History
Manchester evolved from the civilian vicus associated with the Roman fort of Mamucium, which was established c. AD 79 on a sandstone bluff near the confluence of the rivers Medlock and Irwell, in a position defensible from the Brigantes. Once the Romans had abandoned Britain, the focus of settlement in Manchester shifted to the confluence of the rivers Irwell and Irk. During the Dark Ages which followed – and persisted until the Norman Conquest – the settlement at Manchester was in the territory of several different petty kingdoms. In the Middle Ages, what is now the city centre was the township of Manchester.
Manchester Castle – a medieval fortification, probably taking the form of a ringwork – was located on a bluff where the rivers Irk and Irwell meet. The castle was first mentioned in 1184 and was recorded in 1215 as belonging to the barons of Manchester, the Grelley family. It has been described as "of no political or military importance". The Grelleys replaced the castle with a fortified manor house, which in turn was replaced by a college of priests (founded in 1421). In 1547 the college was dissolved and the property acquired by the Earl of Derby and early in the reign of King Charles II it was sold to the Governors who had been appointed in the will of Humphrey Chetham. By royal charter in 1665 Chetham's Hospital was established and eventually this became Chetham's School of Music.
Read more about this topic: Manchester City Centre
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)