Cornell Alniversity Library
BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE
SAGE EN DOW MENT FUND
THE GIFT OF
Henry W. Saae
1891
~
eee ee ol = el
CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Cornell University
The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library.
There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text.
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924088434547
The Victoria thistory of the Counties of England
EDITED BY WILLIAM PAGE, F.S.A.
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
VOLUME II
a2
This Histcry is tssued to Subscribers only By Archibald Constable & Company Limited and printed hy Eyre & Spottiswoode Limited HAL. Printers of London
INSCRIBED TO THE MEMORY OF HER LATE MAJESTY
QUEEN VICTORIA WHO GRACIOUSLY GAVE THE TITLE TO AND ACCEPTED THE DEDICATION OF THIS HISTORY
THE
VICTORIA HISTORY OF THE COUNTY OF
LANCASTER
EDITED BY WILLIAM FARRER anv J. BROWNBILL, M.A.
VOLUME TWO
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LIMITED
1908
CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO
PAGE Dedication . ; a 7 F 7 ‘i s ‘ . : ‘ é v Contents : : 3 : 5 ‘ : - ix List of Illustrations na Maps . : : é : F 3 e ‘ ‘ xiii Editorial Note : : P ‘ F ‘ F 5 i : 3 4 : A xv
Ecclesiastical History :— To the Reformation . . 5 By Pror. James Tait, M.A. . 5 . : : I From the Reformation 2 : By W. A. Suaw, D.Litr. . : i . - 40 Religious Houses :—
Introduction . . - r By Pror. James Tait, M.A. . 3 ‘ 3 - 102 Priory of Penwortham : , 5 5 3 S 3 < : - 104 Priory of Lytham. ‘ " a ee x5 : 7 . . . 107 Priory of Upholland . 2 : 7 55 3 . . F i . Tl Cell of Kersal . - : : a 36 5 é - A * . 113 Abbey of Furness. : : By F. M. Powicxz, M.A... : ‘ : . 114 Abbey of Wyresdale . : é By Pror. James Tait, M.A. . : : 3 2 31 Abbey of Whalley. F , 5 *” 9 : 7 : , « 133 Priory of Conishead . ‘i : 35 45 35 . 5 3 : . 140 Priory of Cartmel . . 3 Sy 3 $s ‘ ; i 5 @ 1A3 Priory of Burscough . ‘ - 53 35 > , F 5 : . 148 Priory of Cockerham ‘i , 3 » 3 ‘ . ‘ ‘ 2 152 Abbey of Cockersand . a 3 PA 55 ‘ 5 ‘ F 2 nee Priory of Hornby. : : 35 3 55 é F ‘ F . 160 House of Dominican Friars, Lan-
caster : j : . = ss 3 . : ‘ : . 6y House of Franciscan Friars, Preston 5 3 5 i : ‘ ‘ - 162 House of Austin Friars, Warrington FF re ey 3 ; i 5 - 162 Hospital of St. Ney en
Preston : 5 ss si : . . 2 . 163 Hospital of St. race eats 5 35 si ; ‘ ‘ ‘ . 165 Gardiner’s Hospital, Lancaster . a ie a : ; é . . 166 Lathom Almshouse . y a 55 35 i P . % ‘ . 166 Hospital of St. Saviour, Stidd
under Longridge . : : 5 5 3 : ‘ F ‘ . 166 College of Upholland é ‘ #5 #5 - ; r ‘ ‘ . 166 College of Manchester 3 : 55 3 9) : 7 - . . 167 Priory of Lancaster . : ‘ 3 55 ms ‘ ; r . - 167
Political History :—
To the end of the oe of Henry VIII : By Pror. James Tart, M.A. ‘ a 175
From the Reign of Henry VIII. By Miss Auice Law, First Class Honours Hist. Trip. 218 Social and Economic History . : By Miss Atice Law, First-Class Honours Hist. Trip. 261 Table of Population, 1801-1901 By Georce S. Mincuin ‘ A ‘ j . 330
1x
CONTENTS
Industries :— Introduction
Natural Products
Copper Smelting
Coal Mining
Iron
Hardware and Allied Trades Watch-Making
Engineering. : : . Ordnance and Armaments . Shipbuilding
Textile Industries The Woollen Tadley The Linen Industry . The Cotton Industry . Felt-Hat Making The Silk Industry Calico Printing é Bleaching, Finishing, and oe Chemical Industries . India-rubber Soap Industry . Potteries and Glass. ‘ 5 Potteries . Glass : The Sugar Industry . The Paper Industry . Asbestos . Miscellaneous Industries Sea Fisheries Agriculture Forestry Sport Ancient and Modern Introduction Hunting . Staghounds Harriers Beagles Otter Hounds Coursing . Racing Flat Racing . Steeplechasing Polo Shooting . Duck Decoys Angling . Cricket
OF VOLUME TWO
By Pror. S. J. aki A., M.Com., and Douctas
Knoop, M.A. By Douctas Knoop, M.A.
” ” ”
By Dovuctas Knoop, M.A.
By Pror. S. J. Cuapman, M, A, M. ens. By Douctas Knoop, M.A.
” ” ”
” ” ”
” ” ”
By James Jounstone, B.Sc. aang: By W. H. R. Currzer
By Wittiam Farrer
Edited by the Rev. E. E. en M.A.
By Maj. Arruur WittoucuBy-OsBorne
” ” ”
By Harotp Brockrepank
By Maj. Artuur Wittoucupy-Osgorne .
By Maj. Arruur WitLoucupy-Osporne .
” ” ”
By Maj. ArrHur Wittoucupy-Osgorne .
By Sir Home Gorpox, Bart
x
PAGE
351 354 355 356 360 364 366 367 374 375 376 376 378 379 393 394 395 398 399 401 402 403 403 404 406 407 408 408 409 419 437
467 469 470 470 471 472 472 479 479 480 481 482 485 487 489
CONTENTS
Sport Ancient and Modern (continued) Rugby Football Golf Wrestling Bowls Tennis Cock-Fighting . Whippet Racing Ancient Earthworks :— Lancashire South of the Sands Lancashire North of the Sands Schools :— Introduction
The Royal Grammar School, Lancaster : ‘
Preston Grammar School The Harris Institute, Preston Middleton Grammar School Prescot Grammar School Manchester Schools . The Grammar School Hulme Grammar Schools
The Municipal rene School :
Farnworth Grammar School, Widnes
Blackburn Grammar schéall Stonyhurst College, Blackburn Liverpool Schools
The Grammar School
Liverpool Institution, Liverpool Institute, and sai oa College
Bolton-le-Moors Grammar School
The Church Institute School, Bolton-le-Moors F
Leyland Grammar School . The Boteler Grammar School,
Warrington . St. Michaels- pe aes Gane School . Winwick School : 5 A Whalley Grammar School . é Kirkham Grammar School . .
Penwortham Endowed School Clitheroe Grammar School . i Rochdale Grammar School .
Rivington and Blackrod Grammar School .
Blackrod School . . . Burnley School . . .
OF VOLUME TWO
By C. J. Bruce Marriott, M.A. . By the Rev. E. E. Doruinc, M.A..
By May. ArrHur WiLLoucHBy-OsporneE .
” ” ”
By Wittoucusy Garpner, F.L.S. . By H. Swainson Cowerr, F.S.A.
By A. F. Leacu, M.A., F.S.A.
” ” ”
” ” ”
By the Rev. H. J. Cuayror, M.A.
By A. F. Leacu, M.A.,, F.S.A.
2”? ” 9
” ” ”
By A. F. Leacu, M.A., F.S.A.
By A. F. Leacu, M.A., F.S.A.
By the Rev. H. J. Cuaytor, M.A.
By A. F. Leacu, M.A., F.S.A. By the Rev. H. J. Cuayror, M.A.
” ” ”
” ” ?
xl
PAGE
493 495 499 500 sol 502 504
5°7 555
561
561 569 574 574 578 578 578 589
589
589 59° 591 593 593
595 596
600 600
601
603 603 604 604 605 605 606
606 607 607
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
I—TO THE REFORMATION
HE ecclesiastical condition of the territory now included in Lancashire, during the period between the departure of the Romans and its conquest by Northumbria, is as obscure as its political organization.’ That it was already to some extent Christianized seems a reasonable inference from the establishment of a British missionary centre by Ninian at Whithern, in Galloway, beyond the bounds of the province, towards the close of the Roman occupation.’ ‘There is a possible trace of Irish influence at a later date, in the primitive little chapel at Heysham, near Morecambe, which is dedicated to St. Patrick. This is a plain rectangular oratory without a chancel, a form which may still be seen in early Irish cells, but of which there is no other instance going back beyond the Norman Conquest in any other English county save Cornwall, whose examples are undoubtedly Celtic.’ The site of the chapel, too, on a promon- tory (overlooking Morecambe Bay) is one which was very commonly chosen for Irish religious settlements. ‘The actual fabric of the chapel is perhaps Saxon, but it may have replaced an earlier building. A similar oratory may possibly have been connected with that cemetery at Kilgrimol, which is only mentioned as a boundary mark in the foundation charter of Lytham Priory.‘ This chapel, too, was close to the sea, which now covers its site.® In what, if any, diocese or dioceses the future Lancashire lay during this period, there is nothing to show. It has indeed been assumed that the diocese of Glasgow, established by St. Kentigern at the end of the sixth century, extended as far south as the Mersey. But this rests upon the further assumption that Kentigern’s patron, King Rhydderch of Alclud (Dumbarton), ruled over the whole district lying between Clyde and Mersey and bounded on the east by the hills that form the watershed ; a hypothesis which is
' See article on ‘ Political History.’ ? Vita Sti. Niniani (Historians of Scotland), v, 11.
* Baldwin Brown, The Arts in Early England, i, 311 ; ii, 30, 100-103, 2793 Trans. Lancs. and Ches. Antiq. Soc. v, 4. The chapel has the Irish feature of great length in proportion to its width. Internally it is 27 ft. long, while its width varies from nearly 9 ft. to less than 8 ft. Brown gives a plan, and figures the south doorway.
‘Farrer, Lancs. Pipe R. 346, 348.
® Local tradition regards this lost chapel as the original church of Lytham (Trans. Lancs. and Ches. Hist. Soc. (New Ser.), xiii, 95).
* Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, ii, 4.
2 I I
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
contradicted by one of the few pieces of fairly trustworthy evidence which are available for that age.’
If church dedications are any guide, Kentigern’s diocese did not extend southwards beyond the northern limits of the lake district. He is the patron saint of eight churches in Low Cumberland, but south of this there are no dedications to him.°
Among the invocations of Lancashire churches, one has been claimed as British. The St. Elfin to whom Warrington church is dedicated is indeed usually identified with Aelfwine, the young brother of Ecgfrith of Northum- bria, whose death in battle with the Mercians near the Trent, in 679, was lamented by both nations." But Aelfwine would normally give Elwin, and there is no historical connexion known between the Aelfwine in question and Warrington, while Elfin, it is said, occurs as a Celtic name in Geoffrey of Monmouth.
A new epoch in the history of the lands between the Mersey and the Solway opened with Ethelfrith’s great defeat of the Britons at Chester, in 613. The whole of this hitherto purely Celtic region was before long conquered by Northumbria, and brought into ecclesiastical dependence on the Northumbrian see of York, or on one or other of the three dioceses into which it was split up in 678—Lindisfarne, Hexham, and the narrower York. To the last-named, which comprised the present Yorkshire, then known as Deira, would naturally be attached those portions of the newly-conquered land which adjoined it on the west, including what is now Lancashire and the southern parts of the later counties of Cumberland and Westmorland. There is good reason for believing that the north-western boundary of the obedience of York was drawn now as it ran in the eleventh century, and, in fact, down to the formation of the diocese of Chester in 1541. This boundary followed the watershed between the Eden on the north and the Lune and Kent on the south to the head waters of the Derwent, along which it ran to the sea. It is a natural frontier which, as we have seen, may very well have been the southern limit of the diocese of Glasgow in Kentigern’s day, and perhaps down to Ecgfrith’s transference of Carlisle and its district to Cuthbert, that is, to the see of Lindisfarne. The changes just described are, in part at all events, alluded to in a well-known passage in Eddi’s life of Wilfrid, a passage which is not without its difficulties of interpretation. At the dedication of his church at Ripon about 675, Wilfrid, who had been bishop of York for
some five years, made a speech, the gist of which is reported by his faithful secretary and biographer :—
Stans itaque sanctus Wilfrithus ante altare, conversus ad populum, coram regibus (ie. Ecgfrith and Aelfwine) enumerans regiones, quas ante reges pro animabus suis et tunc in illa die, cum consensu et subscriptione episcoporum et omnium principum qui (sic) illi dederunt, lucide enuntiavit ; necnon et ea loca sancta in diversis regionibus, quae clerus Brytannus aciem gladii hostilis manu gentis nostrae fugiens deseruit. Erat quippe Deo placabile donum quod religiosi reges tam multas terras Deo ad serviendum pontifici nostro conscripserunt ; et haec sunt nomina regionum—Juxta Rippel, et in Gaedyne, et in regione Dunutinga, et in Caetlaevum, in caeterisque locis,!
“ Nennius, Hist. Brit. 75.
* Ferguson, Hist. of Cumb. 114. Even this extension is perhaps doubtful. The Kentigern dedications may not go back beyond the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the district of Carlisle was in Scottish hands
* Trans. Lancs. and Ches. Hist. Soc. (New Ser.), xviii, 34. ” Bede, Hist. Eccl. iv, 21 :
" Raine, Historians of the Church of York (Rolls Ser.), i, 25-6. , a“)
2
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
The mention of the Ribble (Rippel) indicates generally the position of the first of these regions granted to Wilfrid, in other words, to the see of York. It was undoubtedly part of the later Lancashire, but what part is not so clear. In quoting this passage, Leland (unless it was an interpolation in the copy of Eddi’s work which he followed) interjects after Rippel the explanation, ‘id est Hacmundernes,’” thus identifying the district in question with the land between the Ribble and the Cocker, which from the tenth century at latest has borne the name of Amounderness.* Canon Raine, who overlooked this passage, was inclined to give a wider extension to the ‘regio juxta Rippel’ which would make it include the greater part of the present Lancashire, the district extending from the Mersey as far north as the Cocker. In support of this view he appealed to the list of the gifts to Wilfrid as given in a lost twelfth-century life of the saint by Peter of Blois, also quoted by Leland. This list, which differs from Eddi’s both in addition and omission, runs as follows :—‘ Rible et Hasmundesham et Marchesiae et in regione Duninga.’ “ Canon Raine takes the earlier part of this to mean Amounderness, and the ‘terra inter Ripam et Mersham’ of Domesday Book, the country between the Ribble and Mersey. He has, of course, to assume that the sentence is badly dislocated, as well as corrupt in its forms. Peter of Blois’ interpretation of an ambiguous phrase written down five centuries before his time cannot carry any weight of its own, but it is possible that the meaning put upon it in the passage first cited from Leland is really too narrow, and that ‘juxta Rippel’ covered the districts both south and north of that river.
The first name in Eddi’s list at least gives a starting point for identifica- tion, but it is followed by three unknowns. If we bear in mind that the later archdeaconry of Richmond, in the diocese of York, extended over the Pennine Range to the western sea, and included, besides Amounderness, the rest of the present north Lancashire and the southern halves of the present counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, its northern boundary in this direction being the Cumberland Derwent and the Eden watershed, it is tempting to locate the unknown names among the royal gifts to Wilfrid in this quarter, and so obtain a direct record of its annexation to the see of York. This Canon Raine attempted to do. Gaedyne, indeed, he was inclined to identify with Gilling (Bede’s ‘in Getlingum ’) in Yorkshire, and accounted for its appearing in this collocation on the theory that as it contained the nearest monastery to the new western annexations, they may have been placed under the charge of its abbot. The ‘regio Dunutinga,’ he thought, might be the country watered by the Duddon (Duddondale, locally Dunner- dale) and Caetlaevum Cartmel. But Cartmel cannot be identified with Caetlaevum ; the other identifications, too, are equally unconvincing, and after all there is perhaps no necessity to look for the whole of the places mentioned in this quarter. Eddi’s words are certainly more consistent with the view that Wilfrid was enumerating royal gifts of land in different quarters than with the supposition that he was describing a great addition to his diocese." The latter may more probably be referred to in the mention of the holy places from which the British clergy had been driven.
™ Leland, Colectanea, iii, 109. 8 Kemble, Cod. Dip/. No. 352. “4 Leland, Col, ili, 110. ® As regards Gaedyne, Mr. Stevenson tells me that Gae may in Southern Northumbrian have produced Yea, and points out that curiously enough there is a Yeadon in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
3
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
The ecclesiastical dependence of the district about the Ribble upon York before 675 is in any case satisfactorily established by the passage Just discussed. According to one interpretation of another passage (in Bede) there was a Northumbrian religious settlement at Whalley as early as 664. Tuda, bishop of Lindisfarne, who died in that year, is said to have been buried ‘in monaster1o quod dicitur Paegnalaech.’ ™ The Anglo-Saxon ‘ P and ‘“W’ are of course easily confused, and the Chronicle in reproducing this passage calls the place Wagele.” In a later and undoubted reference to Whalley, however, the form used in the Chronicle is ‘ aet Hweallaege,’ ® and Smith’s identification of Paegnalaech with the Pincanheal which was the meeting place of more than one Northumbrian Witenagemot, and is generally supposed to be repre- sented by the later Finchale near Durham, seems much more likely to be right. The existence of a religious centre at Whalley at an early, if uncertain, date, is, however, independently supported by tradition and its early crosses."
