The Minor Family of Somerset

Isaac King came to his death by a fall down a pair of stairs a
t Load Clough in Warley the 7th instant.
from stockdill.freeserve.co.
Warley is a village West of Halifax on a level shelf halway up t
he North flank of the Calder Valley. Warley, as Werlafeslei, i
s in the DomeDay Book of 1086, that inventory ofhis conquests d
rawn up by william the Conqueror, or Willam the Bastard as hewa
s known at the time. It became one of the townships of the are
a betweenthat of Midgley and that of Ovenden. High Road Well M
oor separated it fromthe township of Halifax. IN those Days li
ttle more than a group of houses was termed a township in this p
artof the West Riding. ToDay people still talkof Warley Town.
The hillside around Warley slopes away to Luddenden Dean and th
e walk from on to the other across the moors provides spectacula
r panoramic vies of the Pennine hills and valley. Luddenden, li
ke Warley and Hepstonstall, is one of the unspoilt villages of t
he region Not built to be charmingthese villages now most cert
ainly are. The immense but ow redundant Murgatroyd's Mill domin
ates Luddenden, this are known by many locally as Little Switzer
land
Warley grew during the Middle ages as a farming area. A third o
f its population died in the Great Plague of the fourteenth cent
ury, a proportion which was the norm in Christendom. Daniel Def
oe rode through Warley whilsttravelling through Yorkshire. Jam
es Murgatroyd of Warley was one of those who refused to buy knig
htHood from Charles I and was consequently fined. Civil War tro
ops passed by whilst crossing from Lancashire to Yorkshire. Pl
ace names in Warley echo military encounters in the past - Cam
p End and SentryEdge. The township grew after the eighteenth c
entury with the construction of the Cliff Hill Estate and in 184
6 the Congregational Church was put up in the centre of the vill
age to cater for the strong Nonconformist tradition of the area
. Physically the Industrial Revolution had limited effect on Wa
rley, concentrated as it was on the water power of the valleys a
nd the towns.
ToDay the centre of Warley is dominated by the Congregational Ch
urch, referenced by Pevsner, and the Mayple public house. The s
quare around the war memorial is strangely funnel shaped where t
hree roads converge. Around it are stonecottages built for agr
icultural workers and larger houses for the prosperousbusinessm
en who liked to live outside the dirty towns. (And still do). T
he Anglican Church, St. John's is outside the village at the bot
tom of windleRoyd Lane. Farming remains the main land use of t
he area though, of course,few now work in agriculture. Some o
f the names of the alleys and passages give additional characte
r to the place - Raspberry Passage and Naylor's Walk and Dark La
ne.
One feature of this part of the Pennines is the large number o
f handsome larger houses or halls built by the rich in the seven
teent and eighteenth centuries. These are grand stone houses wi
th mullioned windows butwithout integral garages; instead the
y had stables and dairies and coach houses and servants' quarter
s. Examples are Haigh HOuse, the Hill and the Grange. Thre fam
ilies owned much of Warley for centuries - The Saltonstalls, th
eOldfields and the Murgatroyds. ToDay trusts for their familie
s control manyof the farms, pubs and residential properties o
n the hillsides.
Warley is now recognised as one of Calderdals's most attractiv
e and unspoilt villages.It is most desirable as a place to liv
e but people, rich and poor, still knowone another and gossip i
s still traded in the Maypole by locals alongside the visitors w
ho leave their BMW's and Range Rovers in the car Park. It retai
ns a semi-rural atmosphere and a charm which fortunately the res
idents willfight to keep. Goodness knows, the developers woul
d love to move in. As mybrother said to me, it is a refuge fro
m the jun