parish being included in Rochdale and Bury parishes, but more extended information points to the conjecture of later date as the most probable. Radcliffe was not established as an independent parish till the fifteenth century, when the Radcliffe family had attained to great distinction. Oldham, destitute from the earliest times of any family of more than mere local reputation, and always containing, except at a most remote period, a large number of small individually independent land-holders, and extensively connected in the feudal ages with the Prestwichs and the Langleys, both by the possession of property and indirect family ties, the place has been through centuries, as it were, inevitably subject to Prestwich, in an ecclesiastical sense only, long after any solid reason for such association has ceased to exist. The existing inclusion of this district in Prestwich parish seems absurd, but the nature of the kindred is more nominal than real, and yet although Oldham is to all intents and purposes a parish, it is, technically speaking, a parochial chapelry, in the parish of Prestwich, hence the parish is frequently styled the parish of Prestwich-cum-Oldham. The descendant has so much outgrown the parent, that the chapelry of Oldham has, on some occasions, begun to take precedency of the parish; and though in the population returns published by the authority of Parliament, in 1811, the term "Prestwich-cum-Oldham" is applied to this parish, yet, in the succeeding return, of 1821, the words are reversed, and they stand
"Oldham-cum-Prestwich;" but in the return of 1831, the more proper designation of Prestwich-cum-Oldham is adopted. The inhabitants of Oldham, and of the other townships in the chapelry of Oldham, still marry frequently at Prestwich church, and the Rector of Prestwich, in virtue of his office, holds the patronage of the living of Oldham. With some degree of subordination, there is, however, much of independence in the church of Oldham. The townships of Oldham, Crompton, Chadderton, and Royton, are liable to

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