Although Eddi’s Caetlaevum cannot be identified with Cartmel, there is positive evidence that this district (now in the Lancashire hundred of Lons- dale, north of the Sands) was, before 685, within the obedience of the Northumbrian church. King Ecgfrith gave it ‘and all the Britons with it’ to St. Cuthbert after he had raised a boy from the dead ‘ in villa quae dicitur Exanforda.’ Cuthbert entrusted it, along with the vill of Suth-Gedluit, given to him on the same occasion, to the charge of Abbot Cyneferth, son of Cugincg, who ‘ ordered them with wisdom at his discretion.’ If Cartmel was thereby attached to Cuthbert’s diocese of Lindisfarne it was not destined to remain permanently part of that see.
More than two centuries elapse without a gleam of further light upon the ecclesiastical condition of the lands that were to be Lancashire. The Anglian, and later the Northman, settled sparsely in this rugged depen- dency of Northumbria, and a limited number of religious centres was doubtless established among them, closer together in the low country by the Irish Sea than in the moorlands beneath the Pennine Range. ‘The only churches, indeed, whose dedications have been thought to afford presumptive evidence of their origin in this period, are those of St. Oswald at Winwick and St. Elfin at Warrington, if indeed the latter was a Northumbrian saint.” But early crosses, or portions of such, and other sculptured stones are found south of the Ribble at Bolton and Winwick, as well as at Whalley and north of that river at Heysham, Halton, Bolton-le-Sands, Hornby, Melling, and Lancaster, the last with an Anglian inscription.” The obscurity is not broken until about the close of the first quarter of the tenth century, when the district in which the two churches above mentioned lay, the land ‘ between Ribble
'6 Bede, Hist. Eccl. iii, 27. In the Anglo-Saxon version it appears as Peginaleah.
" Angl.-Sax. Chron. sub anno 664 ; Leland (Col. ii, 143) has Vegnalech.
'8 Angl.-Sax. Chron. sub anno 798. It is Walalege in Symeon of Durham, Hist. Regum. (Rolls Ser.), ii
9 In the fourteenth century traditionally ascribed to St. Augustine (Whalley Coucher, 186) see
” Sym. Dun. Hist. de St. Cuthd. (Rolls Ser.), i, 200. celae
"See above. The advowson of Winwick was given by Roger of Poitou to the canons of St. Osw Nostell (Testa de Nevill, 405 4), but the mention of the church in . swald ae its ea was due ae connexion. Domesday hardly supports a suggestion that
? See V.C.H. Lancs.1, 262 ; Trans. Lancs. and Ches. Antig. Soc. v, 1-18. Bi transition from the Anglian to the Danish period in one of ie Halton oe oe oF the Monuments, ili, 1843 Victor, Die Northumbrischen Runensteine (1895), 23; Taylor, Anct. Cr Soeur Wells «f Lancs. The inscription on a stone found in the wall of Manchester Cathedral thou h a os ce than those already mentioned. , gh Saxon, is later
4
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
and Mersey,’ was wrested from Northumbria by Edward the Elder or Athelstan, attached to Mercia and transferred from the diocese of York to the Mercian diocese of Lichfield. The lands beyond the Ribble continued to be a dependency of Northumbria, and in the obedience of York. The ecclesiastical change thus effected was destined to be more lasting than the civil one, for the Ribble remained an ecclesiastical frontier down to the Reformation, when the districts which had long been united for civil pur- poses in the county of Lancaster were brought together for ecclesiastical purposes in Henry VIII’s new diocese of Chester.
A few years later we seem to get a little light upon the district north of the Ribble. According to a charter entered in the York Registers, Athel- stan, who annexed Northumbria in 927, granted the whole region of Amoun- derness to the cathedral church of St. Peter, York, in perpetuity.% The king asserts that he had bought it with a large sum of his own money, but does not say from whom. The omission is supplied by the twelfth-century ‘ Lives of the Archbishops of York,’** in which it-is stated that Athelstan purchased it @ paganis, i.e. from the Northmen to whom the district owed the name it now bore. A grant that depended upon a bargain which subsequent pagan invaders might not consider binding upon them was clearly so pre- carious that the absence of any further trace of St. Peter’s ownership of Amounderness need not force us to question the genuineness of Athelstan’s gift, although his charter is not without its difficulties.* Just before the Norman Conquest Amounderness was in the possession of Tostig, earl of Northumbria.”
These meagre and ambiguous notices exhaust the information yielded by Anglo-Saxon sources as to the ecclesiastical state of the remote and backward region with which we are concerned. With the advent of the Normans more light is forthcoming, though it is still far less abundant than could be wished.
There is a strong probability that a fair proportion of the parishes into which Lancashire was divided during the later Middle Ages had already been marked out before the Conquest, while there was as yet no county of Lan- caster.” Only seventeen or eighteen indeed are named or implied in Domes- day ; but the Conqueror’s geld-book is notoriously erratic in its mention of
*S Historians of Ch. of York (Rolls Ser.), iii, 1, and (without the boundaries) Kemble, Cod. Dip], No. 352 ; Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 703. Can the place-name Bispham, which in the eleventh century was Biscopham, be brought into connexion with this grant or with the earlier one to Wilfrid?
™ Hist. of Ch. of York, ii, 239.
* It professes to be granted on 7 June, in 930, in the sixth year of Athelstan, at Nottingham, but the in- diction, epact and concurrent given are those of 934, to which year Birch suggests that it should be trans- ferred ; the more so because its general clauses are exactly those of Athelstan’s charter to Aelfwold granted at Winchester 28 May, 934; Birch, No. 702. If it really belongs to 934 Birch must be wrong in attributing Athelstan’s London charter to St. Mary’s, Worcester (Cart. Sax. No. 701) to this year, for it has exactly the same dating, down to the day of the month, as that we are discussing. A further result of the adoption of the later date would be to put the appointment of Wulfstan as archbishop of York, which appears from the charter to have been concurrent with or only slightly prior to the grant of Amounderness, four years later than has been usually supposed. The original charter is unfortunately not producible.
** Dom. Bk. i, 3014.
” The county boundaries as ultimately settled did not everywhere coincide with parish boundaries. In Lonsdale, where the county boundary was drawn after the Conquest, Dalton township was left in the parish of Burton in Kendal, and Ireby in the Yorkshire parish of Thornton. The limits of Amounderness and ‘Between Ribble and Mersey’ were fixed before the Conquest, but Aighton in Amounderness was after- wards placed in the Yorkshire parish of Mitton, while the parish of Whalley included parts of Bowland and that of Rochdale Saddleworth, both in Yorkshire.
5
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
churches. Considering the very small space allotted to the district the number given compares favourably with what is vouchsafed in the case of some of the midland and southern counties. It comprises more than a fourth of the parish churches which are recorded to have existed before the end of the thirteenth century. The Yaxatio of Pope Nicholas drawn up in 1291-2 enumerates forty-eight, to which must be added eight which cer- tainly existed then, but from poverty or other reasons were excluded from the list ;°° of the fifty-six at least forty-seven can be traced back in records to the twelfth century, and nineteen are mentioned in documents of the eleventh.
Ten of the seventeen or eighteen Domesday churches belonged to the district between the Ribble and the Mersey and to the diocese of Chester, whither the see of Lichfield had been removed in 1075 by its first Norman bishop Peter, a chaplain of the Conqueror. In every case but one a con- siderable pre-Conquest endowment of land is recorded, and some had had extensive immunities ; this doubtless accounts for their being mentioned.
The most highly endowed were Whalley (St. Mary) ® and Winwick (St. Oswald), each of which had under the Confessor two carucates of land tree of all ‘custom.’ In other words, each had a glebe assessed at some 240 arable acres, the fines for all emendable crimes and offences committed within its limits were taken by the church itself and its land was exempt from danegeld. Warrington (St. Elfin), Wigan, and Walton-on-the-Hill each had a carucate of land, and the first was quit of all ‘custom’ except geld.” In Manchester the church of St. Mary and the church of St. Michael had held a carucate of land with the same immunity ;* St. Michael’s was at Ashton-under-Lyne, and its close association with Manchester suggests that this comparatively small parish was not yet quite independent of the mother church. The priest of Childwall is entered as the tenant T.R.E. of half a carucate in (free) alms.* Two bovates, or a quarter of a carucate, was the endowment of Blackburn church.* In Leyland Hundred a priest is inci- dentally mentioned among the tenants of Roger the Poitevin’s vassals in 1086.% This has been thought to imply the existence of a church at Leyland.*® Although, with this exception, the information given all refers to a date twenty years before the Survey there is no reason to suppose that the churches lost any of their land. Five of the churches mentioned or implied were closel associated with the great hundredal manors of the crown into which this district was divided before the Conquest. At Warrington, Blackburn, and perhaps Leyland the church was actually in the royal vill; Manchester was
* In Bedfordshire, for instance, only four are named. * The complete list and the reasons referred to above for the exclusion in 12 i dist ar 91 of certain church supphed by the /nguisitio N onarum of 1341 (Rec. Com.), 35-41. It is as follows :—Deanery of Ma. and Blackburn: Manchester, Middleton, Bury, Flixton, Radcliffe, Ashton-under-Lyne, Prestwich, Bolto Rochda'e, Eccles, Blackburn, Whalley. Deanery of Warrington: Warrington, Leigh, Winwick ; Presc - Childwall, Huyton, Sefton, Aughton, Ormskirk, Halsall, North Meols, Walton-on-the-Hill Wigan 5 D ao of Leyland: Leyland, Croston, Eccleston, Standish, Penwortham. Deanery of Aromas : Deesiay, ae ham, Lytham, St. Michaels-on-Wyre, Gar:tang, Poulton, Ribchester, Chipping, Cockerham Dates 9 : Deanery A ae ae Kendal: Heysham, Halton, Tunstall, Melling, Tatham, Claughton Warton Whit. tington, Polron-Je-Sands. Deanery of Copeland: Dalton, Ulverst Aldi h ? ’. i “artmel, Kirkby Ire!eth. SEE Ge ees ee Menainaten, ® Dom. Br. i, 270. 3! Tbid. 2694 3 Tb; 7 ? ‘ * ‘ . Ib . «Ibid. 270. * Ibid. 2694. * Ibid. 270. ¢ 6 Ibid A sugzestion has, however, been made that Croston may have been the mother church of de hund d red.
6
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
the parish church of the adjacent Salford, and Walton-on-the-Hill of (West) Derby. Wigan, though more remote from Newton, which moreover was in the parish of Winwick, is generally regarded as the church which Domesday speaks of as ‘the church of this manor’ (i.e. Newton). It would seem more natural for Winwick to have occupied that position, and it is difficult to suggest an explanation of the actual state of things unless it be that Wigan was its mother church.” The smallness of the endowment of Blackburn as compared with Whalley, which divided the hundred with it, is noteworthy, and it is possible that the latter was the mother church. The evidence as a whole, scanty though it be, especially in the cases where manor-house and church were in different vills, seems to point to these five churches or most of them being older than the hundredal division, which was probably sub- sequent to the Mercian conquest. If Whalley be added we have a list which pretty certainly includes the most ancient churches of ‘ Between Ribble and Mersey,’ from whose original parochiae the other parishes were gradually cut out. The thirty parishes into which the district was ultimately divided varied greatly in size.” The most extensive were naturally in its eastern moorlands ; Whalley—the largest—-covered about 180 square miles and comprised not less than thirty townships. Blackburn, Eccles, Rochdale, and Manchester came next in the order named. The last had an area of sixty square miles, All, especially Whalley and Rochdale, included great stretches of waste land. The smallest were Radcliffe and Aughton—the only single township parishes—and Flixton, containing two townships of less than average size.”
The space allotted in Domesday to those parts of the present Lancashire which lie north of the Ribble, and were then in the diocese of York, is even scantier than that devoted to ‘ Between Ribble and Mersey,’ and no more than eight churches at most can be deduced from the Survey.
Under Amounderness the enumeration of its vills is followed by a state- ment that all these with three churches belong to Preston. The churches referred to are presumably Kirkham (the vill is entered as Chicheham), Poulton, and St. Michaels-on-Wyre (vill entered as Michelescherche).
‘7 Mr. Farrer suggests that as Newton Hundred (or manor) was probably cut out of that of West Derby, the church of the former and mother church of Winwick may have been Walton-on-the-Hill. In support of this hypothesis he points out that Robert de Walton, whom he takes to be the parson of Walton, held in 1212 one-third of the Winwick glebe of two carucates (Testa de Nevill, 405 ; Lancs. Ing. i, 72). Butas the carucate belonging ‘to the church of the manor’ in 1066 was exclusive of the two carucates held by Winwick the suggested explanation presents difficulties of its own.
3° In the twelfth century, it is true, one-fourth of the tithes, &c., of Whalley and its chapels at Clitheroe and Downham was attached to the rectory of Blackburn ; Whalley Coucher, 91-4. But Henry de Lacy (c. 1150) in one of his charters claims that this benefice was the gift of his ancestors (ibid. 76).
8° No less than twelve of the churches were dedicated (if the original dedications have survived) to St. Mary (Manchester, Blackburn, Bury, Eccles, Leigh, Prescot, Prestwich, Walton-on-the-Hill, Whalley, Eccle- ston, Radcliffe, and Penwortham); five to St. Michael (Aughton, Croston, Huyton, Flixton, and Ashton- under-Lyne) ; two each to St. Cuthbert (Halsall and North Meols), and All Saints (Childwall, Wigan), and one each to St. Andrew (Leyland), St. Chad (Rochdale), St. Elfin (Warrington), St. Helen (Sefton), St. Leonard (Middleton), St. Oswald (Winwick), St. Peter (Bolton), St. Peter and St. Paul (Ormskirk), and St. Wilfrid (Standish). See Mr. Brownbill’s article on ‘Ancient Church Dedications in Ches. and South Lancs., Trans. Hist. Soc. (New Ser.), xviii, 19-44.
“ A number of the smaller parishes were no doubt of post-Conquest creation ; North Meols, for example, was still a chapel about 1155 ; Farrer, Lancs. Pipe R. 323. In this and probably other cases feudal changes seem to have altered ecclesiastical topography. North Meols was a detached township of the barony of Penwortham. Eccleston was claimed as a chapel of Croston as late as 1317 (Hist. of Lanc. Church, Chet. Soc. 24, 411), but is described as a church in 1094; Lancs. Pipe R. 290. Sefton church, which is first mentioned in 1203, was probably formed out of Walton.
7
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
Preston itself made a fourth parish. As Chipping and Ribchester, which are now in Blackburn Hundred, were then in Amounderness they would appear not to have been as yet separate parishes. Lytham and Garstang, too, are seemingly post-Conquest churches. ease
Only two churches (Tatham and Tunstall) are specifically mentione in the later Lonsdale Hundred, but Kirk Lancaster (Chercaloncastre) is included among the vills dependent on Halton, and Mr. Farrer is no doubt right in identifying the Cherchebi which had been held as one manor by Duuan 1n the time of King Edward with Cartmel (Kirkby-in-Cartmel). To this meagre list the foundation charter of Lancaster Priory (¢. 1094) adds Bolton- le-Sands, Heysham, and Melling,” while thirteen others occur in twelfth- century documents.
The twenty-six parishes in this part of the county at the end of the
thirteenth century “ included a larger proportion of small parishes than was the case south of the Ribble. There were seven single-township parishes— Pennington, Whittington, Tatham, Halton, Claughton, Heysham, and Lytham.* Some of these besides Lytham may have been of post-Conquest origin. Lancaster and Dalton-in-Furness were the most extensive, but both contained large areas of wood and fell. It is a striking indication of the backwardness of the districts now sncluded in Lancashire that not a single religious house had been founded within them before the Norman Conquest. No land was held there in 1086 by any monastery or church without its limits, though, as we have seen, grants had been made at various times to Lindisfarne (Durham) and St. Peter’s, York.* Eight years after the date of Domesday, however, count Roger of Poitou founded Lancaster Priory as a cell of the Norman abbey of St. Martin at Sées. The first denizen house was established thirty years later by his successor, as lord of the honour of Lancaster, at Tulketh by Preston and removed after three years to Furness.” Before the close of the twelfth century eight other religious houses had been established, but half of these were mere cells of monasteries outside the county.* Count Roger and his sheriff Godfrey also made liberal grants to Shrewsbury Abbey and the priory of Nostell.
To the period immediately after the Conquest belongs not only the temporary transference of the see of Lichfield to Chester, but the division of that and other dioceses into territorial archdeaconries. Hitherto the bishops had needed but one ‘ eye’ ; but now almost every county was provided with
“ Trans. Lancs. and Ches. Antig. Soc. xviii, 98.
“ For other churches known to have been of pre-Conquest date see above, p. 4.
** Of these six were dedicated (if their original dedications have survived) to St. Michael (Kirkham St. Michaels-on-Wyre, Cockerham, Tunstall, Urswick, Pennington); four to St. Mary (Lancaster, Caruiel, Ulverston, Dalton-in-Furness); three each to St. Cuthbert (Lytham, Aldingham, Kirkby Ireleth) atid St. Wilfrid (Preston, Ribchester, Halton) ; two each to St. Peter (Heysham, Melling) St. Chad (Poulto Claughton), and Holy Trinity (Bolton-le-Sands, Warton); and one each to St. Bartholomew (Chippi , St. Helen (Garstang), and St. James (Tatham). Some cases of adjoining parishes with the same Re e.g. Kirkham, St. Michaels-on-Wyre, and Cockerham may be due to affiliation. In 1205 an attemptt Sue that Garstang was a chapel of St. Michaels-on-Wyre failed on an adverse verdict of a jury (Lancs Pp R rok 197). Furness Abbey a few years later claimed Pennington and Ulverston as chapels of Urewick bg : re Dedications to St. James and Holy Trinity are probably late. The St. Chad dedications if ori t ‘ as expected beyond the bounds of his diocese. The Whittington invocation is unknown pee
i Claughton was the smallest in the county. Lytham seems to have been taken ‘aut of Kirkh
“See above, pp. 2, 45 5. *° See p. 167, ‘ Religious Houses.’ ae
© See p. 114, ‘ Religious Houses.’ “* See p. 102, ‘ Religious Houses?
fe)
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
its archdeacon. The lands composing the nascent ‘ Lancashire,’ as belong- ing to two dioceses, were divided between two archdeacons. The district ‘between Ribble and Mersey’ formed with Cheshire the sphere of the archdeacon of Chester. That north of the Ribble was combined with the western half of the North Riding of Yorkshire and the districts of Kendal and Copeland in the archdeaconry of Richmond.
