Trading Places (Part One)

Let’s have some general background to get us in the mood for this article shall we? Yes, I know. We don’t usually cover this sort of stuff, opting instead for our own particular brand of claustrophobic parochialism, but there you go. You’ll just have to grin and bear it for now.
When Henry VIII corpulently shuffled off this mortal coil in 1547, Edward VI (his offspring to Jane Seymour…not to be confused with Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman) replaced him. Edward’s reign was brief but remarkably busy, marked by social unrest, military withdrawals and the establishment of the Anglican Church as the only official religion in Britain, making Edward himself Britain’s first genuine Protestant monarch.
Not bad going for a nine-year-old brat.
At least, that’s what certain royalist, flag-waving historians would have us believe. In reality, Edward was a puppet in the hands of the regency council led by Jane’s Seymour’s dad.
The painting of Edward by Hans Holbein below shows how inadequately equipped he was to deal with being king. (And this was painted when he was fourteen…er…possibly.)


Unfortunately for Mr. Seymour the puppet’s strings broke, so to speak, in 1553 when Edward dropped dead at the age of fifteen, allegedly naming his cousin Lady Jane Grey as his heir on his deathbed.
Lady Jane Grey (not to be confused with Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who) was only a child herself, and considered to be as malleable as Edward had been.
Understandably, perhaps, Edward’s two half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, were not best pleased by all this, and the succession was heavily disputed. Lady Jane Grey managed a total of fifteen days on the throne before the Privy Council dismissed Edward’s will out of hand, ‘bowed to popular opinion’, lobbed her head off and proclaimed Mary queen instead.
This wasn’t a particularly good choice, on the whole, unless, of course, you happened to be catholic. Unfortunately Elizabeth, her sister, wasn’t, and she soon found herself imprisoned for supporting Protestantism.
The new monarch now set about vigorously undoing most of Edward's religious reforms, burning three hundred dissenters at the stake in the process (far more, intriguingly, than the number of Catholics subsequently murdered by Elizabeth, but who’s counting…certainly not the Catholics it would appear), and earning herself the nickname of ‘Bloody Mary’.
It’s all swings and roundabouts in politics, of course, and when Mary followed her half-brother to the grave in November 1588, Elizabeth naturally stepped into the persecutory breach. The painting below shows Elizabeth (also known as ‘Good Queen Bess’ for reasons best left between herself and her courtiers) in a contemplative mood (in which she bears a more than a passing resemblance to Fanny Craddock in our opinion).


Elizabeth’s mother, Ann Boleyn, had been executed a couple of years after Elizabeth’s birth. This led to Elizabeth being declared illegitimate. Not that such matters held any chuck with the politics of monarchy. With the aid of her trusty counsel (led now by William Cecil, otherwise known as the notorious Baron Burghley), she re-established the Anglican Church, set about oppressing Catholics and launched a number of poorly resourced military campaigns in the Netherlands, France and Ireland, with spectacularly disappointing results.
Military matters improved, however, with a bit of help from the weather, when she defeated the Spanish armada in 1588, and, despite the continuous ups and downs of the country’s ecclesiastical politics (of which the average Fylde and Wyre peasant was growing extremely wearisome, no doubt, by this point) she led Britain into stability, helped forge a sense of national identity and is generally regarded nowadays as one of the country’s most popular monarchs. Eventually she kicked the bucket in 1603 still a virgin, bringing an end to the Tudor era once and for all.
Nonetheless, under Elizabeth’s rule international trade improved considerably, all of which (you’ll be glad to know) brings up back to the Wyre, and in particular the Tudor ports of Wardleys and Skippool.
Actually, come to think of it, we didn’t really need that lengthy introduction. Never mind, it’s too late now.
John Porter in his ‘History of the Fylde’ informs us (with regard to both Skippool Creek and Wardleys Creek) that:

“…as early as 1590/1600, William and James Blackburne, of Thistleton, carried on an extensive trade with Russia, and there can be no doubt that their cargoes of merchandise, most likely flax and tallow, were landed on the banks of the Wyre at those ancient harbours.”

Let’s have an aerial photograph of Wardley’s Creek, shall we, courtesy of Frank Smith (Wyre Archaeology pilot):


It’s on there somewhere, honest.
The quayside at Wardleys can still be seen to this day, although not particularly clearly, it should be said, unless you’re standing on the deck of a boat entering the creek itself, or you’ve broken into the private house in whose back garden it stands and have been chased by the owner’s dog off the end of the wharf and are now hanging precariously above the mud.
Fortunately, we’re cheeky buggers and asked permission for a gander. We’re also untidy buggers, so we lost the photograph we took. However, we did draw up the following illustration of the aforementioned quay for one of our books, so you’ll have to make do with that for now:


As you can probably see, carved Roman numerals, once used to indicate the level of the tide, can still be read vertically down its face.
Right, you’ve suffered enough for one week! Part two in seven days’ time.