Ancoats Hall

Ancoats Hall in Ancoats, Manchester, England, was a post-medieval country house built in 1609 by Oswald Mosley, a member of the family who were Lords of the Manor of Manchester. The old timber-framed hall, built in the early 17th century, was described by John Aiken in his 1795 book Description of the country from 30 to 40 miles around Manchester. The old hall was demolished in the 1820s and replaced by a brick building in the early neo-Gothic style. The new hall, at the eastern end of Great Ancoats Street between Every Street and Palmerston Street, was demolished in the 1960s.

Oswald Mosley who bought the land on which the hall was built in 1609 from the Byrons of Clayton Hall, was a nephew of Sir Nicholas Mosley. The house was sequestered by Parliament after Oswald's son Nicholas Mosley supported the king in the Civil War, but was returned after payment of a £120 fine. The house remained in the family until Sir John Mosley inherited it from a cousin in 1779 and preferring to live on his estate in Staffordshire, sold it. For a period the embalmed body of Hannah Beswick (known as the Manchester Mummy) was kept at the Hall.

In his book, Lancashire Gleanings (1883), William Axon tells of the "curious Manchester tradition" that the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, visited the town, in disguise, in 1744 and stayed with Sir Oswald Mosley at Ancoats Hall for several weeks, to assess whether the people of Manchester were "attached to the interests of his family". The following year, when the Jacobite army rode into Manchester, a young girl was said to have recognised the prince as the "handsome young man of genteel deportment" who had stayed at the Hall and who came to the Swan Inn, where she lived, to read the London newspapers three times a week. As the prince passed by the inn with his army in 1745 she exclaimed, "Father, father, that is the gentleman who gave me the half-crown" but her father drove her back into the house with severe threats if she ever mentioned that circumstance again. Axon was not fully convinced by the story as he could find no other evidence for it other than an account in the Sir Oswald Mosley's Family Memoirs, printed for private circulation.

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