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Cleckheaton is a town in the metropolitan borough of Kirklees, West Yorkshire, England. Historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, it is situated south of Bradford, east of Brighouse, west of Batley and south-west of Leeds. It is at the centre of the Spen Valley and was the major town in the former borough of Spenborough. Cleckheaton has a history as a mill town and forms part of the Heavy Woollen District.

The Spen Valley was once heavily wooded. Evidence of human habitation in Mesolithic and Neolithic times has been found in the area. Roman remains have been found in the valley and it is thought that roads from York to Chester, and from settlements in Halifax and Wakefield, passed through Cleckheaton.

The name Cleckheaton derives from the Old English heahtun meaning 'high settlement'. The Old Norse word klakkr meaning 'lump/hill' was added to the name later on.

Cleckheaton was in the ancient parish of Birstall. A chapel of ease, known as the White Chapel (later Whitechapel) was established.

The area was very disorganised for a long time after the Norman Conquest and the richest townships at that time were still the richest 300 years later as the Poll Tax returns of 1379 show. They also demonstrate the lack of administration as only the richest four of the 227 families living in the Spen Valley were made to pay more than the 4d (approx. 2p) minimum tax. These tax returns also show the recent deviation from the traditional sources of wealth in the area (i.e. farming and allied trades). These were centred on textiles and included dyeing, weaving and fulling (common names in the area nowadays still recall these early trades: Lister- dyer, Webster- weaver, Walker- fuller).

After the Reformation, Kirklees Priory was largely destroyed, many families were driven from the area and new non-aristocratic lords of the manor who were sympathetic to Protestantism were introduced by Elizabeth I, as was a puritan clergyman who was installed at Birstall Church. By 1570, at the time of the Rising of the Northern Earls, the last of the old Norman noble families had been swept away. Sir John Neville went into exile and forfeited his estate and Thomas Hussey (heir to the de Tilly family of Oakwell Hall) was imprisoned in the Tower of London for some time before being pardoned.

By the 17th century land-owning farmers were finding it increasingly difficult as were their landlords and some payments were still in kind as farmers had no money to pay their debts. Meanwhile, the textile workers were becoming more and more prosperous and paid less and less attention to their hard up and increasingly impotent landlords. During the English Civil War the clothiers were on one side and the landlords on the other. Lords of the area were made Royalist officers and made some progress such as at the Battle of Adwalton Moor about a mile east of Birkenshaw and the siege of Bradford, before the Parliamentarians took control of the area.