Clitheroe

What did Armitage and Rugeley have to do with parliamentary elections in Lancashire? In the eighteenth century, Nathaniel Lister of Armitage Park and his cousin Assheton Curzon of Hagley Hall belonged to families that controlled the two parliamentary seats for Clitheroe. For decades they cooperated, until a bitter family dispute in 1780 turned their comfortable arrangement into an extraordinarily expensive electoral battle.