One of England's more remote areas, Saddleworth, always has been and still remains a borderland shared between a number of distinct jurisdictions. In secular terms, eighteenth-century Saddleworth formed one of the most westerly parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire, occupying the moorland valleys of the upper Tame and its tributaries on what was otherwise the Lancastrian side of the Pennine ridge. In ecclesiastical terms, Saddleworth was a parochial chapelry within the parish of Rochdale, and represented the easternmost extension of the Lancastrian part of the archdeaconry of Chester in the Chester diocese.

Its inhabitants had, from the fifteenth century at the latest, got their livelihood from a combination of pastoral agriculture and domestic textile manufacture, characteristic of the northern moorland economy. During the eighteenth century, they participated in the great leap forward of the Yorkshire woollen industry, benefiting, in particular, from a plentiful supply of water power to turn fulling and scribbling mills and the new spinning machinery. Between 1740 and 1792, the local production of woollen cloth increased by over 400 per cent in quantity and almost 800 per cent in value, and this was not the only economic development. Proximity to the dynamic textile economy of its neighbour Oldham led, during the nineteenth century, to a penetration of the western parts of Saddleworth by the cotton industry, and by 1838 some thirty-nine local cotton mills were together employing a workforce of over 2,000.