Guild Merchant of Preston

(Logo of Preston Guild 2012)

Hoghton Tower is about 7 miles from the center of the City of Preston. While Preston has only been a "city" in the British legal sense for the last decade, the market town goes back to the Anglo-Saxon period. It was the site of two famous Battles of Preston, one in the English Civil War (1648), and one in the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion (There's a good article in Wikipedia, here.).

In 1179, King Henry II granted the town a royal charter which gave a monopoly on trade in the town to a guild of its merchants. As the right was valuable, it was important to keep a record of who qualified as a member of the guild, and so in time it became the practice for the court of the guild to meet at long intervals (eventually set at twenty years) to revise the membership list, and this meeting of the court then became the beginning of a week of celebration of the Guild Merchant. (More about this history here.)

Sir Bernard de Hoghton writes to point out that 2012 will be the year for one of these twenty-year celebrations. The Guild Court is required to meet on the first Monday after the Feast of the Decollation [i.e., Beheading] of St. John the Baptist. That feast falls on August 29, so the Court meeting this year will be on  Monday, September 3rd, though the surrounding festival will actually begin on Friday, August 31st.

There is, of course, a web-site! I've cited the history page already, but here's the home page.