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Brief History of Blisworth A
shallow valley sheltered from east winds, a liberal supply of good
spring water emerging from a limestone bed and some fine alluvial
meadows no doubt prompted early farming families to settle here.
In the Domesday records it is named Blidesworde (Blide’s
Enclosure or “Blithe, ie. happy, Enclosure”) and is noted to possess
a small watermill and about 50 inhabitants.
A warrior clan named “The Wakes” established their manor
‘seat’ here from 1265 and the last of them, Roger Wake in 1504, set
up a tiny grammar school that eventually slid under the wing of the
Anglican Church until 1913 when the Council School in the village was
established. The Tudor
Crown appropriated a vast tract of land as a hunting park in
Northamptonshire in 1541 that absorbed the village.
As an obligation to a branch of the Royal family, the area known
as the Honour of Grafton fell into the ownership of the FitzRoy family
in 1673. From
about 1720
to 1830 Blisworth was
rather caringly brought through the period of gradual land enclosure,
initiated in Cromwell's interregnum (c1655), by the Duke of Grafton and
was subsequently developed industrially by the Duke. Other sweeping changes had a marked effect at about this
time, notably the advent of a canal planned to connect London to the
Midlands. A
detail of geography meant that the canal was built from Birmingham,
south, as far as the main road through Blisworth in 1795. There the construction halted for 10 years while a long
tunnel was dug through the hill to the south.
Blisworth briefly became an inland port with a wharf for
transhipment of goods both onto the main road, duly upgraded to a
turnpike (which merely meant that repairs would be funded), and onto a
tiny horse-drawn railway over the hill to continue by canal to London.
Another detail of geography places Blisworth within five miles of
Northampton yet separated by both a low valley and Hunsbury Hill.
When Stephenson planned in 1838 the London to Midlands railway he
could not get across these obstacles and so built a station at Blisworth
that would have to serve Northampton as well, at least for the
“through expresses”. Because
of this, the village later became a cross for rail access from Banbury
to the south and Northampton and Peterborough to the north thus adding
to its rail to Birmingham and London and the already established road and canal connections.
In Blisworth and some neighbouring parishes, the availability of
these connections encouraged the landowners to develop the region
industrially. Hence from
the 1810s there was limestone quarrying, and from the 1850s iron-ore
quarrying, so that there were plenty of labouring jobs in Blisworth in
addition to the labour needs of the railway and the canal.
The population rose to around 1000.
The Duke of Grafton built many new houses in the village but
hardly enough, due to his mounting debts, for by 1900 tiny cottages were
crammed with families and lodgers.
Most people now regard it a blessing that the mineral resource
ran out in the 1914 – 1922 era; being inaccessible to working without
machinery. In any case, the
availability of both men and horses to work them also vanished, for
reasons of the Great War. Death
duties brought an end to the Grafton Estate as, in 1919, virtually all
cottages and farms were sold to the occupying tenants or, at least, to
some wealthy villagers that encouraged a continued tenancy.
Blisworth acquired gas, electricity services and some council
houses in the 1930s but no mains water until 1955.
Blisworth, at the low ebb in population of only 750 was using
those springs, augmented later by district council water tankers, throughout the
WWII so that only a tiny number of refugees from London’s bombings
could be housed here. This
was a poor area, a church and chapel based community of labourers and a few
professionals such as shopkeepers, a milling family and a doctor.
Employment ceased at the mill in 1930 but, by then, a meat processing
business had been set up in the Stoke Road. It was The British
Bacon Company and comprised an abattoir for the slaughter and butchering
of pigs and a factory area for making pork pies and other meat
products. The business moved to the edge of the parish in the
1970s because of the hygiene demands placed upon abattoirs by the
government. Digging for iron-ore re-visited the parish
from 1955 - 1967; this time using giant electric diggers and a rail
network that connected with the main line. Other than generating noise and subsequently
a further adventure playground for our children, this enterprise had little
contact with the villagers, employing only few on account of the
mechanisation. By the 1960s more jobs were available in Northampton to replace the needs of a dwindling canal and the closure of Blisworth railway station in 1960. Soon the M1 motorway brought migrants from London in enormous numbers and a flush of housing estates sprung up in the village. That event, in combination with the baby-boom sent the village population to over 2050, being a doubling in a decade, and encouraged the rejuvenation and broadening of village life with many newly formed societies. Our population now resides at around 1800. As in every parish, farms have coalesced and spawned mini-industrial estates, homes have hosted businesses and some residents typically commute 10 to 40 miles to work, some by the rapid rail connection as far as London. Our purchasing and commuting habits that we share with nearly everyone have generated the need for a village bypass that was completed in 1991. Now we have all walks of life represented here in a quiet semi-rural community that differs little from many others in the Midlands. However, the old village heritage is still with us as many families realise they had a grandfather or great grandfather who worked in a quarry or as engineer or porter at the station while a Blisworth-coined term for the collective additional population, "blow-ins", is affectionately upheld.
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