Three archdeacons of Chester—Halmar, William, and Robert—are recorded without dates before Richard Peche (afterwards bishop of the see), who is said to have held the office in 1135. Conan ‘ the archdeacon,’ who witnessed a charter of Count Alan of Richmond in the reign of William Rufus, is thought to be the earliest archdeacon of Richmond on record.”
The archidiaconal courts and visitations were no doubt originally held in virtue of authority delegated by the bishop, but ‘early in the twelfth century the English archdeacons possessed themselves of a customary jurisdic- tion including certain matters of importance and in particular cases, as that of the archdeaconry of Richmond, augmented by recorded acts of devolu- tion from the bishops." The archdeacon of Richmond exercised a large measure of episcopal authority within the region assigned to him. He was ordinary therein concurrently with and almost to the exclusion of the arch- bishop of York.” The archbishop’s right to visit the archdeaconry was some- times disputed, and it was ultimately agreed that the clergy were not obliged to receive or entertain him.* The episcopal functions of confirmation, con- secration,™ and ordination were of course exercised only by the archbishop ; but the archdeacon instituted to all benefices,* and to him fell the sequestra- tions during their vacancy. He received the synodals and Peter’s pence, paying only to the Chancellor of York 20s. per annum. The archbishop could not impose an aid upon the clergy of the archdeaconry nor suspend a church or clerk belonging to it.°° Richmond was exceptional, but the jurisdiction of the archdeacons was everywhere so aggressive that the bishops about the middle of the twelfth century sought to limit it by delegating their own judicial powers to episcopal officials.” The division of the various dioceses into rural deaneries seems to have been older than that into archdeaconries and prior to the Norman Conquest. Originally mere episcopal delegates, the rural deans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had distinct rights and duties. They exercised a general supervision over the clergy and—in spiri- tual matters—over the laity of their deaneries whether by formal visitations or otherwise; inducted to benefices, which they took into their hands during vacancies; and enjoyed jurisdiction, which in minor matters they administered in virtue of their own power, but in more serious cases in the chapters of the clergy of their deaneries, which they had the right to summon, and in which they presided. From the middle of the thirteenth century onwards, however, they gradually became tompletely subordinate to the archdeacons.
© Le Neve, Fasti, i, 565. ® Dugdale, Mon. Angl. 1, 391 ; Whitaker, Richmondshire, i, 35, 83. 51 Rep. of Eccl. Courts Com. i, 25-6 ; Richmondshire Wills (Surtees Soc.), p. xx. 5? Whitaker, op. cit. i, 34. 53 Ibid. ; Cal. Pap. Letters, ii, 93 ; cf. Furness Coucher, 657, 659.
54 He granted licences for graveyards ; Hist. of Lanc. Church, 153, 164, 362.
> Including headships of religious houses ; but Cockersand seems to have had direct relations with the archbishop ; see ‘ Religious Houses,’ p. 108.
56 Whitaker, loc. cit. ” Rep. of Eccl. Courts Com. i, 26.
58 Makower, Const. Hist. of the Church of England (Eng. tr.), 322; Dansey, Horae Decanicae Rurales
(1835). 2 9 2,
A HISTORY OF Ce es pester
1 he first age of the office their appointment had ot, e ranaated bY 7m ee ys the thirteenth century they ae ie eonrics of Chester and bishops, ee hdeacon jointly. In the ao the archdeacon only.” the bishop and the arc “4 have been appointed by h Richmond they are said f0 ffice, contrary to the
; tury the o ; ; t in the twelfth centu i aa eae ear eee held for life.” Little 1s known of the decanal usual practice >
eem to have been made before the ae is date, but changes § divisions at this >
i th century.” ; ; : ee on Conquest ushered in a period of monastic revival through-
out England and a corresponding outburst of lay liberality to religious houses. Land, tithes, and church advowsons were showered upon them by the Norman barons. The most munificent of these donors in the district with which we are concerned was Count Roger of Poitou, the first lord of the honour of Lancaster. Included in his lavish grants to the great Norman abbey of St. Martin at Sées, for the endowment of a dependent priory at Lancaster, were, in addition to the church of St. Mary there, the advowsons of no fewer than nine churches and a portion of the tithes of nearly all his wide demesne land in this region. Roger’s successor in the honour, Stephen of Blois, and a number of the great tenants here made similar but less sweep- ing grants ; by the close of the twelfth century nearly half of the churches in the new county of Lancaster had been transferred from lay to monastic patrons. Most of these grants of churches were made to religious houses outside the county,” who, however, generally received their advowsons as endowments of daughter houses within it. Only eleven advowsons were granted to independent Lancashire monasteries, and three of these were no longer in their possession when the fourteenth century opened.”
Such grants occasionally led to litigation between different religious houses, who put forward rival claims to the same church. The rights of the lay patrons who bestowed churches were not always well defined, and a further complication was introduced by the ambiguous relation of certain
5° Dansey, op. cit. li, 369. Ibid. i, 149. §! See below, App. II.
® To Sées (for Lancaster Priory): Bolton-le-Sands, Childwall, Croston, a moiety of Eccleston, Heys- ham, Kirkham, Lancaster, Melling, Poulton-le-Fylde, and Preston, all c. 1094 (Lancs. Pipe R. 289-90), Kirk- ham was lost in 1143 (but Bispham Chapel obtained 1147), Preston in 1196, Melling alienated 1185-1210, and Childwall in 1232. To Nostell: Winwick by Roger of Poitou. To Shrewsbury : Kirkham (lost 1196) and Walton-on-the-Hill by Godfrey, sheriff of Count Roger, c. 1093-4. To Pontefract : Whalley (with the castle chapel of Clitheroe and the chapels of Clitheroe, Colne, and Burnley) by Hugh de la Val between 1121 and 1135 (Chart. of St. Fobn of Pontefract). Withdrawn in 1135 by Ilbert de Lacy on his recovery of the honours of Pontefract and Clitheroe. To Evesham (for Penwortham Priory): Penwortham by Warin Bussel between 1140 and 1149 (Lancs. Pipe R. 320-3), Leyland and North Meols by Richard Bussel between 1153 and 1160 (ibid. 323-5), To Leicester: Cockerham (with Ellel Chapel) by William de Lancaster I between 1153 and 1156 (ibid. 392). To Mattersey: Bolton-le-Moors by Roger de Marsey (Mattersey) under Henry II (Lancs. Pipe R. 408; Lancs. Final Concords,i, 75). To Durham (for Lytham Priory) : Lytham by Richard son of Roger between 1189 and 1194 (ibid. 346). To Stanlaw: Rochdale by Roger de Lacy between 1194 and 1211 (Coucher of Whalley, 135-8). The institutions in the Lich- field episcopal registers, which begin in the fourteenth century, show that Lancaster Priory Presented to its livings, while the presentations to Penwortham, &c., were made by Evesham.
® To Furness : Dalton and Urswick, doubtless conveyed with Furness by Count Stephen of Mortain’s grant of 1127 (Lancs, Pipe R. 301) and Kirkby Ireleth, acquired ¢. 1160-80 and held til] ieee “ in Coucher, 318). ‘The advowson of Ulverston may also have belonged for a time to Furness, ToC ( Ae Pennington by Gamel de Pennington before 1181, Ulverston before 1184 by William de onishead : (Lancs. Pipe R. 357). To Cartmel : Cartmel by William Marshal between 1189 and 4 ¢ Lancaster II To Burscough: Huyton, Flixton (lost before 1300) and Ormskirk by Robert son of H 94 (ibid. 341). (ibid. 350). To Wyresdale : St. Michaels-on-Wyre by Theobald Walter bet enry about 1190 336). This grant lapsed on the death of Theobald. To Cockersand : Claughton b God; and 1198 (ibid. Roger de Croft between 1216 and 1255 (see below, ‘ Religious Houses,’). ¥ Godith de Kellet and
fe)
ween 1193
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
religious houses to others. To this latter cause of confusion has been attri- buted the dispute which raged during the first half of the twelfth century between the abbey of Shrewsbury and Lancaster Priory over the advowson of Kirkham church. Shrewsbury Abbey had been colonized from Sces by Roger of Montgomery, and his first intention may have been that it should remain an affiliated house of the great Norman abbey. At any rate the latter laid claim to certain possessions of Shrewsbury Abbey for fifty years after its foundation. But in the case of Kirkham the Sées claim rested on more definite ground than this. It had been clearly granted to both houses. The grant to Shrewsbury by Godfrey the sheriff confirmed by Roger of Poitou son of Roger of Montgomery was the earlier, and in 1143 William Fitz Herbert, archbishop of York, finally decided in its favour. Count Roger’s grant of it to Sées for Lancaster Priory must, if correctly dated, have followed that to Shrewsbury in a very few months. The only reason- able explanation of this double grant would suppose some transfer of God- frey’s interest in Kirkham to his superior lord in the interval. For this, however, there is no evidence. It is true that Godfrey’s lands reverted to the demesne, apparently before 1102, and that Walton-on-the-Hill, the other church which he gave to Shrewsbury Abbey, was, there is reason to believe, regranted to that house by Count Roger. But this general resump- tion must have been subsequent to the grant of Kirkham to Lancaster Priory, which was accompanied by his own concession of the tithes of Bispham close by.™
A dispute which arose at the end of the twelfth century between Furness Abbey and Conishead Priory over the churches of Pennington and Ulverston illustrates another way in which rival claims to advowsons by monasteries might arise. The monks of Furness, who resented the estab- lishment of the priory in close proximity to their own house and on land over which they possessed the lordship, put in a claim to the two churches which had been granted to Conishead by its founders on the ground that they were chapels of its own church of Urswick. ‘The dispute was ulti- mately settled by a compromise, Furness relinquishing its claim to the churches in question on certain conditions which included the abandonment by Conishead of its counter-claim to the chapel of Hawkshead.*
Monasteries had also to defend their title to advowsons against laymen. Church patronage was valuable as a means of providing for younger members of families and dependants, and the successors of donors not infrequently begrudged their generosity and were ready to seize upon any defect of title to get it reversed. Thus Theobald Walter on receiving a grant of all Amounderness from Richard I in 1194 immediately laid claim to the advow- sons of Kirkham, Poulton, and Preston, founding it, we may suppose, upon the ground that the validity of Roger of Poitou’s gifts had been impaired by his disinherison and banishment in 1102. The result of the suits which he instituted in the royal courts was that Shrewsbury Abbey had to surrender the advowson of Kirkham church to Theobald, reserving only an annual pension of twelve marks, and the monks of Sées, while obtaining a confirma- tion of the churches of Poulton and Bispham, gave up that of Preston with
* See below, ‘ Religious Houses.’ ® Tbid.
II
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
the exception of a yearly pension of ten marks. Theobald Walter's heir was not allowed to inherit Amounderness, and the advowsons of Preston and Kirkham with that of St. Michaels-on-Wyre, which the monks of Wyres- dale had enjoyed for a moment by his gift, passed to the crown, and Henry III ultimately bestowed the two former upon his younger son Edmund, first earl of Lancaster.
The rights of heirs could not always be defeated by the grant of a church to a monastery. Robert son of Henry, lord of Lathom, in or about 1190 gave the church of Flixton to his new house of canons at Burscough. But on a vacancy a few years later and after his death his younger brother and (seemingly) a nephew presented, and the question of right was brought before the king’s court; an assize of darrein presentment was held, and a local jury found that Robert’s father Henry, son of Siward, had last presented to the church, and that the two descendants whose title was impugned by the canons were his heirs and the true patrons; whereupon the bishop of Lich- field instituted their candidate to the benefice.”
Religious houses sought to protect themselves against these dangers by procuring charters of confirmation from all who were in any way interested in the benefice whether as superior lords or otherwise, in addition to the consent of the bishop of Lichfield in the case of churches south of the Ribble and of the archdeacon of Richmond in the case of those north of that river, which was required by the canon of the Council of London in 1102, making the licence of the diocesan necessary to the validity of all such transfer of patronage.” To make assurance doubly sure confirmations were often obtained from the king and the pope, though this was an expensive safeguard.
Until the last quarter of the twelfth century the monastic grantees of Lancashire churches had with rare exceptions been content with the right of presenting a rector or parson in the same way as the lay patrons had done, receiving from him a fixed pension.” In several cases, however, religious houses had already been allowed to appropriate the whole property and income of certain benefices to their own uses, subject to making provision for the cure of souls therein. The monastery became the rector, and served the church either by its own members or by paid vicars, curates, or chap- lains." In Lancashire such appropriations were first made when the parish church was intended to be the conventual church of a monastery, as at Lancaster and Penwortham. But about the middle of the twelfth centur Cockerham church seems to have been appropriated to Leicester Abbey without obligation to establish a cell there. It was not until 1207 that the abbey, which had hitherto served the church by a stipendiary chaplain, undertook to settle some of its canons at Cockerham.” With the foundation of new religious houses in the latter half of the century appropriations
© Lancs. Final Concords, i, 2, 6.
Lancs. Pipe R. 353-6; below, ‘Religious Houses,’ p. 149. © Evesham received from the church of Leyland until its appropri
12
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
increased, and by 1300 some twenty parish churches had passed into the hands of monastic rectors.” Only five of these were conventual.
In addition to these the church of Kirkby Ireleth was appropriated before 1291 to the cathedral church of York,” those of Bolton-le-Moors and Bolton-le-Sands were annexed to the archdeaconries of Chester and Richmond respectively,” while Flixton was appropriated about 1280 to a new prebendal stall in Lichfield Cathedral.* The extension of appropriations had its dangers. It involved a great change in parochial arrangements which had not been the case with monastic patronage. The mere substitution of religious for lay patrons was on the whole a change for the better. Monastic patrons must have helped to arrest that tendency of tithes to become lay property which was so marked in the twelfth century, and they did something no doubt to secure a better class of rectors. It has to be confessed, however, that in Lancashire at all events they failed to get rid of those half-secular and even hereditary parsons against whom the church councils of the twelfth century were constantly fulminating—an abuse to which a number of Lancashire benefices, owing to the great size of their parishes and the rectorial manors attached to some of them, were peculiarly subject.” The rectories of Walton and Kirkham seem to have remained just as hereditary under the patronage of the religious as Blackburn and Whalley did under lay patrons.”
But their drafts upon parish revenues were comparatively moderate, and the rectors they presented were instituted by, and owed obedience only to, the bishop. When, however, religious corporations became rectors them- selves they were tempted to divert an undue proportion of parish revenues to their own purposes, and delegate the cure of souls to poorly paid chaplains or vicars. ‘The bishops soon became alive to this danger, and set themselves to provide a remedy. Appropriations could only be effected with their consent, though a great house like Furness or Whalley sometimes forced their hand by a direct appeal to the pope, and they succeeded in most cases in establishing their right to institute and receive the exclusive obedience of the vicar to whom the cure of souls in the appropriate parish was entrusted. In all the ecclesiastical affairs of the benefice the monastic rector was reduced to the position of a patron, and the vicar stood on the same legal footing as
72 Appropriate to Lancaster: Lancaster (c. 1094), Poulton (one moiety before 1198, the other in 1247). To Evesham (Penwortham) : Penwortham (between 1140 and 1149). To Leicester: Cockerham (between 1153 and 1156). To Conishead: Pennington (before 1181) and Ulverston (c. 1200). ‘To Cartmel : Cartmel (between 1189 and 1194). To Wyresdale : St. Michaels-on-Wyre (between 1193 and 1198). This appro- priation lasted only a few years. To Furness: Dalton and Urswick. To Burscough: Ormskirk (between 1215 and 1223) and Huyton (¢.1230). ‘To Cockersand: Garstang (between 1217 and 1237). To Croxton: Tunstall (before 1230). To Nostell : Winwick (in or before 1231). ‘Fo Stanlaw: Rochdale (1222), Blackburn (1230, 1259), Eccles (before 1277), Whalley (1283). To Vale Royal: Kirkham (between 1280 and 1291). The authority for the dates assigned will be found in the case of the Lancashire houses in the monastic section.
73 Advowson transferred from Furness Abbey in 1228 (Furness Coucher, 653).
™ The former between 1246 and 1256 (Not. Cestr. ii, 8); but Mattersey Priory retained a pension and the presentation of the vicars; the latter (whose advowson was acquired from Lancaster Priory in 1246) between 1279 and 1291 (Cal. Pap. Letters, i, 484). Vicarage ordained at Bolton-le-Sands in 1336; Not. Cestr. il, 548.
78 Le Neve, Fasti Eccl. Angi. i, 602. V.C.H. Lancs. iti, § ; Lancs. Pipe R. 110.
7 A division between the sons of a twelfth-century rector seems to be the explanation of the two medieties of Blackburn Rectory, which were transferred to Stanlaw Abbey in 1230 and 1259 respectively ; Whalley Coucher, 72 sqq. The rectory of Whalley was held for generations by one family with the title of dean, a state of things which was only terminated in 1234 ; ibid. 187, 293.
