
03:11And no one's really clear about when it started.
03:15But it's likely to have been late 18th century, and one of those friendly societies associated with the rise of the working class.
03:26Some people think it was a society supported by the middle classes to keep the working class in the place.
03:34But I tend to feel it's a sign of the working class man beginning to assert himself and take responsibility for his own future and his own family.
03:48Benevolent societies existed for all sorts of reasons.
03:53Perhaps the most common were burial societies.
03:56You joined the society and you paid a few pence or maybe a shilling a week.
04:02And when you died, your body was taken care of and the burial was paid for.
04:09Burials were expensive.
04:11About the Downen Benevolent Fund, it was really a men's organisation.
04:18But it wasn't for the cost of burial.
04:22It was for young men who joined in their twenties and for life, unless they broke the rules or something like that.
04:31And they paid a shilling a week and it was for medical attention.
04:37And if they were injured at work or too ill to work, they would get a sort of payment until they were well.
04:47It was very good fun. But the interesting thing about it is, in 1885, I think it was, they had a banner made.
04:57Which was sent around the village in a little annual demonstration of their existence.
05:06And the banner still exists.
05:08We're still in front of the Ashen Arms.
05:12As I said before, it was really called the Georgian Dragon.
05:15The Ashtons, the family, have a long association with Downen.
05:22Originally, in the early modern period, they were based in Middleton and Alcrington, near Manchester.
05:30But when the dissolution of the monasteries took place, they acquired lands that had previously been owned by Wally Abbey.
05:40And in the 1550s, they acquired this estate, the Downen Estate, which the Ashton family still owned.
05:51They lived in Downen, they live in Downen Hall, which is behind the church, opposite from where we look.
05:58And they really still owned the village.
06:02They control who come to live here and so on, because they live in rented accommodation.
06:10The oldest house is built in about 1580.
06:13But there's been a village here for about a thousand years, when an Anglo-Saxon chieftain came and made this his base.
06:25And from that time, there's been a continuous history of Downen as a small village.
06:34We're right in the centre of the village here, and this is all that remains of Downen stocks.
06:41The stocks were obligatory in every centre of the population.
06:46And they were a means of punishment for people who had performed minor criminal acts.
06:53And the village leadership would determine the length of time that an individual would be kept in the stocks.
07:04And it would usually be a short period of time, like a day or two, a day or two, a week.
07:11In Burnley in 1425, the village baker was imprisoned very briefly in the lock-up.
07:20Then found guilty of making adulterated bread in order to be tied up in the stocks for a week.
07:32We're standing in the middle of the village now, and behind us you can see the stream.
07:38And we thought we ought to tell you what the name of the village means.
07:44Downen was, in Anglo-Saxon times, Dunen.
07:49Ham means village, estate, place where people live, so let's call it village.
07:56And the first part of the word, the down, or dun, means hill.
08:05So it means the hill by the village, or the village by the hill.
08:10And of course the hill may well be Pendle, which is in the background just over there.
08:15And Pendle is the most prominent of the hills around, so it's likely to be Pendle.
08:21So, Downen is the village by the hill.
08:25Although not all that much is known about Downen in Roman times,
08:30we do know that the Romans were familiar with Downen,
08:34because the road from Richester into Yorkshire ran through the village up by the church ahead of Minow.
08:46And the road was a very well maintained road.
08:51It had a marjorie number, that is a road that indicates that it was Roman.
08:59And along it, several burial places have been found.
09:03But, the village is even better known because of something that I've got written down here,
09:10because I always forget.
09:12And that is, Whistle Down the Wind, the famous film, was shot here.
09:17The BBC had a programme called Born and Bred.
09:22It was a fictional village called Ormston, but it was actually Downen.
09:28And then The Secret of Crickley Hall was filmed in and around Downen in 2012.
09:37So, Downen is the kind of place you come to when you want to show the public what an English village really looks like.
09:48And there's probably no better place in Lancashire than Downen that demonstrates the real qualities of an English rural community.
09:58Thank you very much for your recognition and I am być by evil people in Australia.
