The so-called Lindow Man (a well-preserved twenty-two hundred-year-old corpse unearthed in a peat bog near Manchester, England, in 1984), presumably a human sacrifice, consumes a burnt bannock cake, a traditional last meal for Celtic sacrificial victims, and is first bludgeoned and garroted, then his throat is slit and he is dropped into a pool of water. (The complexity of this ritual execution indicates, to some archaeologists, that he was an important member of Celtic society, perhaps even a druid. The absence of bodily scars—other than those incurred during the sacrifice—tend to indicate he was of the noble, rather than the warrior, class.)

Manchester, a town located along the River Irwell about thirty miles (thirty-five kilometers) to the east of Liverpool, and whose name drives from the Roman town of Mamucium, the site’s earliest settlement, is in 1359 declared a market town.

The ground is frozen to twenty-seven inches near Manchester; ...

An unknown English glassworker in 1720 apparently first prepares crude hydrofluoric acid, a highly toxic and corrosive solution of hydrogen fluoride in water.

Lord Derby abandons the defense of Manchester on November 23.

A three hundred-strong Manchester Regiment is raised in the town.

...Thomas Percival at Manchester and ...

Ann Lee has risen to prominence by urging other believers to preach more publicly concerning the imminent second coming, and to attack sin more boldly and unconventionally.

She speaks of visions and messages from God, claiming that she has received a vision from God the message that celibacy and confession of sin are the only true road to salvation and the only way in which the Kingdom of God can be established on the earth.

She is frequently imprisoned for breaking the Sabbath by dancing and shouting, and for blasphemy. 

She claims to have had many miraculous escapes from death.

She tells of being examined by four clergymen of the Established Church, claiming that she spoke to them for four hours in seventy-two tongues.

While in prison in Manchester for fourteen days, she said she had had a revelation that "a complete cross against the lusts of generation, added to a full and explicit confession, before witnesses, of all the sins committed under its influence, was the only possible remedy and means of salvation."

After this, probably in 1770, she had been chosen by the Society as "Mother in spiritual things" and calls herself "Ann, the Word" and also "Mother Ann."

After being released from prison a second time, witnesses say Mother Ann performed a number of miracles, including healing the sick.

Lee eventually decides to leave England for America in order to escape the persecution (i.e., multiple arrests and stays in prison) she has experienced in Great Britain.

Ann Lee was born in Manchester, England, and baptized privately at Manchester Collegiate Church (now Manchester Cathedral) on June 1, 1742, at the age of six.

Her parents are members of a distinct branch of the Society of Friends, and too poor to afford their children even the rudiments of education.

Ann Lee's father, John Lees, is a blacksmith during the day, and a tailor at night.

It is probable that Ann Lee's original surname was Lees, but somewhere through time it changed to Lee.

Little is known about her mother other than she was a very religious woman.

When Ann was young she worked in a cotton factory, then she worked as a cutter of hatter's fur, and later as a cook in a Manchester infirmary.

In 1758 she had joined the Wardley's, an English sect founded by Jane and preacher James Wardley; this is the precursor to the Shaker sect.

Ann believes in and teaches her followers that it is possible to attain perfect holiness by giving up sexual relations.

Like her predecessors, the Wardleys, she teaches that the shaking and trembling are caused by sin being purged from the body by the power of the Holy Spirit, purifying the worshiper.

Beginning during her youth, Ann Lee was uncomfortable with sexuality, especially her own.

This repulsion towards sexual activity had continued and manifested itself most poignantly in her repeated attempts to avoid marriage and remain single.

Eventually her father forced her to marry Abraham Stanley.

They were married on January 5, 1761 at Manchester Collegiate Church.

She became pregnant four times, all of her children died during infancy.

Her difficult pregnancies and the loss of four children were traumatic experiences that contributed to Ann Lee's dislike of sexual relations.

Lee has developed radical religious convictions that advocate celibacy and the abandonment of marriage, as well as the importance of pursuing perfection in every facet of life.

She differs from the Quakers, who, though they support gender equality, do not believe in forbidding sexuality within marriage.

John Dalton, born into a Quaker family at Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth, Cumberland, England as the son of a weaver, had joined his older brother Jonathan at age fifteen in running a Quaker school in nearby Kendal.

