Lisburn ( ) is a cathedral city in Northern Ireland. It is southwest of Belfast city centre, on the River Lagan, which forms the boundary between County Antrim and County Down. First laid out in the 17th century by English and Welsh settlers, with the arrival of French Huguenots in the 18th century, the town developed as a global centre of the linen industry.
In 2002, as part of Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee celebrations, the predominantly unionist borough was granted city status alongside the largely nationalist town of Newry. With a population of 51,447 in the 2021 Census, Lisburn was the third-largest city in Northern Ireland. In the 2016 reform of local government in Northern Ireland Lisburn was joined with the greater part of Castlereagh to form Lisburn and Castlereagh.
Name The town was originally known as Lisnagarvy (also spelt Lisnagarvey or Lisnagarvagh) after the townland in which it formed. This is derived .
In the records, the name Lisburn appears to supersede Lisnagarvey around 1662. One theory is that it comes from the Irish lios ('ringfort') and the Scots burn ('stream'). Some speculate that -burn refers to the burning of the town during the Irish Rebellion of 1641, but there is evidence of earlier use. An English soldier later recalled the rebels having entered the town of Lisnagarvy at "a place called Louzy Barne". In the town's early days, there were possibly two ringforts: Lisnagarvy to the north and Lisburn to the south, and the latter may simply have been easier for the English settlers to pronounce.
History
Early town Lisburn's original site was a fort located north of modern-day Wallace Park. In 1609 James I granted Sir Fulke Conway, a Welshman of Norman descent, the lands of Killultagh in southwest County Antrim.
In 1611 George Carew, 1st Earl of Totnes remarked: "In our travel from Dromore towards Knockfargus, we saw in Kellultagh upon Sir Fulke Conway’s lands a house of cagework in hand and almost finished, where he intends to erect a bawn of brick in a place called Lisnagarvagh. He has built a fair timber bridge over the river of Lagan near the house." In 1622 the first impressions of Sir Fulke's brother and heir, Edward Conway, was of "a curious place ... Greater storms are not in any place nor greater serenities: foul ways, boggy ground, pleasant fields, water brooks, rivers full of fish, full of game, the people in their attire, language, fashion: barbarous. In their entertainment free and noble."
Management of the Conways' Irish estate fell largely to George Rawdon, a Yorkshire man, who laid out the streets of Lisburn as they are today: Market Square, Bridge Street, Castle Street and Bow Street. He had a manor house built on what is now Castle Gardens, and in 1623, a church on the site of the current cathedral. In 1628, Charles I granted a charter for a weekly market, which is still held in the town every Tuesday. To populate the town, Rawdon, hostile to the Presbyterian Scots already moving into the area, brought over English and Welsh settlers.
In 1641 the Irish, rising in the first instance against English, and not Scottish, settlers, were driven back three times from the town. A herd four hundred head of cattle driven against the gates failed to batter them down. The town nonetheless burned. In 1649 the town was secured by forces loyal to Cromwell's English Commonwealth, routing an army of Scots Covenanters, and their Royalist allies, in the Battle of Lisnagarvey.
The Presbyterians, despite their loyalty to the Crown, upon its Restoration continued to be penalised as "dissenters" from the established Church of Ireland. It was not until 1670 that they were permitted a meeting house in town, and that had to be of "perishable materials [...] dark, narrow and devoid of any pretensions to art and comfort. Their support for William III (whose forces wintered in the town) during the Williamite War in Ireland likewise failed to win them equal standing. Like the Catholics, who had to wait another 60 years for a Mass House, Presbyterians were discouraged from exerting their presence. The First Presbyterian Church built in 1768 was screened (until 1970) from Market Square by shops.
The town was destroyed once again in 1707: the accidental conflagration giving rise to the town's motto Ex igne resurgam --"Out of the fire I shall arise". Conway's Manor House was not restored (part of the surrounding wall and its gateway with the date 1677 engraved still stands on the south and east side of Castle Gardens). The Anglican church, designated by Charles II as Christ Church Cathedral in 1662, was rebuilt retaining the tower and the surviving galleries in the nave. The distinctive octagonal spire was added in 1804.
One of the few buildings spared in the fire of 1707 was the Friend's Meeting House. Quakerism had been brought to the town in 1655 by a veteran of Cromwell's army, William Edmundson. In 1766, a prosperous linen merchant, John Hancock, endowed what is now the grammar school known as Friends' School Lisburn.
John Wesley first visited Lisburn in 1756, and thereafter he returned to preach biannually until 1789. The first Wesleyan Methodist Preaching House was established in the town in 1772.
The Huguenot and the linen trade
Lisburn prides itself as the birthplace of Ireland's linen industry. While production had been introduced by the Scots, the arrival in 1698 of Huguenot refugees from France brought more sophisticated techniques, and government support. Even as it raised duties on Ireland's successful woollen trade (with the concurrence of the subordinate Irish Parliament), the English Parliament removed them on all Irish articles of hemp and flax, and the government gave Louis Crommelin, "overseer of the royal linen manufacture of Ireland", money to promote their production.
