Like most of Britain in the Dark Ages, the Accrington area was a rural district with just a scattering of homesteads and small farms inhabited by Saxon tribes living off the land.
But the introduction of Christianity into England has a profound effect on the organisation of the land and people and, like the rest of the country, Hyndburn began to take shape. And over the next 1,400 years the small cluster of individual communities grew into the modern borough we know today.
The parish of Whalley was founded in 628 over an area known as Blackburnshire, which covered 400 square miles. The district was made up of the forests of Alkerynton (Accrington), Pendle, Trawden and Rossendale.
Over the next 400 years there was political turmoil in the area and the district was passed between different leading groups. But with the Norman Conquest in 1066, William the Conqueror granted the district to Roger of Poitou who built Lancaster Castle.
The Normas carried out the Domesday survey between 1080 and 1086 and recorded Hyndburn as being part of Cheshire. Although Norman leadre Robert de Lacy controlled the land a Saxon tribe, Leofwine, lived there and they were allowed to remain in the area under the supervision of the de Lacy family.
Hunicot (Huncoat) had the distinction of being one of only four places in North East Lancashire to be mentioned in the Domesday survey.
In 1191 Accrington was granted to the Abbot of Kirkstall Abbey and around 1200 the monks built a grange (small-scale abbey) in the area that is now Grange Lane and Black Abbey Street near the police station in Accrington.
Shortly after it was built, three monks - Humphrey, Norman and Robert - were murdered and the Grange set on fire by local people that the monks had driven out of their homes. Despite this, the abbots stayed in the area for another century.
