A spectre haunts Towneley Hall: the spectre of lordship. It takes the form of a boggart – that is, a supernatural presence – crying regret at having enclosed the nearby commons of Horelaw, Hollinhey and Hollinclough, bordering the Lancashire town of Burnley. This chapter begins with the identification of the sorrowful boggart and with what this might have to say about early modern social relations. The first part of the chapter tells the story of the enclosure of Horelaw, Hollinhey and Hollinclough in the early sixteenth century. It goes on to consider the subsequent contestation of that enclosure over the course of the sixteenth century. The second half of the chapter deals with the significance of curses and ghosts in the history of enclosure, and with the local memorialisation of these enclosures. It touches on a particularly chilling practice of anti-enclosure protest noted by John Walter: that of cursing enclosing lords to a ghostly afterlife, the incarnation of spectral lordship.

Whitaker couldn't establish the identity of the encloser: ‘the offence has been remembered long after it had been redressed, and even when the name of the offending party was forgotten’. Whitaker was wrong: the name of the boggart was not forgotten. His inability to name the ghost of Towneley Hall was corrected a generation later by the Victorian antiquarian Thomas Turner, who identified the boggart as Sir John Towneley. Turner had this to say of Sir John: