[Bell Historians] Liverpool Pro Cathedral

[Andrew Wilby]

charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

By accident rather than design Todmorden may have had two Parish Churches.

The original church in the town centre (which was itself originally a chape=
l of ease of Rochdale Parish) was "replaced" in late Victorian times by Chr=
ist Church.... except that it didn't quite happen.

They built the new church and it became the centre of Parish activity with =
old St Mary's reduced to being used as a chapel of ease with its own congre=
gation.

On the formation of the Diocese of Manchester, the diligent new Bishop stud=
ying his new empire noticed that Christ Church had never been formally desi=
gnatd the Parish Church and worse still, had never been licensed for marria=
ges.

This meant that there were now very many couples who thought they were marr=
ied and were not... and that there were rather a lot of bastards about the =
area. (nothing changes there then!)

The legal inheiritance problems arising from this would be enormous so it r=
esulted in "The Rochdale Parishes Marriages Act" being passed through Parli=
ament to retrospectively ligitimise everybody.

In more recent time Christ Church has been abandoned and St Mary's is again=
the active Parish Church.

Andrew
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ringingworld.co.uk/pipermail/bell-historians/attachments/20040701/9ff9b6c3/attachment.html>