13
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
the rector of a non-appropriate church. In this way perpetual seed came into existence. The bishop’s right to institute such vicars enable
him further to insist on a permanent endowment of the cure by the oe priator, the amount of which was fixed by the diocesan and could be pa
by him if need arose. A few perpetual vicarages were created in the closing ears of the twelfth century, but their establishment on a large scale belongs to the first half of the thirteenth. In one small group of appropriated churches no vicarages were created. Lancaster, Penwortham, Cockerham, Cartmel, Lytham, and Ulverston, which had early become conventual or quasi-conventual, continued to be served by members of the appropriating house or by clergy whom it instituted and removed at its pleasure without reference to the ordinary and whose stipends it fixed.” To these latter the designation ‘curate’ was ultimately confined, and with the exception of Lancaster, in which a vicarage was ordained after the suppression of the alien priory in the fifteenth century, the benefices in question became perpetual curacies after the Reformation.” These precedents were not followed when the abbey of Stanlaw was removed to Whalley in 1296: a vicarage was ordained, the church remaining purely parochial. But, on the ground that the residence of secular clerks within the monastic precincts led to disturbances, the abbey induced the bishop of Lichfield to institute members of its own body as vicars, and finally procured a licence for this usage from Pope Innocent VI in 1358.% The priory of Burscough too obtained episcopal licence to present canons of the house to their appropriate and adjacent church of Ormskirk ‘in relief of their burdens.’ * The earliest recorded case of the ordination of a vicarage in Lancashire has a somewhat transitional character. In sanctioning the appropriation of the church of St. Michaels-on-Wyre to the monks of Wyresdale between 1193 and 1196 the archdeacon of Richmond stipulated for the appointment of a definite (certus) vicar ‘ with a portion sufficient for his food and clothing.’ Where- upon the monks entered into a formal agreement with a certain chaplain that he should be their chaplain for life in the church of St. Michael, or should find at his own charges another competent chaplain who should first do fealty to the abbot and monks. For this service (propter hoc servicium) they granted him land near the church and half a mark of silver yearly for his vicarage (vicaria) and for his faithful service.” The removal of the abbey to Ireland put an end to this arrangement, but fourteen or fifteen vicarages had been created in Lancashire before 1300.
The minimum annual income of a vicar was fixed by the council of Oxford in 1222 at 5 marks,® and this was the amount assigned to the vicar of Rochdale, which was appropriated in that year to Stanlaw Abbey. Found to be too low it was augmented in 1277 to 18 marks.* The others
73 . + 7 Makower, op. cit. 330. The case of Lytham shows that even where the prior of a cell was admitted
by the ordinary, he could be removed at any time by the convent. Th i even admitted by the bishops of Lichfeld. ; : Et Heeb St RCE nara ere
Thid. 332.
“ Cal. Pap. Let. iii, §95. In the fifteenth century monks of Whalley their churches at Blackburn and Rochdale. which had become very general, by statute.
a Reg. Bursc, fol. 1064 (1285) ; Duc. Lanc. Anct. Deeds, L. 275 (1 339).
* Lancs. Pipe R. 336-9. 8 Wilkins, Concisia, i 587
“ Whaley Coucher, 139. ® Ibid. 85. Repo
14
were not infrequently vicars of Under Hen. IV an attempt was made to stop this practice,
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
ranged from £5 (Cockerham, Urswick) up to £44 (Whalley). This was nearly always made up from the small tithes and the altarage of the church, but in at least one case all the tithes of one of the townships were assigned (with altarage) to the vicar. A competent manse* was usually added and sometimes a portion of the glebe. The vicars were generally bound to pay the ordinary charges upon the benefice, the synodalia or cathedral dues, and the archdeacon’s procurations (originally food and other provisions during his visitations), the extraordinary charges being borne by the monastery ; other arrangements, however, occur.”
The provision made for these Lancashire vicars was fairly liberal as times went. It was not attempted to fix a proportion between the value of the whole rectory and the vicar’s portion, the principle being simply to secure the vicar a sufficient maintenance, not to give him a fair share of the profits. But allowance was made for the greater burdens incumbent upon him in the more extensive parishes, and occasionally, where the benefice was exceptionally rich, this fact may have been to some extent taken into account. Neverthe- less, the more valuable the church the larger was the residue that went to the religious. The vicar of Kirkham was nearly twice as well paid as the vicar of Garstang,” but while Cockersand Abbey drew only 40 marks a year from the latter, the income of the monks of Vale Royal from Kirkham was six times that amount.
Kirkham, Blackburn, which was worth 40 marks, and Whalley were the best endowed vicarages in the county. Bishop Langton assigned to the vicar of Whalley in 1298 a competent manse, 30 acres of land with ‘ house- bote’ in the abbey’s wood and pasturage for his beasts with theirs, the whole altarage of the church and six of its seven chapels, and the glebes of those of Burnley and Church.” The altarage was estimated to be worth over £37, exactly a quarter of the gross value of the rectory. All the ordinary and one- third of the extraordinary charges were to be borne by the vicar, but the abbey was made responsible for the repairs and maintenance of the chancel of the church. The altarage probably increased in value, and in 1330 the monks induced Bishop Northburgh to revise the vicar’s portion as excessive. His altarage was commuted for an annual sum of (44, the land and common rights were withdrawn, and the maintenance of divine service in the chapels was imposed upon him, which involved an expenditure of at least £20 a year. The abbey, however, had now to defray all extraordinary charges.” It would seem that the value of the vicarage was afterwards further reduced, perhaps
8 Garstang (Cockersand Chart. (Chet. Soc.], 282) ; a detailed ordination of considerable interest.
% The vicar of Leyland was given half the rectory manse.
e.g. at Whalley (in the first ordination) 30 acres and the glebes of all its chapels ; at Rochdale 4 oxgangs ; at Blackburn 2 oxgangs; at Garstang 1 oxgangin the town fields ; at Ormskirk 4 acres ; at Huyton
selions. ou The tax known as ‘synodals’ or ‘synodaticum ’ (also ‘cathedraticum’) was so called because generally paid at the bishop’s Easter synod ; Phillimore, Eccl, Law, 162. Normally 2s. was the maximum from each church, but some Lancashire parishes seem to have paid more; Whalley Coucher, 206.
9 35% marks and 20 marks respectively. The figures are taken from the ‘Taxation of Pope Nicholas.’ Benefices were not taxed at their full value, but this does not affect the proportions between vicarages and rectories. In that part of Lancashire which lay in the diocese of Lichfield the vicarages were not separately taxed.
°° Whalley Coucher, 215.
% Tbid. 219. In 1281, on appeal from the abbey, the archbishop inhibited the bishop of Lichfield from acceding to a request of the vicar of Blackburn for an augmentation of his portion (ibid. 95).
15
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
as a result of its being held by monks of the house. At the time of the Dissolution the vicar’s pension amounted to £12 only.” eranaied
The ravages of the Scots in the reign of Edward II seriously diminishe the incomes of the Lancashire vicars in the archdeaconry of Richmond, but the rectories were equally affected.” Limited by the establishment of per- petual vicarages, the system of monastic appropriations was not originally without redeeming features. The expenses of a celibate priest were, or ought to have been, comparatively small ; and as long as the religious houses served a good purpose, the surplus revenues of rich rectories were better employed in their maintenance than in swelling the incomes of such great pluralists and non-residents as the notorious John Mansel, minister of Henry III, whose three hundred benefices included the desirable rectory of Wigan. Of him it is related that on one occasion when he had received a fair benefice of £20, he exclaimed, ‘ This will provide for my dogs.’ *
Rectors too, it must be remembered, were frequently allowed by com- plaisant bishops to delegate their duties at the sacrifice of a small fraction of their income, and in the case of one rich Lancashire living—that of Walton- on-the-Hill—a perpetual vicarage was ordained in 1326 by the bishop of Lichfield. Even where rectories escaped the pluralist and the sinecure rector they were apt to be treated by lay patrons as a convenient provision for younger sons, who had often to be given leave of absence from their cures for some years in order that they might fit themselves for their work.” On the whole it would seem probable that for long the vicars presented by the monasteries made better parish priests. Nor were they worse off in the thirteenth century than the incumbents of the smaller rectories. ‘The rector of Flixton was poorer than any Lancashire vicar. The commissioners of 1291 valued the living for the tenth at 7 marks only. Three other rectories, Tatham, Claughton, and Pennington, were taxed at 10 marks and under.”
The great size of many of the parishes, and the rugged character of much of the county, made access to the parish church always laborious, and often in winter impossible to the inhabitants of the remoter villages and hamlets. Something had probably been done to relieve this hardship by the foundation of parochial chapels even before the Conquest. It can scarcely be supposed that the ecclesiastical decentralization of the huge parish of Whalley, for instance, was entirely subsequent to that date. But the growth of popu- lation and prosperity in the twelfth century, and the increased religious fervour of the age, greatly stimulated the process. Norman lords of manors built chapels and obtained permission to have divine service celebrated in them for themselves, their households, and their tenants. The further privilege of burying their dead in a graveyard of their own was often secured, HET ener eee ee ee
> er, carefully guarded. Attendance 3 Ducdaie, on. ; i ee oo . ck Bas or) fen ae Sas a froma 46) sake £0138. es ae 1470, Pia it was sees ee Sir Time Monee eae rig ia ie ta vicar of Wigan for life in 1199 at the request of the rector, made here ; Hist. of the Ch. of Wigan (Chet. Soc.), 3.
7 Numerous cases in the Lich. Epis. Reg. See below, p. 31. ** Philimore, Ece/, Law, 1825 ; Makower, op. cit. 333.
16
ty Abbey from 1094 to Adam de Freckleton was ie but no permanent ordination s-ems to have been
” Pope Nich. Tax. 249, 307-8.
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
there was still usually required on the greater festivals, the offerings at the chapel continued to go to the rector, and the tithes were still paid to him. In a few cases, indeed, these were severed from the rectory, and the parochial chapelry became an independent parish. North Meols, described as a chapel’ (perhaps of Halsall parish) in the middle of the twelfth century, is included among the parishes in the Taxatio of 1291. The church of Ashton-under- Lyne seems to have been originally a chapel in the parish of Manchester, and the mention of a joint endowment in Domesday Book suggests doubts whether it had yet become the centre of a distinct parish. If the statement of the same record as to the churches of Amounderness is to be interpreted strictly, the parishes of Lytham, Garstang, Chipping, and Ribchester must have been formed between 1086 and 1291, and were perhaps originally chapelries.!” In this county there was but one clear instance of the free chapel exempt by special privilege from dependence upon any parish church, and even from the jurisdiction of the ordinary." The church of the little hospital of St. Mary Magdalen at Preston enjoyed these privileges, being of the foundation and patronage of the lords of the honour of Lancaster."* Henry de Lacy, when he gave to the monks of Stanlaw the church of their new home at Whalley, withheld the chapel of St. Michael in the castle at Clitheroe, and Queen Isabella, upon whom the honour of Clitheroe was bestowed for life by the crown on the attainder of Lacy’s son-in-law Thomas of Lancaster, continued to treat it as a free chapel." But fifty years afterwards the abbey regained possession on the ground that the chapel had no rights of baptism or burial, nor any papal privilege such as other free chapels could show.'* Some parochial chapels may have grown out of private oratories in which the cele- bration of mass was at first only licensed, under restrictions devised to pre- serve the rights of the rector of the parish, for the benefit of the lord of the manor and his household.’” Others, like Saddleworth, were from the outset chapels of ease for a district remote from the parish church. William de Stapleton, the founder of Saddleworth chapel between 1194 and 1211, had to bind himself and his heirs not to subtract their tithes and oblations from the mother church of Rochdale, to the parson of which the chaplain was to be presented and swear obedience.“ The appointment of the chaplain was sometimes, however, reserved to the rector of the mother church. When the archbishop of York in 1230 granted a cemetery to the chapel of Caton, owing to its distance from Lancaster and the danger of the ways, the lay lords of
1 Lancs. Pipe R. 323. 101 Dom. Bk. i, 270.
109 See above, p. 8. Garstang was claimed in 1205 as a chapelry of St. Michaels-on-Wyre, but the verdict of a jury was that within living memory it had always been a parish church ; Lancs, Pipe R. 197. In 1241 Aymer des Roches, rector of Preston, failed in an attempt to establish that Chipping was a chapel appendant to Preston and not the church of an independent parish; T. C. Smith, Rec. of Preston Par. Ch. 26.
18 Phillimore, op. cit. 1823.
14 Lancs. Chant. 208 ; see below, ‘ Religious Houses.’
% Whalley Coucher, 226.
6 Tbid. 226-36. The question was re-opened more than once, but-the king and the dukes of Lancaster ultimately ratified the rights of the abbey. See ‘ Religious Houses,’ under Whalley Abbey.
17 Such a private chapel was allowed by the priory of Burscough to Henry de Tarbock in the early part of the thirteenth century. He was to have a chantry in his oratory at Tarbock, but he and his family were to attend the mother church of Huyton on Christmas Day, Candlemas, Easter Day, Whitsunday, Michaelmas Day, and All Saints’ Day with due oblations. No parishioners might use the chapel, and all its offerings were to go to the mother church under a penalty of £5 for subtraction; Reg. of Burscough, fol. 444. ‘Tarbock chapel, however, never became parochial.
8 Whalley Coucher, 147. The founder’s son gave an endowment of land ; ibid. 148.
2 17 3
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
the place renounced all claim to the advowson.’* The deans of Whalley appointed the chaplains of at least seven of its eight chapels, and paid them by custom 4 marks a year each."" In the neighbouring parish of Blackburn the rector is described at the end of the twelfth century as parson of its two chapels at La Lawe (Walton-in-the-Dale) and Samlesbury."! The former, indeed, was in all but name a parish church. The tithes of a certain district (which included Samlesbury) were paid to it, it was called ecc/esia, and was the mother church of Samlesbury chapel, enjoying the full privileges of that position down to the episcopate of Hugh de Nonant (1 188-98). Samlesbury had as yet no graveyard. During the absence abroad of Bishop Hugh, Gos- patric the lord of Samlesbury entertained two bishops from Ireland, who, with the consent of the rector, dedicated a cemetery. Hugh on his return was much annoyed, and declared the proceeding null and void. But after- wards, in consideration of the difficulty of getting to Walton, especially in winter, he allowed a graveyard to be made.'* On the strength of this the lords of Samlesbury seem to have claimed a right of advowson, which was resisted by Stanlaw Abbey as appropriator of Blackburn rectory.
But for the firm hold which the rectors of Blackburn and their monastic successors kept upon it, and the apparent indifference of the Banasters, the lords of the place, Walton might very easily have become a separate parish. In the case of Altham, one of the Whalley chapels, a persistent local family nearly succeeded. During the greater part of the thirteenth century they treated it as a rectory, and the bishop and archdeacon seem at times to have favoured their claim, which the abbey only got rid of at last by an appeal to Canterbury and a handsome monetary solatium.™
The following twenty-nine chapels, exclusive of Saddleworth, which was in Yorkshire, though in the parish of Rochdale, and of those which had become parish churches before 1291, can be traced back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Nearly all of them were probably in existence before 1200: Broughton,"* appendant to Kirkby Ireleth Church ; Hawkshead," to Dalton; Over Kellet to Bolton le Sands 3" Gressingham,”* Caton,!"” Stalmine,"” and Overton," to Lancaster; Ellel,"* to Cockerham ; Bispham," to Poulton ; Pilling,’ to Garstang ; Longton,’ to Penwortham ; Douglas,” to Eccleston; La Lawe, or Walton, and Samlesbury ¥% (indirectly), % Blackburn ; Burnley,’* Clitheroe Castle,* Clitheroe Town,”* Colne,
- at a of Lanc.(Chet. Soc.), 20. a Whalley Coucher, 206. id. go. Ibid. "* Tbid. 228-35. ™ Has a Norman nave.
'* Ulverston resigned its claim to be th h ; j oo ae ake © be the mother church of Hawkshead ; Lancs. Pipe R. 362. "6 Originally a chapel in Melling parish, but transferred to L , 5 ancaster bet Roger de Montbegon ; Hist. of Ch. of Lanc. 20. Licence for cemetery, 12 a. ter sis Earliest mention in 1230; ibid. 164, 362. Licences for cemeteries, ; us Earliest mention in 1247; ibid. 127. Has a Norman door. ™ Earliest mention ¢. 1155 ; Lancs. Pipe R. 392. '* Earliest mention in 1147 ; ibid. 283. '" Earliest mention (indirect) in 1272 ; Cockersand Chart. 49. ‘” Earliest mention c. 1160 ; Lancs. Pipe R. 323. ™ Earliest mention between 1230 and 1264; Reg. of B ; par. of Wigan ; Lich. Epis. Reg. Heyworth, oh eee” ane 47. Im 1445 said to have been in '* Mentioned before 1182. It had font and graveyard, c. 1190; Wha, : Licence for cemetery between 1188 and 1 198 (ibid.) ; a one ee oe Granted to Pontefract Priory by Hugh de la Val between 1121 and 1135 sete : ve, p. Io,
18
5 and 1210 by
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
Church,” Altham,”* Downham,” and Haslingden,’® to Whalley; Dids- bury,’ to Manchester ; Deane,'* to Eccles ; Rokeden, or Newton,’ to Win- wick ; Farnworth," to Prescot ; Knowsley,“ to Huyton; Garston,'* and Hale,'* to Childwall ; and Liverpool, St. Mary at Key (Quay) ** to Walton.
Some of the chapels which are first mentioned in the fourteenth century, such as Rufford in Croston parish, and Melling and Maghull in the parish of Halsall, may go back to a considerably earlier date.
The cost of up-keep of parochial chapels and their services was in some cases borne entirely by the locality, in others it was divided with the mother church. The nature of the division varied. At Saddleworth, Whalley Abbey, which held the tithes of Rochdale, found the chaplain and the necessary books and vestments, and repaired the chancel, the maintenance of the rest of the fabric being thrown upon the parishioners.” On the other hand the parishioners of Church in Whalley parish were bound to repair the chancel of their chapel, and though here, as in its sister chapels, the chaplain was found by the abbey (from 1330 by the vicar of Whalley) they had to provide a clerk to take his place if necessary. These obligations were affirmed in 1335 by the bishop of Lichfield, the chancel having been allowed to become
ruinous and the people having sometimes to leave without mass for want of a clerk."
