THE good folk of Harrogate would not want it shouting from their elegant Georgian rooftops, so keep it under your hat. But the first written reference to a town now justly famous for its genteel teashops and healing waters was about a mugging.

In September 1332, 'John of Harrogate' was up before the court of the Royal Forest, of which the town was a part, charged with assault and trespass. No doubt the justices treated this matter with the seriousness it deserved, although no more was heard of John.

These rum doings open a new book, simply titled Harrogate, part of Tempus publishing's history and guide series. In his always absorbing account, the author Malcolm Neesam, a well-known Harrogate historian and former librarian at York, takes us from the town's earliest times through its Georgian heyday to its recent renaissance. At the back is a walking tour of modern Harrogate.

Along the way the reader learns many fascinating facts. Did you know, for example, that in 17th-century England, at least 80 per cent of the population had various kinds of internal parasitic worms? Or that, in 1901, Harrogate boasted the largest concentration of domestic servants in West Yorkshire?

Early in his account, Mr Neesam stresses the town's great good fortune in its association with the Duchy of Lancaster. This dates back to 1372 when the second duke was given the Royal Forest of Knaresborough, which included Harrogate.

In 1399 Henry IV declared that the Duchy of Lancaster would be forever held as a royal possession. "This is why from 1399 until the Great Enclosure of 1778, Harrogate was owned by the monarchs of England, who indeed - through the Duchy inheritance - continued to own large parts of the town after 1778, including the famous Harrogate Stray," Mr Neesam writes.

This meant the Duchy maintained law and order, even during the Civil War, gave the Stray to the public, laid down strict building standards and contributed in countless other ways to the town's long-term prosperity.

Harrogate's second stroke of luck was its liquid assets: the town's finest boast is the title 'England's first spa'. Four hundred and thirty years ago, William Slingsby discovered the mineral waters of Tewit Well.

Slingsby was a friend of Dr Timothy Bright. Dr Bright was in the perfect position to promote the new well, as he was for a time the personal physician to Queen Elizabeth I. He immediately named the well 'the English Spaw', the first recorded use of the name spa to refer to an English resort.

The health-giving powers of the water soon encouraged well-to-do people from near and far to come to the town.

"Visitors to the 'English Spaw' during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries probably consisted of half a dozen patients per month, who were almost certainly accompanied by their own physicians," writes Mr Neesam.

"Some visitors stayed in York, an important medical centre at the time, and easily within a day's journey of Harrogate. Others stayed in smaller towns such as Boroughbridge, Knaresborough, Otley and Wetherby.

"But increasingly, visitors lodged with the Harrogate farmers, whose traditional farms provided basic accommodation, good fresh food, and provision for their horses. Indeed, many of eighteenth and nineteenth century Harrogate's great hotels have their origins in the former farmhouses which were gradually transformed, by the addition of rooms and buildings, to accommodate ever-growing visitor numbers."

Many residents benefited from the passing trade, not least John Metcalfe, better known as 'Blind Jack, the Yorkshire road-maker', responsible for many of the highways.

He was a colourful character. "In 1732, Metcalfe was invited to Harrogate to succeed the retiring fiddler at the Queen's Head, where he became such a celebrity as to be a regular Harrogate fixture, providing the town's first transport-hire service, arranging races and eloping with the daughter of the Granby's landlord on the very eve of her wedding to another." The Granby was a major inn in High Harrogate.

During Georgian times, the town expanded to cope with the tourist trade. A theatre was built in 1788, which could not have survived on the patronage of Harrogate's 500 residents alone. Seats cost a shilling, quite an expense, and guests often arrived in sedan chair or by carriage. This was often a precarious journey, given the condition of the Stray.

Harrogate's reputation as a healthy place to be was underlined in the national cholera outbreak in 1832. That August, the York Herald reported that Harrogate had enjoyed an especially busy summer, commenting "we are not surprised at this, for the health of the place was never better and it has long been considered a most safe refuge from the dangers of infection and the ravages of the pestilence".

Ten years later the Royal Pump Room opened. This was, according to Mr Neesam, "the first public building of any merit since the Workhouse of 1810, and one which could compete with the private sector's developments of the Promenade Room, Victoria and Montpellier Baths, and Royal Spa Rooms.

"These buildings gave Harrogate all the facilities of a modern early Victorian Spa, and, together with the great hotels, inns, and private terraces and villas, they ensured that the town could develop without destroying the very atmosphere which - in those pre-railway times - was so valued by discerning customers."

The Victorians' passion for science meant that the waters of Harrogate were subjected to exhaustive analysis. At the same time all manner of new water treatments were being developed, many allied to mechanical, and later electrical, devices.

Among the treatments available in the mid-1800s were warm baths; plunge, shower and spouting cold baths; shower baths, hot air baths and vapour baths.

When Dr Arthur Roberts published Use And Abuse Of The Harrogate Mineral Waters in 1909, the list had grown to include: slipper baths, Sitz baths, Turkish baths, hot air baths, Russian baths, brine baths, needle baths and peat or mud baths.

Among the new developments Dr Roberts reported were electrical treatments such as ozone and light treatments and Dr Schnee's "four-cell baths for cataphoresis".

Bringing the story up to date, Mr Neesam charts Harrogate's decline and resurrection. By 1945, after six years of war, Harrogate "looked shabby", he writes. Successive councils in the Forties and Fifties tried to secure the town's role as an economically viable spa, while looking for alternative sources of income and employment.

Its potential role as a conference centre was recognised 50 years ago, but an ambitious municipal plan to build an enormous leisure complex on the Royal Hall estate was scuppered when the Government tightened local authority spending restrictions.

Harrogate ultimately did develop into a major conference centre. By 1993, it was only behind Birmingham and London, with an annual expenditure by conference delegates in Harrogate put at £140 million.

Harrogate by Malcolm Neesam is published by Tempus, price £12.99