Short History of Coppull

At the very edge of their empire, the Romans drove a road between two staging posts Coccium (what we now call Wigan) and Walton le Dale. It would have been the first time Latin had been heard in the village.

Towards the end of the first millennium someone called Blaina strode off the old and overgrown Roman Road perhaps with a small band of followers and found some uninhabited woodland with a stream running through and glimpsed deer between the trees. He decided to settle there and founded the hamlet of Blainscough.

A few years after his invasion and conquest of England in 1066, William of Normandy’s northern lords rebelled against his authority. To reassert his rule and to teach them a lesson, he sent his men north to put the land to the sword and the torch. Coppull may have suffered during the Harrying of the North.

In the 1190s, the lords of Lathom founded a new priory at Burscough near Ormskirk. Many local families endowed the priory with land. Thomas the son of Richard de Coppull, the heir of the family which had recently become lords of the Manor of Coppull gave land to the south of the village to the Prior and monks. His gift was approved by the lords of Worthington who were the overlords of the de Coppulls.

A century and a half later, John de Coppull, their descendant, went to Ireland with the ambitious and successful Sir John Stanley to fight in the wars for the English king. As a reward, Sir John appointed him as a tax collector in Ireland in 1400.

His son William de Coppull was feared far and wide. In 1432 the rector of Eccleston petitioned the Chancellor of England against the “malice” of William. In 1438 William was blamed for the death of John Bradshagh and had to pay 20 marks to his family. In the same year, William’s home in Coppull was attacked by over 20 people led by the lord of the manor of Worthington, with whom William was obviously engaged in a bitter dispute.

In 1461 after building up a small landholding in the village of Coppull and neighbouring townships, Sir Thomas Stanley bought the manor of Coppull from William, the son of William the Bruiser, to add to his growing holding of manors and lands in the north west of England. The de Coppulls meanwhile fell into obscurity, perhaps providing the Church with priests.

The Stanleys became the Earls of Derby and played an important role in national politics for half a millennium. They had no time to take an interest in the affairs of Coppull and their administration was done through rent collectors and bailiffs. The first family who played this role was the Dicconsons, who perhaps lived at Coppull Hall. They were replaced by the Ugnalls who were in turn replaced by the Rigbys of Burgh in the 1550s.

To pay the bills incurred in a long and expensive family dispute, the Earls of Derby sold the manor of Coppull to their servants the Rigbys of Burgh in 1601, and the Rigbys became lords of the manor for over a century, losing it briefly during the Civil War when they fought for the royalist side and along with Edward Chisnall, played a part in the Siege of Lathom House, the seat of the Earls of Derby.

By the end of the sixteenth century, people from Coppull had trade and other links with London. They took woven cloth from Coppull and other villages down the great road to the south and sold it on the way. As well as cash, they brought back radical new ideas about religion and the relationship between man and God and they started to win converts for these new ideas in Coppull and neighbouring villages. In the 1650s, they built a chapel in the village to enable them to worship in new ways.  

The Rigbys prospered once again after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and in the 1690s Alexander Rigby was knighted. Around the same time, England and France were at war, and Sir Alexander Rigby and others invested money in expeditions to intercept French ships and impound their cargo. They applied for and received “Letters of Marque” from the government which were, effectively, licences to commit piracy on French ships. One of these expeditions went terribly wrong and Sir Alexander was bankrupted and lost all his lands.

The Reverend John Pearson, with others, bought the manor and he became the sole owner in 1736. A datestone on the barn at Coppull Hall celebrates his purchase. Pearson was a new type of lord – he was an investor and with his lawyer Nicholas Woosey he quickly set about making the most of his investment: charging a fee to villagers for digging clay from the common land in the village, arranging for the enclosure of the commons in 1736, building a workhouse to make looking after the poor much cheaper and digging for coals on his lands in the village.

The year 1776 saw the start of big changes in the life of the village: Richard Arkwright rented a mill at Birkacre to try new ways to manufacture cloth. The mill was sacked in 1778 by traditional workers concerned that the new methods of manufacture were a threat to their livelihoods. This only briefly delayed the great industrial changes which were to come to Coppull. Other factories were built in and around Coppull and in the 1840s the railway arrived transforming life in the village for the next 120 years and making it much easier to get the coal extracted from the new mines in the village to markets.