There is little more to be said as to the ecclesiastical history of the county until the closing years of the thirteenth century are reached. The Lichfield episcopal registers do not begin until 1298, and the scanty extracts from the lost registers of the archdeaconry of Richmond extend only (with gaps) from 1361 to 1484.
For North Lancashire we have, however, one important document in the Constitution of Archbishop Walter de Gray (1215-55) fixing for the province of York the portions of the church fabrics and furniture to be maintained and repaired by the parishioners and by the rectors and vicars
™ Prior to 1202 ; Lancs. Fines, i, 14.
%° Supposed to have been founded temp. Ric. 1; Whalley Coucher, 301.
% Probably before 1147 ; ibid. 76, 92.
'® Mentioned in 1296 ; ibid. 214. With the exception of the castle chapel at Clitheroe the chapels of Whalley seem to have had rights of baptism and burial ; ibid. 227.
™ Said by Hollingworth (Mancuniensis, p. 26 [ed. 1839]), on what authority does not appear, to have been built before 1235. In 1352, when a cemetery was granted, the chapel was said to be of antiquity beyond memory ; Lich. Epis. Reg. Northburgh, ii, fol. 127.
™ Earliest mention in 1234; Whalley Coucher, 44. Graveyard mentioned in 1276; ibid. 60.
8 For the identification of Newton chapel with the chapel of Rokeden, in which Sir Robert Banaster had licence in 1284 to have a chantry owing to his distance from the mother church, see Not. Cestr. (Chet. Soc.),271. It is possible, however, that the licence was only for himself and his household and Newton as yet merely a private chapel.
88a V.C.H. Lancs. iii, 391.
™ Earliest mention in 1190 ; Lancs. Pipe R. 350. This chapel, called also apparently the Ridding Chapel (Reg. Burscough, fol. [4]), soon disappeared.
"8 Earliest mention in 1261 ; Trans. Lancs. and Ches. Hist. Soc. (New Ser.), xvii, 54.
** Mentioned before 1257; ibid. xviii, 77. A larger chapel (St. Nicholas) was built close by about 1350.
“8” Whalley Coucher, 150. 18 Ibid. 236-45.
The Richmond Registers have shared the fate of the archdeacon’s special powers. One of them, extending from 1442 to 1484, was still extant about fifty years ago (Richmondshire Wills, Surtees Soc. p. xx.), but my inquiries have failed to discover its present place of deposit. Extracts from Canon Raine’s trans- cript of it are in Raine’s Lancashire MSS. (vol. xxii, p. 373, sqq.) in the Chetham Library. They are followed by a reproduction of extracts from three earlier registers, those of Charlton (1359-82), Dalby (1388-1400), and Bowet (1418-42) made by Dr. Matthew Hutton in 1686 and preserved among the Harleian MSS. (Nos. 6969-78). Some fragments of what appears to be a fifteenth-century register are at Somerset House.
19
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
respectively.” Some information can be gleaned from the pap and monastic chartularies. The latter contain abundant evidence of the religious zeal of the people of Lancashire in hundreds of charters bestowing lands and rents upon the local monasteries (half of which were founded in the last quarter of the twelfth century), ‘for the health of their own souls and the souls of their ancestors and successors.” Until the removal of the monks of Stanlaw to Whalley all the religious houses, with the unimportant exception of Kersal cell, were in the western half of the county, and this form of piety was comparatively absent in its eastern portions. The generosity of the laity to the religious occasionally led to friction between the latter and the parochial clergy. Early in the thirteenth century Albert de Nevill, rector of Manchester, complained to Pope Innocent III of the infringement of the rights of his church by the Cluniac priory of Lenton, which was admitting the inhabitants of Kersal to service in the chapel of its cell there, burying them in a graveyard of its own and taking their tithes and offer- ings.'* A compromise was arranged by the bishop and the archdeacon of Ely as papal delegates. The monks retained their cemetery and the tithe from land which they had won from the waste. For the latter they were to pay 2s. a year to the mother church and its rights of sepulture were to be recognized by the annual render of two candles, each of 14 1b. of wax. No parishioner was to make an offering or receive burial at Kersal unless the church of Manchester were properly indemnified, and the monks must not administer the sacraments to parishioners in their chapel.“* Occasionally the aggrieved party was itself a religious house, the appropriator of the church whose dues were imperilled. Such a case arose when the hospital (soon abbey) of Cockersand was founded in the parish of Cockerham, whose church belonged to Leicester Abbey. The question was complicated by the fact that the hospital had been established on the abbey’s manor of Cockerham during a temporary disseisin. A settlement was arrived at in 1204 or 1205 confirming the hospital in its share of the manor and making it extra- parochial.'* The canons in their turn had to agree to waive, in the case of any other lands they might acquire in the parish of Cockerham, the privilege they had obtained from the pope of exemption from tithes.’ These papal exemptions were another mode in which parish revenues were encroached upon in favour of monasteries. After further dispute it was settled in 1242 that the abbey should not admit any parishioners of Cockerham to confession, communion, or other sacraments, but only those of their own establishment."
Of some importance for the spiritual life of the county was the fact that six of the religious houses which were new in the early part of the thirteenth century consisted of canons.” The institution of regular canons marked an attempt to bridge the gulf between the older monks and the secular clergy. They
al archives
149 Wilkins, Concilia, 1, 168 ; Cockersand Chart. (Chet. Soc. 1).
o Conishead, Cockersand, Cartmel, Hornby, Lytham, Burscou the little hospital of St. Saviour at Stidd under Longridge and the leper hospital of St. Leonard, Lancaster.
gh, (the short lived) Wyresdale babl (which was afterwards piven to th ered The last was the second ot its kind i ae
That of St. Mary Magdalen, Preston, possibly dated from the reign of Henry | n the county. “ Lancs, Pipe R. 330. “8 Ibid. 331 ve “ Cockersand Chart. 376-8. MS Tbid. 4. Ws Ibid, 28 * 4. id. 382.
’ Conishead, Cartmel, Cockersand, Burscough, Hornby, and Cockerham 20
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
were normally in orders, and no breach of their rule was involved in their serving as parish priests in appropriate churches, provided they still lived the common life. In 1207 the abbey of Leicester arranged to appoint three canons in their church of Cockerham in addition to the existing chaplain, and after his death to keep four canons there. A more active religious influence was no doubt introduced by the coming of the friars in the second half of the century. They settled as usual in the towns; the Dominicans or Black Friars at Lancaster, the Franciscans or Grey Friars at Preston, and the Austin Friars at Warrington.“ Their work lay in the slums of the town among the poorest and most neglected class of the population, but their devotion must have stirred spiritual life in a wider circle. Such an example was much needed. The conditions under which the parish clergy were appointed were not favourable to high ideals of character and self-sacrifice. Prominent among the causes of clerical apathy and inefficiency must be reckoned the papal dispensations for pluralities and non-residence which were freely granted to those who had influence. In a great many parishes the cure of souls was left to stipendiary clergy without sufficient guarantees for their being well chosen and properly paid.
Allusion has already been made to one mighty pluralist, John Mansel, the non-resident rector of Wigan. His, no doubt, was an exceptionally gross case. But John le Romeyn (Romanus), who became archbishop of York in 1286, had held the Lancashire rectories of Bolton-le-Sands and Melling along with that of Wallop in Hampshire and other preferments.'® He was the natural son by a servant girl of John le Romeyn, archdeacon of Richmond (c.1241-7), and treasurer of York, himself of illegitimate birth, and according to Matthew Paris, very rich and avaricious. Moreover the crown used its patronage, with the connivance of the pope, to pay its servants and reward its favourites, and the spiritual interests of the county were thrust into the background.
The valuable benefice of Preston, which had reverted to the crown on the death of Theobald Walter, was thus employed by John and his son. Henry III successively presented to the living a nephew of Peter des Roches, his treasurer William Haverhill, Arnulf a chaplain of his half-brother Geoffrey of Lusignan, Henry de Wengham, ‘a discreet and circumspect courtier ’ and a great pluralist, who was also rector of Kirkham, and retained both livings after his appointment as bishop of London, and finally the famous Walter de Merton, chancellor, bishop of Rochester, and founder of Merton College, Oxford. Matthew Paris singles out as a conspicuous instance of the king’s abuse of his patronage the preferment of Arnulf :
a fool and buffoon . . . utterly ignorant alike in manners and learning, whom I have seen
pelting the King, his brother Geoffrey and other nobles, whilst walking in the orchard of
St. Albans, with turf, stones and green apples and pressing the juice of unripe grapes in their eyes, like one devoid of sense.’
Edward I was not guilty of such scandals as this last, but the rich rectories of Manchester and Childwall, when they came into his hands during the protracted minority of Thomas Grelley, the last of his line, were bestowed
“8 Lancs. Final Concords (Rec. Soc.), i, 26. 49 See ‘ Religious Houses.’ 199 Dict. Nat. Biog. xlix, 182. 11 TC. Smith, Ree. of Preston Church, 25 sqq. 1 Matth. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Rolls Ser.), v, 329.
21
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
upon his ministers. One of Edward’s non-resident rectors of Manchester was his well-known councillor Walter Langton,'’ who had previously had papal licence to hold the rectories of St. Michaels-on-Wyre and Croston without residing therein or being ordained priest.’ He resigned his benefices on becoming bishop of Lichfield in 1296. The rectory of Childwall was given, with four others in different parts of England, and numerous prebends to another crown servant, who in due course was raised to the episcopal bench. This was John Drokensford, bishop of Bath and Wells from 1309 to 1329. He received Childwall while still under the canonical age,'* and as late as 1298 was only in deacon’s orders. The rectory of Prescot was held for thirty years by Alan le Bretoun im commendam with that of Coddington and the treasurership of Lichfield.“* Church revenue was further trenched upon by the demands of pope and king. The taxation of spiritualities initiated by the Saladin tithe of 1188 became common in the thirteenth century. At first it was taken by papal authority, and usually for a crusade or some other quasi-ecclesiastical object, but the popes sometimes allowed Henry III to relieve his necessities from this source, and thus paved the way for the regular taxation of the clergy as an estate of the realm introduced by Edward I. From the middle of the century the amount taken was nearly always a tenth. The bringing of the clergy under contribution rendered necessary an assessment of benefices."’ Such an assessment is recorded to have been made in 1219, and perhaps remained in force until Pope Innocent IV in 1253 ordered a new valuation for the tenth which he had granted to Henry III for a fresh crusade. The re-assessment was carried out in the following year by Walter Suffield, bishop of Norwich, and was therefore generally known as the ‘ Norwich Taxation.’ Its figures are only preserved in isolated cases from which no trustworthy inferences can be drawn. The assessment of Garstang rectory, for instance, was raised from 20 to 33 marks, in addition to a vicarage taxed at 8 marks; but there are no means of deciding whether this was due to greater stringency or to a corresponding rise in the value of the benefice.'* Thirty-four years later Pope Nicholas IV ordered a new assessment to be made, which was completed in 1291 for the province of Canterbury, and in 1292 for that of York. This ‘Taxatio,’ never subsequently revised for the greater part of England, remains among the archives of the kingdom, and was printed in 1802 by the Record Commission. For Lancashire it is valuable as giving the first fairly complete summary of church property in the county as well as Mina dee a ee The list is a quite Ae ee : See sar i cere eat uae or ore ; : re omitted for reasons which, except in one case, can be gathered from the later document known as the Ingui s1tl0 Nonarum.\© Bolton-le-Moors and Bolton-le-Sands were exempt a taxation as being annexed to the two archdeaconries, Kirkby Sag appropriated to the cathedral church of York, Radcliffe and North Meols on
"S$ Cail. Pat. 1292-1301, p. 190. 1A Cay
ms Ibid. i, $77. “ Lich. Epis. Reg. Langton, fol. 22. Pape Letters i, S45, sf. $50 $50:
7 Stubbs, Const, Hist. li, 174-5
~ ; ; See above, p. 6. The vicarages in that part of the county which was i also omitted, unless indeed they are included in the valuation of the rectories
22
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
account of their poverty, Aughton doubtless for the same reason. The total annual value given is: spiritualities £1,544 135. 4d.; temporalities £420 os. 6d. Under the former head the churches in the archdeaconry of Richmond were taxed at £931 6s. 8d.; those in the archdeaconry of Chester at £613 6s. 8¢. The temporalities (of religious houses) in these same areas were respectively £371 15. 2d. and £48 19s. 4d.
The churches most poorly endowed were Lytham, assessed at Pa Flixton, £4 135. 4d., and Pennington, (5 6s. 8d. The richest were Kirk- ham, £186 135. 4d. (£160); Lancaster, £80; Poulton, £68 135. 4d. (£46 135. 4d.) ; Preston, St. Michaels-on-Wyre, Warton and Whalley, each £66 135. 4¢.; Aldingham and Manchester, each £53 6s. 8¢.'\% Only six benefices in this county of extensive parishes were taxed at less than {10 a year, a third of the whole number varied between that figure and £20. In the one instance (Garstang) in which we are able to compare the assess- ment of 1292 with that of 1254 the valuation of the rectory is higher by £4 135. 4d. and that of the vicarage by £8.
Benefices were not assessed at their full annual value. Matthew Paris in 1252 estimated that Preston church was worth f100.'* In an inquest held after the death of Robert Grelley in 1282, as to the value of his advowsons, it was found that the church of Manchester and the church of Childwall were each worth £133 6s. 8d. a year, more than double the assess- ment of the former in 1292 and more than three times that of the latter." Ashton-under-Lyne, the advowson of which Grelley had also held, was returned as worth £20, or double its taxed value ten years later.” Five years after Pope Nicholas’s taxation an inquiry was held as to the true value of the rectory of Whalley with a view to the ordination of a vicarage. Its gross annual income was found to be £210 gs. 8d.; this was reduced on further inquiry in 1298 to £148, but even so it is more than twice the taxed value of 1292.'% Liberal deductions seem to have been allowed for fixed charges.’
The fearful ravages wrought by the Scots in the north of England in the years following Bannockburn put large areas of land out of cultivation,
161 Pope Nich. Tax. 249, 258-9, 307-9. The figure for spiritualities includes certain monastic pensions in churches north of the Ribble which are accounted for separately. The valuation of two or three churches differs slightly from the report of the Inguisitio Nonarum as to the tax of 1292. ‘That for temporalities may also not be quite accurate, as the details do not in every case exactly agree with the totals, and one or two entries are a little ambiguous.
16 When two figures are given the first represents the taxed annual value of the whole endowment including vicarage and pensions, the second the residual rectory. According to the Inguisitio Nonarum Manchester was taxed in 1292 at £66 135. 4d.
18 The following is a summary of those not named above. Vicarages and pensions are included :—
Over £6 and under £10: Claughton, Leigh, and Tatham.
£10 and upwards : Ashton-under-Lyne, Bury, Chipping, Dalton, Eccleston, Halsall, Halton, Heysham, Huyton, Ormskirk, Prestwich, Standish, Urswick, Warrington, and Whittington.
£20 and upwards: Cockerham, Eccles, Penwortham, Ribchester, Rochdale, Sefton.
£30 and upwards : Blackburn, Croston, Tunstall, Ulverston, Wigan.
£40 to £50: Cartmel, Childwall, Garstang, Melling, Prescot, Walton.
164 Cockersand Chart. 286-7.
‘8 Chron. Maj. v, 329. A local jury put the same value on it in 1361 although its assessment had by that time been further reduced to £23 65. 84.
186 Lancs. Ing. and Extents (Rec. Soc.), i, 250. ‘7 Ibid.
18 Whalley Coucher, 205-6, 213-15.
1 Aldingham rectory, however, was stated later to have been overtaxed by 20 marks in 1292; Inquisitio Nonarum, 36.
23
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
and it was found necessary to make sweeping reductions of the a ee of benefices throughout the greater part of the province of York, ae ports the archdeaconry of Richmond. The Lancashire churches of t Of deaconry were relieved of two-thirds of their rating, or about ae ae this £375 was allowance for loss of tithes from lands wasted by a st > the rest took the form of an exemption of small tithes, oblations, and giebes from taxation. The reduction varied in different parishes from fifty per cent., e.g. at Heysham, Melling, and Tatham, to over eighty per cent. at oe ham, Cartmel, and Ulverston. One rectory —Pennington—and four out 0 seven vicarages were entirely freed from taxation, on the ground of their poverty.’” On an average the relief given to the monasteries in consideration of the depreciation of their temporalities in North Lancashire was even greater than was accorded to the churches. What had been rated in 1292 at £371 1s. 2d. now paid only £52 10s. a reduction of eighty-six per cent. Furness must have suffered most; the annual value of its temporal possessions was reckoned to have sunk from £176 to £13. 65. 8d." The Ribble was practically the southern limit of the Scottish invasion to the west of the Pennine Range, and none of the Lancashire churches in the diocese of Lichfield were included in the ‘ New Taxation,’ as it was called.