The Huguenot retained their own place of worship, the French Church in Castle Street, until 1820. The last of its pastors, Saumarez Dubourdieu, was 56 years Master of the Classical School of the Bow Street. His students subscribed to his memorial and bust on the south interior of the cathedral.
Large scale manufacture began in 1764 when William Coulson established his first linen looms close by is now the Union Bridge. His mill supplied damask to the royal courts of Europe and, in the early nineteenth century, was to draw celebrity visitors, among them Grand Duke Michael of Russia, Crown Prince Gustaf of Sweden, Louis Napoléon Lannes, the Duke of Wellington and Lord John Russell.
To carry the town's new trade, construction of the Belfast-Lisburn section of the Lagan Canal began in 1756. Despite problems of low water levels during the summer, the canal (extended in 1794 to Lough Neagh) continued to carry bulk cargoes until 1958.
In 1784, the Scotsman John Barbour began spinning linen thread, and in 1831 his son William moved production to what had originally been Crommelin's bleach green at Hilden. By the end of the century Barbour's Linen Thread Company was the largest mill of its kind in the world employing about 2000 people to work 30,000 spindles and 8,000 twisting machines. The company had built a model village for the workers, with 350 houses, two schools, a community hall, children's playground and a village sports ground.
Irish Volunteers, Croppies and Orangemen
Mechanisation, tied first to water, and then to steam, power, drove the growth of industry, but displaced independent weavers. In 1762, over 300 paraded through Lisburn brandishing blackthorn sticks as a protest against the threat of unemployment. In the 1780s they were gripped by the spirit of "combination"—the formation, in defiance of the law, of unions to press for higher piece rates. This brought workers into a sometimes uneasy relationship with the Volunteer militia.
The Volunteer militia movement, formed in response to the defence emergency caused by French intervention in the American War of Independence, served the town's merchants and tradesmen as an opportunity to protest (with their kindred in the American colonies) the restrictive English Navigation Acts and to insist on the independence of the Irish Parliament in Dublin. In 1783 William Todd Jones, a captain of the Lisburn Fusilier Corps of Volunteers, took this patriot programme (approved at a convention in Dungannon) a step further. He successfully challenged the parliamentary nominees of the town and district's principal landlord, the Hertfords, on a platform of a representative reform to include votes for Catholics.
In the wake of the French Revolution the cause of religious equality and representative government for Ireland was taken up in a still less compromising form by the Society of United Irishmen. The society won support of working men in the town, and of its leading Catholic family, the Teelings of Chapel Hill, wealthy linen manufacturers. Bartholomew Teeling (destined to hang) and his brother Charles, were an important connection between the largely Presbyterian "United men" and Catholic Defenders in rural areas. It is likely, however, that the greater strength in the district was the fraternal Orange Order, newly formed in defence of the Protestant Ascendancy. In 1797 the Order paraded 3,000 loyalists in the town before the British commander General Lake.
The neighbouring military camp at Blaris, ensured that when in 1798 the United Irishmen, decided upon insurrection, there could be no rebel demonstration in the town. Blaris supplied troops that helped ensure defeat for the forces of the "Republic" to the north of the town at the Battle of Antrim on June 7, and to the south at the Battle of Ballynahinch on June 12 where the Croppies had been under the command of the Lisburn linen draper, Henry Munro. For over a month, the severed heads of Munro and three of his lieutenants were displayed on pikes, one on each corner of the Market House.
The Victorian Town
The county-by-county record of pre-Famine Ireland, Hall's Ireland: Mr and Mrs Hall's Tour of 1840, found Lisburn recognisable as the settlement Rowden had formed more than two centuries before. Believing that between Drum Bridge and Lough Neagh the people were "almost exclusively" of English and Welsh extraction, the Halls ventured that in no town in Ireland were "the happy effects of English taste and industry more conspicuous". With the formation in 1836 of the Lisburn Cricket Club, the Halls might have noted that English taste also extended to sport and leisure.
To the visitors the town still appeared in 1840 to consist "principally of one long street" (Bow Street) at the Market Square end of which stood the cathedral. An "interesting and picturesque church", it contained "two very remarkable monuments". One is of "the great and good Jeremy Taylor" (1613–1667), sometime Bishop of Down and Conor (reputed "Shakespeare of the Divines" and former chaplain to Charles I). The other is to the memory of Lieutenant William Dobbs killed in the capture of his vessel, HMS Drake, by the American privateer John Paul Jones (an engagement in Belfast Lough in 1778 that spurred formation of the Volunteer movement).
The Halls would have been able to proceed the eight miles to Belfast on the newly completed Ulster Railway line. The line from Belfast was continued to Portadown and, with the completion of the Boyne Viaduct, connected with Dublin in 1855. A junction out of Lisburn at Knockmore, established further service to Banbridge and Newcastle and to Antrim and Derry. Lisburn's present railway station, built for the Great Northern Railway Company, dates from 1878.