Dalton seems to have considered taking up law or medicine around 1790, but his projects were not met with encouragement from his relatives—Dissenters were barred from attending or teaching at English universities—and he remained at Kendal until he moved n the spring of 1793 to Manchester.

Mainly through John Gough, a blind philosopher and polymath to whose informal instruction he owed much of his scientific knowledge, Dalton had won appointment as teacher of mathematics and natural philosophy at the "New College" in Manchester, a dissenting academy, remaining in that position until 1800, when the college's worsening financial situation led him to resign his post and begin a new career in Manchester as a private tutor for mathematics and natural philosophy.

Dalton's early life was highly influenced by a prominent Eaglesfield Quaker named Elihu Robinson, a competent meteorologist and instrument maker, who had gotten him interested in problems of mathematics and meteorology.

During his years in Kendal, Dalton had contributed solutions of problems and questions on various subjects to the Gentlemen's and Ladies' Diaries, and in 1787 he had begun to keep a meteorological diary in which, during the succeeding fifty-seven years, he will enter more than two hundred thousand observations.

He also rediscovered George Hadley's theory of atmospheric circulation (now known as the Hadley cell) around this time.

Dalton's first publication, Meteorological Observations and Essays (1793), contains the seeds of several of his later discoveries.

However, in spite of the originality of his treatment, little attention was paid to them by other scholars.

A second work by Dalton, Elements of English Grammar, is published in 1801.

Dalton in 1794, shortly after his arrival in Manchester, had been elected a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, the "Lit & Phil", and a few weeks later, he had communicated his first paper on "Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours", in which he postulated that shortage in color perception was caused by discoloration of the liquid medium of the eyeball.

In fact, a shortage of color perception in some people had not even been formally described or officially noticed until Dalton wrote about his own.

Although Dalton's theory is to lose credence in his own lifetime, the thorough and methodical nature of his research into his own visual problem is so broadly recognized that Daltonism becomes a common term for color blindness.

Examination of his preserved eyeball in 1995 demonstrated that Dalton actually had a less common kind of color blindness, deuteroanopia, in which medium wavelength sensitive cones are missing (rather than functioning with a mutated form of their pigment, as in the most common type of color blindness, deuteroanomaly).

Besides the blue and purple of the spectrum he was able to recognize only one color, yellow.

He followed that paper on the subject with many others on diverse topics on rain and dew and the origin of springs, on heat, the color of the sky, steam, the auxiliary verbs and participles of the English language and the reflection and refraction of light.

John Dalton's investigations concerned with the atomic theory in chemistry, with which his name is inseparably associated, are the most important of all.

It has been proposed that this theory was suggested to him either by researches on ethylene (olefiant gas) and methane (carburetted hydrogen) or by analysis of nitrous oxide (protoxide of azote) and nitrogen dioxide (deutoxide of azote), both views resting on the authority of Thomas Thomson.

However, a study of Dalton's own laboratory notebooks, discovered in the rooms of the Lit & Phil, concluded that so far from Dalton being led by his search for an explanation of the law of multiple proportions to the idea that chemical combination consists in the interaction of atoms of definite and characteristic weight, the idea of atoms arose in his mind as a purely physical concept, forced upon him by study of the physical properties of the atmosphere and other gases.

The first published indications of this idea are to be found at the end of his paper on the absorption of gases already mentioned, which is read on October 21, 1803, though it will not be published until 1805.

Here he says: Why does not water admit its bulk of every kind of gas alike?

This question I have duly considered, and though I am not able to satisfy myself completely I am nearly persuaded that the circumstance depends on the weight and number of the ultimate particles of the several gases.

Dalton proceeds to print his first published table of relative atomic weights.

Six elements appear in this table, namely hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus, with the atom of hydrogen conventionally assumed to weigh 1.

Dalton also begins using symbols to represent the atoms of different elements.

In his laboratory notebook under the date 6 September 1803, there appears a list in which he sets out the relative weights of the atoms of a number of elements, derived from analysis of water, ammonia, carbon dioxide, etc., by chemists of the time.

It appears, then, that confronted with the problem of calculating the relative diameter of the atoms of which, he was convinced, all gases were made, Dalton has used the results of chemical analysis to propound his atomic theory of matter.

The late James Hutton’s 1795 Theory of the Earth receives wider attention when his friend, Scottish mathematician and geologist John Playfair, publishes the concisely written Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth in 1803.