No provision seems to have been made for a re-valuation of the northern parishes on their recovery from the effects of the harrying they had received, and apparently they continued to enjoy this exceptionally low rating down to the sixteenth century. Some slight improvement in a few parishes within the twenty years which followed is revealed by the returns of the commis- sioners appointed to assess the ninth of sheaves, fleeces, and lambs granted by Parliament to Edward III in March, 1340..% The ecclesiastical ‘ Taxatio,” mainly based as it was upon the great tithes, afforded an obvious guide in their labours, and their instructions were to take the church assessments as a standard in ascertaining the true value of the ninth.’* So closely did they follow them that in many cases at all events the tax became a tenth and not a ninth. In seventeen out of twenty-four Lancashire parishes in the arch- deaconry of Richmond the ‘ New Taxation,’ which only took into account the great tithes, was returned as the true value of the ninth. But in five parishes a higher figure was given, the assessment being recognized as too low. The difference was not, however, great, except at Dalton, where the ninth was valued at twice the amount of the assessment of twenty years before.'% Preston affords a solitary instance of a parish in which the com- missioners put the value of the ninth below even the low assessment of the ‘New Taxation.’ South of the Ribble the returns show greater variety. In ten parishes the ninth was estimated as exceeding the valuation of 1292, in five as exactly equal to it, and in thirteen as falling below it. In the last class of cases we are occasionally told that the difference consisted of allow- ances for glebes, small tithes and oblations, and for the exclusion of boroughs (where they existed) which paid a ninth of goods instead. The explanation
“° This ‘Nova Taxatio’ is printed in the Pope Nich. Tax. 329.
p. 200. The figures differ in one or two ins into the value of the ninth of 1340. - These details come from the Inguisitio Nonarum (Rec. Com.). Pope Nick. Tax. 309. "8 Rot. Parl. ii, 112 ; Inguisitio Nonarum, 35. Cal. Pat. 1340-3, p. 125. " Ing, Non. 36. "6 Thid. 37
24
‘ For its date see ‘ Political History,’ tances from those given by the commissioners who inquired
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
of the cases in which the true value of the ninth equalled or exceeded the whole valuation of the benefice in 1292 must be either that the assessment was revised as too low or that the real value of a ninth was calculated from the tithe data. For Whalley parish, where careful statistics of the tithes were available, the commissioners returned the ninth as worth as much again as Pope Nicholas’s assessment.”
Compared with the preceding age the fourteenth century was upon the whole a period of depression in the history of the church in Lancashire. The north of the county lay prostrate under the successive blows of the Scottish invasions and the Black Death, and though the south escaped the earlier of these scourges it was thrown into much disorder by the struggle between Earl Thomas of Lancaster and Edward II. The French wars exer- cised a distracting influence. These were not the only causes, however, of the slackening of the stream of church endowments which is observable. The county was now fairly well provided with parish churches and parochial chapels. To the former a single addition was made late in the century. Brindle, hitherto an outlying part of the parish of Penwortham, was erected into a separate parish between 1341, when it does not appear as such in the Nonarum Inquisitio, and 1369, when it is described as a rectory.’
Of the eleven chapels which are first mentioned or implied in this century some may have been of older foundation, some perhaps were as yet purely domestic.” Sir Robert de Holland, who owed his advancement to Thomas of Lancaster, endowed a college of priests in his chapel of (Up) Holland in the parish of Wigan in 1310, but the chapel itself may have been of earlier date.'
Funds were forthcoming for the rebuilding or extension of existing churches, and in one case at least a rectory was augmented, but this did not make very deep drafts upon private munificence.
The county already contained nineteen religious houses, large and small ; their further multiplication and enrichment was not desirable, and royal policy definitely discouraged such extension by the Statute of Mortmain (1279). One addition only was made to their number during the fourteenth century. Through the influence of his patron Thomas of Lancaster Sir Robert de Holland obtained permission in 1319 to convert his collegiate church of St. Thomas the Martyr at Upholland into a priory of Benedictine
"7 See above, p. 23. "8 Lich. Epis. Reg. Stretton, fol. 85 ; Lancs. Final Concords (Rec. Soc.), ii, 182.
7 Melling in Halsall parish had a chapel with a cemetery as early as 1322 ; Lich. Epis. Reg. North- burgh, ii, 44. The chapel of Goosnargh, an outlying portion of the parish of Kirkham, is first mentioned in 1349; Engl. Hist. Rev. v, 526. The custody of Singleton chapel in Kirkham parish was granted on 20 Aug. 1358 to John of Eastwitton, hermit, by Henry, duke of Lancaster; Fishwick, Hist. of Kirkham, 44. The chapel of Rufford in Croston parish is first mentioned in 13463; Nor. Ceser. ii, 367. The inhabitants of Chorley in the same parish procured in or before 1362 a licence for the dedication of a chapel to be served by one chaplain ; Lich. Epis. Reg. Stretton, fol. 45. The chapel of St. Nicholas, Liver- pool, in the parish of Walton, is first mentioned in 1361 ; ibid. fol. 44. The chapel of Oldham in Prestwich parish first appears in 1336 (Coram Rege R. 306, m. 26d.) ; that of West Derby in Walton in 1360 (Assize R. 451, m. 3) ; William, clerk of Stretford, in Manchester parish, occurs 1326; the chapel certainly existed before 1413 ; Hist. of Stretford Chap. (Chet. Soc. 48). To these perhaps Great Harwood chapel in Blackburn parish ought to be added (Nor. Cestr. ii, 208, 285.)
189 Cal. Pat. 1307-13, p. 233.
181 Warrington church was rebuilt ; An. of Warrington (Chet. Soc.), 197.
1 Thirteen laymen in 1344 gave (or sold) plots of lands varying from an acre to 80 ft. square to Henry de Haydock, parson of Eccleston, ‘for the easement and utility of him and his successors, rectors there’ ; Cal. Pat. 1343-5, p. 306.
2 25 4
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
monks. This was the last Benedictine foundation in England. Restricted in its flow by external obstacles rather than by slackening of religious zeal the liberality of the laity began to run in new channels. The favourite form of benefaction now in constantly increasing measure down to the Reformation was the foundation of chantries. The doctrine of purgatory and of the efficacy of prayers for the dead and of the sacrifice of the altar to abbreviate its terrors had taken firm root throughout Christendom. The landowning class had heaped gifts upon the monasteries for their souls and the souls of their relations, but they now desired a more direct, instant, and individual intercession. This was secured by endowing a perpetual chaplain to sing mass for the souls of the founders and their kindred, to which were sometimes added the souls of all the faithful, at an altar in their parish church or parochial chapel, more rarely in a conventual church. In some cases the chantry was attached to an existing altar, in others a new one was contrived in an aisle, but not infrequently a chapel was built on to the older fabric ; by the addition of such chantry chapels the church of Manchester was doubled in size during the two centuries preceding the Reformation. The founder and his descendants were often buried in the chapel he had endowed, and the chantry priest was surrounded by the sculptured effigies and inlaid brasses of those for whose souls he continually ministered. It must not be assumed that the motives of chantry founders were always purely personal ; these special endowments increased the dignity of the church and its services, the chantry priest being commonly bound to assist the parish clergy in addition to his special work. Sometimes too he was required to act as schoolmaster for a certain number of free scholars, but of this arrangement no Lancashire instance is recorded before the fifteenth century. :
An occasional chantry had been founded in the thirteenth century. About 1208—9 the family of Beetham endowed one in the church of Cocker- sand Abbey,’ and another was founded about seventy years after at Conis- head Priory.* In the following age they became more numerous, some sixteen being recorded."*
The foundation of endowed chantries was carefully watched both by the lay and the ecclesiastical authorities. Gifts of land for this purpose required a licence from the crown for alienation in mortmain, and the bishops usually applied to them the same principles as governed the creation of vicarages. Perpetual chaplainships were ordained with a fixed stipend, and the incumbents were presented by the founders and their heirs to the diocesan, from whom they received admission to the chantry. In the case of the well-endowed Winwick chantry in Huyton church (1383) Bishop Stretton insisted that each of the two chaplains should be paid 10 marks a he Pos mu and eee elaborate regulations as to the oath they were
, their manner of life and the duties incumbent upon them. It is noteworthy that the endowment out of which this chantry was provided had
“8 Cockersand Chart. 332, 1013. They also endowed two beds i i , ; eds in the abbey inf '* Duchy of Lanc. Anct. D., L. 564. For others ascribed to this vin ae By enon Raines (Lancs
Chantries (Chet. Soc.), 31, 74, 225, 264) there is either i i i ; , , Jt ’ nsufhi t fusion with the older and wider sense of ‘cantaria,’ in which it is ee aL ai Seca
88 Accounts of the various chantries will be found in th ica rt € topogr. i ™ These admissions are entered in the Epis. Reg. oe ti Res Coe fol 8 : , fol. 94-8.
26
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
been intended by John de Winwick for the foundation of a new college at Oxford. His brother secured its diversion to Burscough Priory on the ground of the poverty of that house, but subject to the institution and maintenance of a chantry at Huyton. The almost complete absence of such foundations in that part of the county comprised in the archdeaconry of Richmond speaks eloquently of the impoverishment of North Lancashire by the Scottish ravages.
The position of the parish churches in relation to the religious houses was little altered during the fourteenth century. Three or four more were appropriated. The rectories of Melling and Leyland, whose advowsons had long been held by Croxton and Evesham respectively, were bestowed upon those houses in 1310" and 1331.” Childwall, the advowson of which had been acquired by Sir Robert de Holland and given to his new college at Up- holland, was appropriated to the Benedictine monks who replaced the seculars there in 1319." Preston, which Whalley had attempted to secure, but without success, was appropriated to the dean and canons of Henry of Lancaster’s college of St. Mary Newark at Leicester between 1380 and 1415,” when the first mention of a vicar occurs. At Leyland and prob- ably at Melling the ordination of a vicarage accompanied the appropria- tion." Childwall had had a perpetual vicar appointed while its patronage was still in lay hands. Edward I, as already stated, gave the living to his minister John de Drokensford. Drokensford, a pluralist and non-resident, consented voluntarily or otherwise in December, 1307, shortly before his promotion to the see of Bath and Wells, to the ordination of a vicarage at Childwall."* Light is thrown upon the staff of clergy considered necessary for an important church by the provision made for the support of three chaplains and a deacon in addition to the vicar.'*
The vicar’s independence in regard to the religious who held the appropriation not infrequently led to friction between them, especially when the church was close to the monastery. The monks of Whalley maintained that Henry de Lacy had never intended that a vicarage should be established at their very gates, and complained bitterly that it had been excessively endowed. In 1330 they induced Bishop Northburgh to make a new ordinance considerably reducing the emoluments of the vicar of Whalley.’ Ten years later Northburgh had to settle a dispute between Burscough Priory and the vicar of Ormskirk as to the portion due to the latter. But neither house remained content with this. As early as 1285 the canons of Burscough had secured a licence from Bishop Roger Longespée, on the ground of the proximity of Ormskirk church to the priory, to present canons of their house to the living after the next vacancy.” In 1339, having, in
18 Reg. of Burscough, fol. 764 ; Cal. Pat. 1377-81, p. 560. *° Cal. Pat. 1307-13, p. 229. 1 As additional endowment of the cell of Penwortham (Priory of Penwortham, 41-6.) | Cal. Pat. 1317-21, p. 353. ™ Smith, Rec. of Preston Ch. 5, 37-8.
"8 Priory of Penwortham, 47. The vicar took part of the great tithes; but besides defraying the synodals and procurations he had to pay an annual pension of forty shillings to the abbey, which had bound itself to com- pensate the see of Lichfield for the loss it sustained owing to the appropriation—the cessation of vacancies during which the bishop took the profits of the benefice—by a yearly payment to that amount.
™ Lich. Epis. Reg. Northburgh, vol. 1, fol. 28. The case is somewhat similar to that of Walton-on- the-Hill. See above, p. 16.
1 The council of Oxford in 1222 had made a canon that churches with wide parishes should have two or three priests ; Wilkins, Conci/ia, i, 588.
18 Whalley Coucher, 216~20. 197 Reg. of Burscough, fol. 1064.
a]
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
the interim, ‘by negligence’ presented a secular clerk they procured a renewal of the grant from Northburgh ‘for the relief of their soe burdens,’! and henceforth down to the Dissolution the vicar of Ormskir was always a canon of Burscough. The same expedient was adopted at Whalley. Prior to 1358 the bishop had given a dispensation to three monks in succession to hold the vicarage, the reason offered being that the residence of secular clerks within the monastic inclosure led to disturbances, and in that year Pope Innocent VI gave them a general licence to present members of their community to the living,’ and this was done down to the Reformation. Archbishop Thoresby in his re-ordination of the vicarage of Kirkham in 1357 allowed the abbot and convent of Vale Royal to present one of their own number to the benefice; but perhaps this was restricted to the next vacancy.” That this practice was not confined to Lancashire is evident from the statute of 1402, which forbad the religious to hold vicarages in any churches appropriated after that date.*” The tenure of a cure of souls was, no doubt, more inconsistent with the ideal of the monk than of the canon. But monks had long been allowed to serve parish churches which became conventual, like Lancaster, Lytham, and Penwortham ; and at Whalley at all events the monastic vicars could still live with the community. The position of the monk of Vale Royal at Kirkham or of the monks of Whalley, who in the fifteenth century were occasionally made vicars of Blackburn and Rochdale, was less easily reconciled with the observance of the common life. Even in the case of canons, who were normally priests, departure from the house to serve a benefice was regarded as an exceptional thing, requiring dispensation and guarded by special conditions. The monastic vicar of either kind had to be accompanied by one or more of his fellow monks or canons,” and in some cases at least the rule forbad him to administer the Sacraments personally to his parishioners.’ The canon vicar was the commoner. A canon of Conishead served Orton church in West- morland as early as 1281.% In addition to Ormskirk, which was only three miles away, Burscough occasionally presented a canon to Huyton in the fifteenth century,”* and Cockersand had then no less than six of its canons regularly absent from the house, the vicars of Garstang and Mitton, the proctors for those benefices, and the chantry priests of Middleton and Tunstall.* At least one canon of Nostell occurs among the vicars of Winwick in the fourteenth century.
The ordination registers of the bishops of Lichfield give us the number of the religious in South Lancashire who took orders. In the quarter of a
© Duchy of Lanc. Anct. D., L. DFS ™ Cal. Pap. Letters, iii
”' Hist. of Kirkham (Chet. Soc.), 32. Philip de Ei nk cee Pr iar Gea a a oe p de Grenhal, monk of Vale Royal, was instituted in 1362,
™ Stat. 4 Hen. IV, cap. 12. An Act of 1391 (15 Ric. II, appropriation the diocesan should ordain not only the vicar’s portio the benefit of the poor parishioners.
™ Lich. Epis. Reg. Northbur; i, 1225 (Whalley); Alexander III in 1170 aha oe a of coed et a ee te churches, provided the vicar was assisted by two or three of his
fellow canons * Duchy of Lane. Anct. D., L. 293. *™ Nicolson and B = i eae grea ee os nand burn, Hist. of Westmld. and Cum). 1, 481-2.
06 Se 24 See ‘ Religious Houses,’ 156 note 42. The churches of Ulverston and Car were ever established, and Cockerham, until one was created towar served by canons with or without stipendiary priests.
28
cap. 6) had enjoined that before any n, but a proper share of the income for
: 293. Pope hold perpetual vicarages in their ape
tmel, in which no vicarages : ges ds the end of the thirteenth century, were
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
century between 1360 and 1385 the monks of Whalley head the list, with the Austin Friars of Warrington a good second ; about a third as many were contributed by Burscough and Holland respectively. There is no instance of a monk of Penwortham being ordained, unless some of the monks of Evesham, who were occasionally ordained, resided in that cell. The titles offered by secular candidates for ordination reveal in a striking way the concentration of church patronage and employment in the hands of the three important monasteries of this district. From 1325 to the end of the century the titles given by them vastly outnumber all others. Between 1360 and 1385 Whalley gave more than four times as many as those presented by beneficed clergy, and the Holland titles are some 40 per cent. more numerous than those of the great Cistercian house. Burscough, however, gave very few. As Holland had only one appropriate church in the county, while Burscough had two and Whalley four, with many chapels,” these proportions are not a little perplexing. In any case it is obvious that, besides those for whom the religious houses could at once find places, many of those to whom they gave titles must have been maintained by them for years. It was chiefly to the monasteries that the Church of England owed its supply of clergy.”
The increase in the number of ordinations during the second half of the century must have been largely due to the necessity of filling up the gaps caused by the Black Death. In 1349, the year of the first and most fatal visitation of the pestilence, there were seven deaths among the beneficed clergy of that part of the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield which comprised South Lancashire as against one or two in ordinary years. The benefices vacated by death were the rectory of Walton and the vicarages of Childwall, Huyton, Winwick, Whalley, Eccles, and Rochdale* As these were less than a third of the whole number the mortality here was not so great as in Derbyshire and Yorkshire, where upwards of fifty per cent. of the beneficed clergy died.*” Of the number of deaths among the unbeneficed clergy and the religious we have no means of forming a precise estimate, but no doubt it was large. The disorganization caused by the ravages of the plague is illustrated by the fact that the bishop had to collate to the vicarage of Eccles per /apsum, and that the vicarage of Rochdale remained vacant for eight months.”°
The mortality among the beneficed clergy of the deanery of Amounder- ness was even greater. Between 8 September, 1349, and 11 January, 1350, the churches of Lytham, Poulton, Lancaster, Kirkham, and Garstang, half the benefices of the deanery, were all vacated by death, the last two twice.” In addition to these the chapel of St. Mary Magdalen at Preston was vacant for eight weeks. We owe this information and an obviously
#7 These would account for a considerable proportion of the fifty-five chaplains without benefices, who towards the end of Edward III’s reign were resident in the deanery of Blackburn ; Gasquet, The Grear Pestilence, 155.
278 Collect. for Hist. of Staffordshire (Salt Soc.), viii (New Ser.), p. xii.
28 Lich. Epis. Reg. Northburgh, vol. i, fol. 123-27. *09 Gasquet, op. cit. 147, 151.
70 Lich. Epis. Reg. Northburgh, vol. i, fol. 1254, 127.
"11 In the case of Lytham it was the prior who died, and this, though not stated, must have been the case at Lancaster, which was served by chaplains paid by the priory. The coupling with Lancaster, Poulton, and Kirkham of their respective chapels Stalmine, Bispham, and Goosnargh has led to a mistaken statement that nine benefices were vacant (including the Preston chapel). The reference is only to the death of the incumbent of the mother church.
