Famous People

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Father Edmund Arrowsmith

Ordained a Roman Catholic priest at the age of 27,Father Edmund Arrowsmith ministered and said Mass in the Brindle area between Blackburn and Preston.

At that time, the saying of Mass was an offence punishable by death and Father Arrowsmith was arrested in 1628 and condemned to die as a traitor. He was hanged, drawn and quartered, and the parts of his body exposed on top of John O' Gaunt's Gateway.

George Fox & the Quakers

Quakerism was founded by George Fox who first visited Lancashire in 1652 and subsequently made Swarthmoor Hall (the home of Judge Fell), near Ulverston, the headquarters of the Society of Friends, more commonly known as the Quakers.
George Fox was summoned to the Lancaster Assizes on a number of occasions, the most famous of which was in September 1664 when he refused to take the oath and was remanded in custody until the next Assizes. He described his incarceration:

"Then I was put into a tower where the smoke of the other prisoners came up so thick that I could scarcely see the candle that it burned...

Besides it rained in upon my bed... in this manner did I lie all that long cold winter till the next assizes; in which time I was so starved with cold and rain, and my body so greatly swelled and my limbs benumbed."

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