The Pack Horse Inn History The Stanley family had settled in Lancashire towards the end of the  fourteenth century, but our story concerns James Stanley, the Seventh  Earl of Derby (born at Knowsley in 1607) who led an horrific assault  by Royalist troops on Bolton in May 1644.   The background to this is as follows:-  The significance of the religious divide within the county was  emphasised by the crisis of the mid 1600's. Most Catholic gentry were  firm supporters of the King, while as a rule dissenters and  nonconformists adhered to parliament side. The civil wars of 1642-50  thus divided the county geographically as well as politically: the north  and west were strongly royalist under the leadership of James Stanley, The Earl of Derby, the south east faithful to parliamentary cause.  Skirmishing in Lancashire began even before war was formally declared  in late September 1642 and in the autumn of that year the royalists’ unsuccessfully besieged  Manchester. During the early spring of 1643 the two sides fought to secure the strategic north-south  road and its key towns Warrington, Wigan, Preston and Lancaster—and by midsummer all four  centres had fallen to parliament after fierce fighting. Only two Lancashire strongpoint's — Lathom  House and Greenhalgh Castle near Garstang—still held out for the king, but in late May 1644 the  royal armies under Prince Rupert swept through the county from the south. Parliamentary forces  abandoned the siege of Lathom in panic and on 28 May the royalists captured the besieged town of  Bolton, which they ransacked and plundered. Rupert also took Wigan and Liverpool before he headed  for Yorkshire in late June, only to meet crushing defeat by parliament at Marston Moor in early July.  As a result the royalist gains were soon lost—Liverpool fell once more to parliament in November  1644, and by the middle of 1645 only Lathom House, heroically defended by the Countess of Derby  against overwhelming odds, stood out. It finally surrendered in December 1645. War broke out again  in 1648. In early August a great royalist and Scottish force under the Duke of Hamilton marched  slowly southwards from Carlisle, via Hornby and Lancaster. Cromwell led his armies swiftly through  the Ribble valley from Yorkshire and on 17 August attacked the royal army on Ribbleton Moor outside  Preston, putting them to flight and chasing them down the main road to Warrington where 4.000  were captured. The battle of Preston, the decisive engagement of the second part of the Civil War,  put an end to Charles I's  hopes and led directly to his execution in January 1649. In August 1651  Prince Charles invaded from Scotland and was joined by Lord Derby, who had returned from exile in  the Isle of Man. On 25 August, at Wigan Lane between Standish and Chorley, Parliamentary forces  defeated the Lancashire Royalists. Front of the pub  The pub in the early 1950’s  The skull behind the bar  James Stanley was later captured and sent to trial by a Court Martial at Chester. The prosecution  claimed that he had disregarded the Act of 12th August, 1651, which made it illegal for a person to  have any dealings with Charles Stuart - the pretender Charles II. The Earl was found guilty and was  condemned to be executed by the severing of his head from his body at Bolton on Wednesday 15th  October. The venue was a calculated piece of publicity since he was held to have been largely  responsible for the indiscriminate slaughter during the siege of the town in 1644.The savagery of the  events at Bolton, which relative to its size possibly suffered greater loss of civilian lives and more  physical destruction than any other English town. Shortly after noon on the 15th October, the Earl  arrived at Bolton but, because the scaffold was not  ready, he waited at a nearby house which tradition  says, was the Man and Scythe Inn where the chair in  which the Earl sat is still kept. The scaffold was not  ready because the people of the town refused to  carry the timbers needed, for they were grieved that  the Earl should die in their town. When at last he  went to the scaffold the onlookers cried and prayed.  The headsman approached; the Earl kissed the axe  and gave a few coins to his executioner in order for  him to make a clean, swift cut. One report gives his  last words as: "Blessed be God's name for ever and  ever. Let the whole earth be filled with His glory.  Amen." Then he lifted his hand as a signal and the  axe fell.  The life and death of James Stanley are well documented, but what of the headsman? His skull is said  to be behind the bar at the Pack Horse Inn but can this be confirmed?? If the Whewell name goes back to the early seventeenth century it should be easy to trace its origin.  