29
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
exaggerated estimate of the number of deaths in each oar ee deanery (varying from 3,000 in those of Preston, Lancaster, and : Ir
to sixty in that of Chipping, and amounting in the total to 13,180) a dispute between Henry de Walton, archdeacon of Richmond, and Adam de Kirkham, dean of Amounderness, as to the sums received by the latter inter alia from vacant benefices, probate of wills, and administration of the goods of intestates."? As Adam, whose accountability began in September, was executor for his predecessor in the office of dean, William Ballard, it is not unlikely that the latter was himself a victim of the plague.”* For the other Lancashire deaneries no similar data are available. The prior of Cartmel apparently died, probably of the plague.”* The Lichfield Registers do not reveal any unusual mortality among the beneficed clergy of South Lancashire during the subsequent visitations of the plague in 1361 and 1369. While the plague raged it was not possible to enforce the rights of sepulture of the parish church where the distances involved were great ; licences were therefore granted for local burial. In two cases this interim arrangement led to a more permanent one. In 1352 Bishop Northburgh authorized the consecration of a cemetery for the chapel of Didsbury in consequence of the devotion of its people during the late pestilence and the difficulty of carrying their dead to Manchester, on account of which they had had a licence to bury at Didsbury.”* The burgesses of Liverpool received a licence to bury in the cemetery of their chapel of St. Nicholas during the plague of 1361, saving the dues of the parish church of Walton, and in the following year the rector of Walton procured from the bishop a commission to dedicate the chapel and appoint a cemetery to last as long as the vicar of Walton pleased.?"*
The more general effects of this terrible scourge, which must have been specially felt in North Lancashire, where the wounds inflicted by the Scots were still fresh, are not easy to appraise.2”7 A temporary relaxation of morals and disorganization of church institutions, some lowering of the character of the clergy, whose thinned ranks had to be suddenly recruited without too nice an attention to qualifications, must have resulted. Against this is to be set a certain revival of religious feeling, partly no doubt the effect of panic.
_ The mortality among the landowning class doubtless stimulated the desire to secure permanent intercession for the souls of the dead by the
™ Engl. Hist. Reo. v, 325 (1890). The archdeacon claimed £28 administration of intestates’ goods), and a jury assessed the amount
> There may als office.
** Lich. Epis. Reg. Northburgh, vol. ii, fol. 127% to bury in their cemetery, in Sept. 1361, ‘on account Stretton, i, fol. 7). Northburgh also authorized them t though it is of antiquity beyond memory, has been seldom done of late, oblations to the rectory of Manchester. : os pear aa oe vol. ii, fol. 44-5. The agreement in the
roston and the inhabitants of Chorley for the dedicat; brought about by the pestilence, though ae is ee ae hd A Tay ee Aye: Bash The hospital of St. Leonard at Lancaster was given to the povert oe i Froved fatal to its usefulness ; see ¢ Religious Houses.’ PES: Gan orca aire ** Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 205.
of the mortality due to the plague’ (ibid. Reg.
same year between the rector of
30
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
foundation of chantries. Another feature of the plague period was the great increase in the number of licences granted to the local lords for the celebra- tion of divine service in the oratories of their manor-houses,”” and here too we may perhaps detect an attempt to obtain a more direct and personal intervention with heaven coupled in some cases doubtless with a dread of infection. These licences were only granted for a short term of years, or, occasionally, during the bishop’s pleasure, but their effect was unfortunate in so far as they tended to raise a barrier between the lord and his tenants. Allusion has been made to a probable lowering of tone in the clergy and religious as one of the results of the Black Death. It must be admitted, however, that this was not marked enough to come out in the rather scanty information at our disposal as to the state of the Church in Lancashire during the fourteenth century. Both before and after the great pestilence there is some reason to believe that the appropriate churches were better served than those under lay patronage. The frequent occurrence of the names of Langton, Standish, Halsall, and Le Walsch among the rectors of Wigan, Standish, Halsall, and Aughton illustrates the habitual use of livings by lay patrons as a provision for younger members of their families. Rectors were instituted when only in minor orders, or even with the first tonsure, occasionally under the canonical age, and so little qualified for their work that licences of absence for several years to study at a university had to be granted to them.*° The bishop might and did insist that the cure should not be neglected ; but for this there was no real guarantee when its duties were performed by chaplains not too well paid and without security of tenure. Leave of absence was also freely granted to rectors for other reasons the nature of which is seldom expressed,” and in such cases they were allowed to put their churches to farm. Between 1355 and 1383 Thomas de Wyk, rector of Manchester, was absent from his cure for eleven years altogether. The episcopal registers contain only one instance of such permission in the case of a vicar, and then only for a year; in 1309 the vicar of Blackburn received leave to go on pilgrimage for that length of time.¥* Robert de Clitheroe, rector of Wigan from 1303 to 1334, undertook the work of escheator beyond Trent and other royal commissions without formal leave of absence ; he had an acknowledged (but of course illegitimate) son born after he was ordained priest, and was an active partisan of Earl Thomas of Lancaster, for which he was tried and heavily fined in 1323.%% He pleaded
9 Lich. Epis. Reg. passim. The licence was sometimes granted to rectors and even chaplains ; ibid. Scrope, fol. 124. An enigmatic entry in 1394 records the grant of a licence to the prior of Penwortham to celebrate divine worship in his parish church without prejudice to the oratory in his priory for two years ; ibid. fol. 1314. Taking advantage of the increased demand for their services and the reduction of their numbers by the plague, chaplains (like labourers) demanded higher salaries, 10 or 12 marks a year, with the result that Parliament in 1362 fixed 6 marks as a maximum for parochial chaplains and five for those without cure of souls ; Rot. Parl. ii, 271. .
™ They were usually licenced vaguely imsistere studio generali, but in one case Oxford is specified ; Lich. Epis. Reg. Scrope, fol. 135. A rector of Walton in 1328 obtained permission to study for seven years “according to the canon,’ but two or three years was the average time allowed. In the case of Henry Halsall, who in 1395 was admitted to the family rectory of Halsall at the early age of 19, no licence appears on the registers ; ibid. fol. 594. He was described as Master H. H. however when promoted in 1413 to be arch- deacon of Chester ; ibid. Burghill, fol. 1034.
™! A rector of Leyland was given leave of absence in 1322 while an advocate in the Court of Arches ; a rector of North Meols in 1324 to serve the earl of Huntingdon, who was lord of Widnes ; ibid. Northburgh, i, fol. 124, 13.
"a iia. Taneae: fol. 57. 3 Hist. of the Ch. of Wigan (Chet. Soc.), 38-45.
31
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
d him to render llustration of a church-
that the terms of his tenure of the manor of Wigan boun military service to the earls of Lancaster when required—an 1 the ambiguous position in which such rectory manors might place man. Another beneficed priest with a son was Thomas de Wyk, rector of Manchester, already mentioned.”* The son was rector of Ashton-under- Lyne. It is perhaps not without significance that the only recorded case of deprivation in this century is that of a rector of Leigh, Henry Rixton, in 7928."
As far as Lancashire was concerned the evil of pluralities does not seem to have been more glaring than in the previous century. No pluralist of Mansel’s magnitude occurs. As before, the worst cases were connected with Wigan and Preston, and for these the lay authorities were primarily respon- sible. The crown intermittently claimed the advowson of the former against the Langton family, and in 1350 Edward III presented his chaplain John de Winwick, who for a short time held the rectory of Stamford in Lincolnshire concurrently with Wigan, was provided by the pope at the king’s request to the treasureship of York, and enjoyed prebends in various cathedrals and collegiate churches.”* The patronage of Preston, which had passed from the crown to the earls of Lancaster, was exercised by Earl Henry in 1348 in favour of his treasurer Henry de Walton, who in the next year was provided to the archdeaconry of Richmond (with which was united the rectory of Bolton-le-Sands), and held stalls at Lincoln, York, Salisbury and Wells.” His successor Robert de Burton seems to have been also rector of Ripple in Worcestershire.** The popes sought to restrain at least the accumulation of benefices with cure of souls, and Urban V in 1366 issued a constitution against plurals, in accordance with which John Charnels, an old servant of the crown and principal executor of Henry, duke of Lancaster, then rector of Preston, exhibited to the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield a list of his ecclesiastical benefices and their values.** But the pope was not always stern and many dispensations were granted. The union even of cures of souls was not stopped. In 1388 John Fithler was admitted both to the vicarage of Rochdale and the rectory of Radcliffe.’*
__ For the early part of the century at all events there is evidence that the bishops of Lichfield kept a watchful eye on the Lancashire part of their great diocese. Walter de Langton and Roger de Northburgh were not very spiritually-minded ecclesiastics ; but Langton, finding that the rectory of Prescot, held im commendam by Alan le Bretoun, treasurer of Lichfield, ee
** The marriage of the clergy in minor orders was n i : g ot forbidden. But i ibi from entering the higher orders. In 1313 Robert de Wigan, clerk, Agnes his ate nthe ee are ae at Warrington ; Annals of Warrington (Chet. Soc.), 142. : sk a ina poe eee: Cae vol. i, fol. 103. In 1360 William de Slaidburn, vicar of Kirkh oe or abuse of his office as dean of Amounderness, but received the duke of L i se : Hs a irkham (Chet. Soc.), 70. William de Hexham had to resign Eccleston in 1371 pe Baia cing the son of a priest he had obtained institution without a dispensation ; Cal. P pe a as ti ie, Fi oe 420-1, 460; Hist. of Ch. of Wigan (Chet. Soc.), 47 ‘ Ba aerate teens al. Pap. Letters, iil, 277, 290, 478, 542; Smith, Rec sm C - , > > > . of Preston Ch. “ 1 oe ot a been keeper of the Great Wardrobe and constable of Bee oe esti d Soke is ak at £50 a year; ibid. 36, from Add. MS, 6069, fol. 96. : Scape ae DEeMere rer a3 fats of Rochdale (Chet. Soc.), 22. For papal collations to Lancashire benefice i 308, 324, 384. In 1363 the vicarage of Kirkham was void so long as to la eee
In 1357 the cardinal of Perigueux, papal legat lapse to the holy see (ibid. 451). ‘aie papal legate, gave the rectory of Standish to Gilbert de Standish ta
32
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
being neglected, threatened to take it from him ;*' while Northburgh made at least one personal visitation of this portion of his diocese (1330), and four years later corrected some disorders at Holland Priory.** His successor, however, was the illiterate Robert de Stretton, whom the Black Prince forced into the see after a good deal of resistance on the part of the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury, who both at first rejected him propter defectum literaturae ; he was unable to read _ his profession of obedience to the arch- bishop, and most of his episcopal work during the twenty-five years (1 360-85) he held the see was done by suffragans.** Richard le Scrope, on the con- trary, who presided over the diocese in the later years of the century until he became archbishop of York, was a man of learning and high character.
The list of archdeacons of Richmond in the early part of the period affords good instances of the way in which foreigners were still provided for in England. This important office was held in close succession by Gerard de Vyspeyns, subsequently bishop of Lausanne ; Francesco Gaetani, Cardinal of St. Mary in Cosmedin, and Elias son of Elias de Talleyrand, count of Perigord and afterwards (1328) bishop of Auxerre.™* Of any opposition to the church system and doctrines there is in Lancashire no trace. Lollardy never got a footing so far north. In 1337, while Wycliffe was still a boy, Sir William de Clifton refused to allow those of his tenants who were living in open sin to be corrected or punished by the parish clergy of Kirk- ham, and had his infant baptized without the baptismal font of the church, but these were mere incidents in a bitter quarrel with the abbot of Vale Royal over the payment of tithe.”
The unshaken attachment of the county to the existing ecclesiastical establishment is amplyattested by the many benefactions bestowed on it in the fifteenth century. It benefited largely by the prosperity which the landed gentry of Lancashire derived from the new and close connexion of the county with the crown, a prosperity of which the most conspicuous instances were the rapid rise of the house of Stanley and the high positions in Church and State attained by members of the local families of Booth and Langley. ‘Three sons of John Booth of Barton rose to episcopal rank ; John became bishop of Exeter *” (1465), William bishop of Coventry and Lich- field (1447-52) and archbishop of York (1452-64), and Laurence, bishop of Durham (1457-76), archbishop of York (1476-80), and Lord Chan- cellor. Thomas Langley of the Middleton family was bishop of Durham (1406-37), Lord Chancellor and a cardinal. With the exception of John Booth they were considerable benefactors to the Church of their native county. Langley rebuilt Middleton church, in which he founded a chantry, and William and Laurence Booth endowed two chantries in the church of Eccles. The foundation of chantries was more than ever the favourite form
*1 Lich. Epis. Reg. Langton, fol. 22.
32 Thid. Northburgh, vol. i, fol. 1582.
%88 Ibid. vol. ii, fol. 604. 4 Dict. Nat. Biog. lv, 47.
"85 Cal, Pap. Letters, ii, §3, 218 ; Le Neve, Fasti Eccl. Angi. iii, 137.
°86 Hist. of Kirkham (Chet. Soc.), 34-5. Clifton and his tenants drove the tithe collectors away by force of arms, assaulted the priests and clerks in the church, and scourged the abbot’s clerk in the streets of Preston even to effusion of blood. In the end Clifton had to make restitution and seek absolution, while the tenants had to present a large wax candle to the church, which was carried round it on the feast of palms, and to swear never more to injure Kirkham church.
37 He was previously rector of Leigh and warden of Manchester.
2 33 5
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
of benefaction. At least forty were endowed during the century, most of
. : doubt given by the civil wars. them after 1450; a fresh impulse was no doubt g yu A novel feature of the fifteenth-century chantry foundations was their frequent association with charitable provisions. At Middleton, Preston, and St. Michaels-on-Wyre chantry priests were required to keep a free grammar school for poor children ; those of Lathom and Lancaster presided over small hospitals or almshouses for eight and four bedesmen respectively ; in other cases an annual distribution of alms formed part of their duties. Occa- sionally the founder bound them ‘to assist the Curate for ever (e.g. at St. Michaels-on-Wyre), or ‘to maintain the service in the quiere (choir) every holy day’ (e.g. at Standish). The priests of the two Eccles chantries were to live together in a manse built for them near the churchyard, and have a common hall and table.**'
The most striking single benefaction to the church in Lancashire during this age, however, was the collegiation of the church of Manchester by Thomas la Warre. Last of his family in the direct male line, La Warre doubled the parts of patron and rector ; in 1421, moved by representations of the insufficient spiritual oversight of this large and populous parish, the rectors of which had been generally non-resident and indifferent, he arranged for the transference of his rights to a college to consist of one master or warden chaplain, eight fellow chaplains, four clerks and six choristers, and augmented the considerable revenues of the rectory with a sum of 200 marks and certain lands and tenements, including the Manchester manor-house of the La Warres and of the Grelleys before them, the proximity of which to the church made it a convenient residence for the college.” Warden Huntingdon, its first head, began the re-construction of the church on a scale propor- tionate to its new dignity. In less ambitious fashion a large number of the Lancashire churches were restored or rebuilt during this century and the first quarter of the next, and this with the chantry chapels imparted that generally ‘ Perpendicular’ character which now characterizes them. This building activity testifies to the increased prosperity of the county.
The chapel of Littleborough in Rochdale parish was built about 1471, the Todmorden chapelry of Rochdale came into existence between 1400 and 1476, provision was made for one at Milnrow in the same parish in 1496, and in or before 1500 a chapel was erected at Lathom ; those in the town of Garstang, which was a mile and a half from the parish church, and at Windle (St. Helens) in Prescot parish, are first mentioned in this tae et ae then. Holme in Cliviger (Whalley parish) a oe . this age. These are all, not clearly earlier than
-entury, that can be definitely traced beyond the sixteenth century ; but it is probable that a number of those which are first heard of in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII were of earlier foundation.
*8 Besides these there were chantries not monastic churches.
** The almshouse at Lancaster was near the eas chantry were to have a common seal. Gardiner, not connected with the chantry.
*° This was 5s. at Hollinfare, 30s. at Eccles.
> In the chantry certificate of 1547 they are called fellows
*’ Hibbert Ware, Foundaticns of Manchester, iv, 1543 Halas Heyworth, fol. 112. The manor-house is now the Chetham Hospi
34
permanently endowed. Chantries were also endowed in some
t end of the church, and still exists. The pri i > ; e€ priests of th the founder, also endowed a grammar aheol: but this ae
d, M ae F a amecestre, 468 ; Lich. Epis. Reg.
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
With the exception of Garstang,™* Littleborough, Oldham, and Todmorden those mentioned above seem to have been originally mere chantry chapels.
Some important changes in the relations of the parish churches to the religious houses took place. In 1414 Lancaster Priory shared the fate of other alien priories dependent upon foreign monasteries. Their possessions had from time to time been taken into the king’s hands during the wars with France, and now an Act of Parliament dissolved them altogether and vested their property in the crown.“* Henry V bestowed the priory of Lancaster upon his new Brigittine nunnery of Sion founded in the same year.™* Its advowsons and appropriate churches were included in the grant, with the exception of the advowson of Eccleston, which was granted (before 1463) to one of the Stanleys.“* As some compensation perhaps for its being with- held, Croston, of which the priory had only held the advowson, was appro- priated to the nuns of Sion ; *” a vicarage was ordained by Bishop Heyworth in 1420.%° Ten years later the archdeacon of Richmond ordained a vicarage in their church of Lancaster,** and in the same year the abbess augmented the vicarage of Poulton.”
