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I can confirm that 'Penny Lane' is recorded on the Lancashire & Furness map of 1850/51.
Properties called 'Oakfield, 'Grove House' and 'Grove Cottage' are the only housing indicated. The railway, and railway bridge are also indicated. The rest is farmland.
I can't publish the map here, as it's copywrite protected.
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For some reason 'Three Good Lives and Twenty-One Years' was the standard Liverpool lease. Other towns had their own particular standards.
Penny "Lane" suggests that it was not intended by Penny to be a residential street when it was named. Lanes tend to be thoroughfares in the most literal sense of the word. For instance Cromptons Lane was named after Peter Crompton who owned Eton House (nowadays Bishop Eton). It was the lane that led to his dwelling.
Penny lane must have been named before 1800 as James Penny died circa 1799.
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Was it ever defined numerically what 'Three Good Lives and Twenty-One Years' amounted to? Or was that not the point here? As lives are variable, so to are the leases?
Do we know the name of Penny's house?
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I think (although I do not have the book I read it in to hand) that they used the biblical 'threescore and ten' to mean a lifetime. That would be about 70 years perhaps? So altogether that would be 231 years I think.
Penny lived in numerous places, but I can't find any reference to a mansion house as such. Towards the end of his life I think he was living at Mount Pleasant.
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Very interesting, thanks. There must have been a shift between thinking in terms of natural cycles - sunrise, sunset, life and death, three good lives [and 21 years] and increased use of linear abstractions...numbers and clock-time. The day's measured. Noon in Liverpool was always different than noon in London, until the railways regularised them. I guess the shift from agriculture to industry in the cities.
Penny - ok thanks.