However, the two common dictionaries of surnames - Bardsley's and Reaneys's - contained no  reference whatsoever. But in Lower's “Patrionica Britannica”, from 1860, the name “Whowall” appears  with a note, "probably the same as Whewell", which says "Probably from Whewell Grange, Staffordshire,  where conspirators from the Gunpowder Plot took refuge in 1605". So did the name originate in the  Midlands and travel to Lancashire, or vice versa?? George Whewell is alleged to have lived in the Turton area, and there are three possible sites of his  home, “Whewell's Farm” in Cadshaw Valley, “Whowell's Farm” in Broadhead Valley and “Old  Butterworth's” on the slopes of Turton Heights, which had a datestone of 1667 with initials G:W. This  stone was later built into New Butterworth's Farm. How the skull of the axeman came to the Pack  Horse remains a mystery but it has been here since the late 1800's when the Butterworths became  residents. Is this a coincidence or was there some connection with this Butterworth family, New  Butterworth's Farm and George Whewell? A correspondent writing in the Bolton Evening News in 1874 claimed to have met a descendant of  George Whewell who explained that the family home was Whowell's farm north of Edgworth, but that  some spelled the name Whewell. He remembered hearing stories at home in his childhood about  Headsman Whowell. His family left the farm in 1829 and tradition says the skull was brought to the  Pack Horse because George was a regular at the pub. Whowell's Farm was about 4 miles away, and  there would have been without doubt a pub or two between. In some publications, George Whewell (Whowell) is referred to as Jack; but when Mrs Hilton was  landlady at the inn in 1980, she was visited by a gentleman from Virginia, USA, by the name of Alfred  Whowell who claimed that the headsman was in fact Alex or Alfred Whowell, and there had never  been a George in the family. He also pointed out that there is a plaque on a wall inside the 'Man and  Scythe' with the initials A.W. and the date 1636. As the date is fifteen years before the execution  there is a dubious connection, and the headsman was but a farmer; a plaque in his honour seems a  bit unusual. Tradition says if the skull is removed from the pub, strange things will happen; this was the subject of  a story "The Executioners Skull" by Teddy Ashton (pen name of writer Charles Allen Clarke) and  written sometime between the two world wars. The story involves a customer called Siah Slopp, a  Holcombe man, who got a little drunk and stole the skull as a joke. Later that night the landlord  heard a banging on the door, and Siah was there with the skull, pleading with him to take it back. "When I geet whum," he said, "I put th’ skull on th’ dresser an’ went to bed. Aw at once I were wakkened  up by summat hittin’ me on th’ nose. I sit up an’ I seed summat bobbin’ up an’ deawn like a giant moth of  a ghostly blue colour, sheinin’ like phosphorus an’ wi’ two greit blazin’ red een... I seed that it were a  skull, that very skull I’d been sich a foo as to bring away... an’ there coom a bloodcurdlin’ voice saying,  ‘Tak me back to wheer I should be, or I’ll tormen thy sowl eaut o’ thee’ " So he did take it back.  The landlord told this tale to three customers who had hiked up to Affetside, who were unconvinced,  and one of them decided to test the story for himself. He too stole the skull, and this time he and his  two friends were confronted on the road by a ghostly headsman wielding a very solid-looking axe. ‘Tak that skull back or I’ll chop thy silly yead off,’ cried the ghost. ‘If 'ave to ax thee again I’st axe thee wi’  this.’ Even headless axe men, it seems, were not above the occasional pun. The spectral figure followed the trio back to the Pack Horse, and as soon as they handed back the  skull to the landlord, it disappeared.  ‘Yo needn’t have any fears that th’ ghost ull follow yo any mooar,’ they were told. ‘Yo’re safe neaw it’s  geet its skull back. Let this be a lesson to yo.’  The story is an imaginative piece of writing, but it is on record that the skull was removed at one time  for a short while. Captain Thomas Hardcastle JP took some members of the Lancashire and Cheshire  Antiquarian Society, led by a Mr. Redford, to see the skull, but they were informed that the previous  tenant of the inn had taken it away with him. Was it returned to its 'home' because of ghostly  happenings?? The date of this event is not clear, so the brave ex-landlord who dared to defy tradition  cannot be identified. Skulls are believed to have strange powers - until well into the 17th Century it was thought the skull  was the location of the soul - and many are preserved in various parts of the country. How the skull  got there in the first place is not exactly clear, but nobody has ever tried to steal it again. On the  contrary, on very festive evenings, somebody buys it a pint of Hydes Best!  On a final note, when a photographer moved the skull to get a good shot, he found his flash would  not work due a failed new battery. Coincidence?..   Who knows..  James Stanley  The Old Man & Scythe, Bolton  The Story Behind the Skull  History of The Pack Horse Inn