Three churches besides Croston were now first appropriated. St. Michaels-on-Wyre was given by Henry IV in 1409 as part of the endow- ment of the chantry (afterwards college) of Battlefield, founded in com- memoration of the battle of Shrewsbury, and a vicarage was subsequently ordained.*' In 1448 Prescot became appropriate to King’s College, Cambridge, which had received the advowson from its founder Henry VI in 1445," and in the same year William, Lord Lovel arranged for the appropriation of Leigh, the advowson of which he had inherited from the Hollands, to the Austin Canons of Erdbury in Warwickshire, of whose house he was a patron.** Vicarages were ordained in each case."
Eccleston was not the only church which reverted to lay patronage. In 1433 or 1434 (12 Hen. VI) the canons of Nostell sold their rights in Winwick church, which in this case too passed into the hands of the Stanleys ; the purchaser was Sir John Stanley of Lathom, K.G., grandfather of the first earl of Derby.** The advowson of Walton-on-the-Hill was bought from Shrewsbury Abbey in 1470 by Sir Thomas Molyneux, knt., of Sefton.
43 In 1437 the inhabitants of Garstang had licence from the archdeacon of Richmond to have divine service performed in the chapel in that town for one year ; Not. Cestr. ii, 412.
4 Rot. Parl. iv, 22. ™5 Thid. iv, 243. See ‘ Religious Houses.’
“6 Lich. Epis. Reg. Heyworth, fol. 1204 ; ibid. Hales, fol. 101. Thomas, Lord Stanley, father of the first earl of Derby, presented in 1463.
*7 Ratified by Pope Martin V on 18 Aug. 1418 ; Foedera, ix, 617.
™8 Lich. Epis. Reg. Heyworth, fol. 129. The vicar was bound to distribute annually ros. to the poor.
9 Not. Cestr. ii, 429. The vicar was required to maintain six chaplains, three in the parish church and one each in the chapels of Gressingham, Caton, and Stalmine.
79 Thid. ii, 456.
*! Wylie, Hist. of Hen. IV, iii, 241 3 Hist. of St. Michaels-on-Wyre (Chet. Soc.), 43, 109.
*? Rot. Parl. v, 92 ; Lich. Epis. Reg. Booth, fol. 64 ; Nor. Cestr. ii, 203. John of Gaunt obtained the advowson in 1391 from Ralph, Lord Nevill of Raby in exchange for that of Staindrop ; Lich. Epis. Reg. Scrope, fol. 57.
*8 Lich. Epis. Reg. Booth, fol. 684.
*4 The vicar of Leigh’s portion was 16 marks and a tenement. Besides the usual payments to the bishop and archdeacon he was bound to distribute annually 6s. 8¢. among the poor.
%55 Nor, Cestr. ii, 261. ‘The priory reserved a pension of £5. ‘The incumbents were henceforth rectors instead of vicars.
#86 Thid. ii, 222. The Molyneux family had always been patrons of the adjoining rectory of Sefton.
35
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
No very marked declension in character or devotion to their work on i ea ble, unless it be among the monastic the part of the parochial clergy is observable, De a Pa ale==ane vicars. Negligent and absentee parsons—some too, of indifferen en met with, but there is nothing to show that they were much more ee than before. The use of patronage to provide a career for een cae gitimate sons perhaps increased a little—a continuous sear ine - oe ie e.g., held the rectory of Wigan from 1370 to 1506—and t e a fe & Winwick became almost an appanage of the Stanley family. Crown patronage continued to be exercised in a way which led to non-residence. The rectors of Prescot, for example, before its transference to King’s College were men of high academic standing—two of them became bishops—but one of them, Philip Morgan, much employed by Henry V in diplomacy, and Aner wards bishop successively of Worcester and Ely, was certainly an absentee,” and probably others were. Royal nominees cannot, indeed, be said to have been the only offenders in this respect. In 1444 the archdeacon of Richmond had to admonish the rectors of Claughton and Chipping and the vicars of Lancaster and Garstang for non-residence.*® Instances occur of diocesan interference for graver reasons. The bishop of Lichfield ordered an inquiry in 1460 into the state of Walton church, whose church furniture and buildings were alleged to be notably defective by the fault of the late rector, Ralph Stanley.” In 1473 the archdeacon of Richmond inquired into abuses in the church of Tunstall." Bishop Hales in the following year collated to the vicarage of Eccles because John Bollyng, whom the abbey of Whalley had presented, was found to be ‘unsuitable and incompetent.’*” As the vicar of Tunstall was a canon of Croxton, the last two incidents are primarily a reflection upon the condition of the religious houses. This seems to have undoubtedly suffered a change for the worse. In 1454 the prior of Burscough and two of the canons, one of whom was the vicar of Ormskirk, were convicted of practising divination, sortilege, and the black art in order to discover hidden treasure. All three were suspended from the priestly office, the prior had to resign, and the vicar was deprived.** Towards the end of the century Holland Priory fell into a very unsatisfactory state. Complaints reached the bishop in 1497 that the monks did not observe the rule of St. Benedict, that their church was out of repair, their other houses ruinous, and their spiritual and temporal goods dilapidated or dissipated by their negligence and excesses,?* The result of the inquiry ordered does not appear, but the alleged neglect of the rule is borne out by the evidence as to the condition of the priory at the time of its dissolution forty years later. Records of visitations of Cockersand Abbey show that a considerable relaxation of morals and discipline prevailed in that house towards the close of the century. But the abbey seems to have recovered a healthier tone before the Dissolution.2“* From the episcopal registers it would appear that the number of regulars taking orders
2 Dict. Nat. Biog. xxix, 24; Lich. Epis. Reg. Catterick, fol. 19. * Smith, Rec. of Preston Ch. 38 ; Raines’ Lancs. MSS. XXll, 373.
ARE, é 7 : ; ae ae Reg. Hales, fol. 125. Eccleston was vacant in 1493 ‘by cession or dismissal’ ; ibid. *! Lancs. Chant. 233. *? Lich. Epi - Epis. Reg. Hales, fol. 108. *® Ibid. Boulers, fol. 50, 655 ** Tid. Arundel, fol. 2364.
** See below, pp. 111, 112, * Ibid. p. 156, 36
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
had decreased in this age. In this period, too, the leper hospitals at Preston and Lancaster were allowed to fall into decay and disuse. What has been said of the ecclesiastical state of the county in the fifteenth century is generally true also of the early years of the sixteenth down to the abrupt changes of Henry VIII. The tendencies already noted became perhaps a little more marked, but that was all.
Of the three chapels (all in Whalley parish) which are expressly recorded to have been erected during the first half of the sixteenth century | one only, Newchurch in Rossendale, preceded the breach with Rome. It was built by the inhabitants in 1511 as a chapel of easement, the way to their parish chapel at Clitheroe from the forest being ‘ penefull and perilous.’ Some, however, of the many chapels of which the first mention occurs in documents of the time of Edward VI may have been built under Henry VII and Henry VIII, while others no doubt were older.” Not all were parochial, but certain chantry chapels served as chapels of ease where the parish church was remote or difficult of access.** Until the very eve of the Reformation the foundation of chantries went on even more rapidly than before. In the course of a generation almost as many came into existence as in the whole of the previous century. Most of the founders were still drawn from the landed gentry and the clergy, but the Manchester chantries reveal the rise in that town of a class of merchants enriched by its nascent manufactures. Pre- eminent among them for his munificence was Richard Beswick the younger, who, besides founding a chantry for two priests, one of whom was to teach a free school—thus anticipating the larger endowment for education made some years later by his brother-in-law Bishop Oldham—bore part of the cost of the Jesus Chapel in which his chantry was installed, and restored at his own ex- pense the choir and nave of the church.” He was assisted in the erection of the chapel by the other members of the gild of St. Saviour and of the Name of Jesus ; Richard Tetlow, also a merchant, and others left money for the maintenance of a second gild, that of Our Blessed Lady and of St. George ;*” but neither these nor any other Lancashire gild, if such existed, seems to have received a separate and permanent endowment, for no associations of the kind are noticed by the commissioners of 1546 and 1548. A sign of the times is the provision made for grammar schools in connexion with chantries at Manchester, Liverpool, Warrington, Blackburn, Leyland, and Rufford. The chantry priest at Blackburn, for instance, was required to be ‘ sufficiently learned in gramer and plane songe to keep a fre skole.’ All seem to have
*66 The others were Goodshaw (1540) and New Church in Pendle, built by the inhabitants and consecrated as a parochial chapel in 1544.
* ‘They include: in Bury parish, Edenfield, Heywood, Holcomb ; in Deane parish, Westhoughton ; in Bolton parish, Rivington ; in Croston parish, Becconsall, Tarleton ; in Kirkham parish, Lund ; in Leyland parish, Euxton, Heapey ; in Middleton parish, Ashworth ; in Prestwich parish, Shaw ; in Ribchester parish, Longridge ; in Rochdale parish, Whitworth ; in Sefton parish, Crosby ; in Walton parish, Formby, Kirkby ; in Whalley parish, Accrington ; in Tunstall parish, Leck ; in Cartmel parish, Cartmel Fell, Flookborough. This list is doubtless incomplete.
768 Becconsall, e.g., being separated from Croston Church by an arm of the sea, was sometimes cut off from it for four days together (Lancs. Chant. 171), during which the chantry priests ministered the sacraments to the inhabitants. Rufford and Tarleton were in the same case. The rector of Ribchester sometimes could not visit Bailey chapel owing to floods in the Hodder (ibid. 212). We may here notice that the chapelry of Deane was now formed into a parish separate from Eccles (No. Cestr. 37) and that the ancient parochial chapels of Bispham and Goosnargh were now occasionally and loosely called parish churches. (Hist. of Bispham, 26 ; Lancs. Chant. 242).
769 Lancs. Chant. 48 sqq. 7 Ibid. 41, 44.
37
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
been free with the partial exception that at Liverpool the cantarist of St. Katherine was allowed ‘to take his advantage ’ of scholars saving those ‘that beryth the name of Crosse and poore children.’ ‘At Manchester (St. James’ chantry), Liverpool, and Warrington the foundation included an annual distribution of alms to the poor, and in the last case to the ministers of the church. The chantry priests at Blackburn and Standish were expressly bound to assist in the services of the church.?” Edward Stanley, first Lord Monteagle (fifth son of the first earl of Derby), to commemorate his success at Flodden left an endowment for a hospital at Hornby for two priests, one clerk, five bedemen, and a schoolmaster, but his intentions were never carried out. Better fortune attended an almshouse for a chaplain and eight bedemen founded at Lathom by the second earl of Derby in 1500. A number of the older churches and chapels were restored or rebuilt in this period.
The state of the clergy remained much as before. Perhaps the evils of family livings and political influence may have become a little more accen- tuated, but the beginning of the century does not form a real dividing line. Stanleys, and in a less degree Molyneux and Halsalls, continued to be thrust into the richest benefices without much regard to their fitness. James Stanley (younger brother of Lord Monteagle), whose easy morals were afterwards made the most of by Protestant critics, did not resign the wardenship of Manchester until he had been bishop of Ely for four years, and he held Win- wick down to his death. He is not unfairly described by his nephew, the bishop of Sodor and Man, in his rhyming history of their house, as a man
who If he had been noe prieste had bene worthier praise.
Edward Molyneux, who in 1509 succeeded his uncle James, archdeacon of Richmond, as rector of Sefton, held the rectory of Ashton-under-Lyne and the vicarage of Leyland, and in 1528 was admitted rector of Walton on his undertaking to pay the late rector, who had resigned in his favour, £80 a year ‘as long as he should be employed in worldly affairs.” William Wall, probably the son of a law-agent of the second earl of Derby, died in 1511 rector of Eccleston in Lancashire and Davenham®*® in Cheshire. Pluralities and non-residence had, indeed, taken such deep root that even the best men of the time saw no harm in them ; the famous physician and scholar Linacre had no scruples in holding the rich rectory of Wigan (1519-24), though he never resided. As for the chantry priests, there is little evidence as to character, but the commissioners of 1546 could report that in almost ever case the duties prescribed by the founders were performed ; and if the priest at Goosnargh ‘did use to celebrate at his pleasure,’ the reason probably was that in this case no foundation ordinance could be produced?”
There was much that urgently called for reform, but it is pretty clear that the drastic changes introduced by Henry VIII were regarded with no real sympathy in Lancashire, except among the few who hoped to share in the spoils of the monasteries, and that on the contrary they provoked a large amount of more or less active hostility, especially in the northern parts of ‘ie
™ At Blackburn ‘ he was to maintain one side of the choir every h a : oly day.’ that Chetham s cantarist at the altar of St. George in Manchester mney pe - cele of the cloke in the mornynge’ and to be a member of the gild of St. George *? Lancs. Crant. 112-13. ™ Tbid. 178-9. om Ibid. 243
38
It may be noticed here brate mass daily ‘at six
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
county. It was a priest who, on the proclamation of Queen Anne at Croston in July, 1533, cried out that ‘Quene Katheryn shulde be Quene, and as for Nan Bullen, that hore, who the Devill made her Quene? and as for the Kynge shall not be King but on his beryng ;’ nevertheless there can be no doubt that he voiced the opinion of large numbers of laymen.?* Grievances not directly connected with the royal divorce and the ecclesiastical changes which followed in its train swelled the rising tide of discontent,’ but the spectacle of the faith of which the king was entitled Defender ‘ piteously and abominably confounded,’ the dissolution of the smaller monasteries in 1536,"” and the fear of even more sweeping measures, opened the flood-gates.' Lanca- shire, however, as is shown below, played only a secondary partin the Pilgrimage of Grace. The south and west of the county did not join in the insurrection, though even there the loyalty of the commonalty, if not of the gentry, was considered somewhat doubtful. No profound indignation can have been aroused by the suppression of Holland and Burscough priories; they had fallen into utter decay, and at no time had they filled the same place in the life of their neighbourhood as the northern houses in their wilder surroundings.
The priories of Conishead and Cartmel were included in the first suppression, and the great abbeys of Furness and Whalley fell after the Pilgrimage of Grace. The remaining houses did not long survive. ‘The results of the disappearance of the monasteries were not wholly beneficial. A good deal of charity, indiscriminate it may be, came to an end and the new owners of their lands raised rents. The parish churches which had remained conventual or quasi-conventual to the last—Lytham, Penwortham, Cartmel, and Ulverston—were left in an unfortunate position as compared with those appropriated churches in which vicarages had been endowed. It is true that the successors of chaplains or curates paid by the convent, though appointed without episcopal institution by the new impropriators of the rectories, were in future ensured life tenure, and so became ‘ perpetual curates’ ;° but they had no income except what the impropriators allowed them, and this was miserably low.”
The order for the removal of superstitious objects from the churches was not more popular in Lancashire than the suppression of the religious houses. A few months after his appointment to the new see of Chester (1541) Bishop Bird informed the king that for lack of doctrine and preaching the inhabitants of his diocese were much behind His Majesty’s subjects in the south. ‘ Popish idolatry ’ was likely to continue by reason that divers colleges and places claiming to be exempt from the bishop though they had, in accordance with the proclamations, taken down idols and
75 Derb. Corres. (Chet. Soc.), 13. 8 See ‘ Political History.’
7 The Act of February, 1536, provided for the suppression of monasteries with less than £200 a year. According to the revaluation of clerical property made in 1535 (Valor Eccl. printed by the Rec. Com.) five Lancashire houses were under this limit : Burscough, Holland, Cockersand, Cartmel, and Conishead. Royal Commissioners appointed 24 April, made a new survey of them, and on their report all but Cockersand were suppressed. For Cockersand see ‘ Religious Houses,’ p. 157.
378 Makower, Const. Hist. of Engl. Ch. 332.
779 Until the middle of the seventeenth century the curate of Cartmel had nothing but what the bishop’s farmers allowed him ; Not. Cestr. 499. The whole salary of the curate of Ulverston in 1560 was {10 ; ibid. 535. The curate of Lytham had then nothing but a grant fron the Committee of Plundered Ministers ;
ibid. 447. 39
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
images accustomed to be worshipped, still kept them and suffered the els to offer as before.*” The suppression of the chantries 1n 1548, Av ate the faults of the chantry system may have been, undoubtedly diminis i ae efficiency of the church machinery in the county. The gn a
Chantry Act might have been less open to criticism had it remaine ae Somerset’s hands. It is characteristic of his successors that they stretched it to cover the confiscation of the plate and bells of a large number of chapels
in which chantries had never existed.
II—FROM THE REFORMATION
The Reformation period has a twofold importance for the County Palatine ; a special one in so far as it led to the erection of the see of Chester, and a general one in so far as it gave rise to a certain amount of disturbance among the parochial clergy and even among the laity. The former point can be dealt with summarily. The Act of 1539 for the dissolution of all monasteries *! was accompanied by the Act authorizing the king to make bishoprics by his letters patent.” Between the date of this latter Act and the actual issue of the letters patent erecting the new bishoprics a period of nearly two years elapsed, an interval which was probably occupied by the prepara- tory work of surveying the financial basis and drafting the general scheme of each intended foundation. From the record preserved it can be gathered that it had not at first been contemplated to erect a bishopric at Chester at all, but only to extend the foundation and resources of the abbey of St. Werburgh.** Abandoning this more limited idea, the letters patent erecting the see were signed by the king on 4 August, 1541, at Walden. Thereby the monastery of St. Werburgh at Chester was made an episcopal seat and cathedral church with a bishop, a dean, and six prebendaries. The whole of Lancashire was included in the new see, John Bird, bishop of Bangor, being nominated to it. The two archdeaconries of Richmond and Chester,” separated respectively from York and from Lichfield, were united and annexed to the new see with all their jurisdictions. Both archdeacons were to be collated by the bishop and to receive not more than {100 per annum from him. The archdeaconry of Richmond, hitherto under York, was taken into the province of Canterbury, thus bringing the whole see under that province. The chapter was incorporated and was to guide itself in its actions by statutes to be prescribed by the king in an indenture.
These letters patent were followed on the next day by two other patents, granting respectively to the bishop and to the dean and chapter their endow- ments." The latter of these two patents has a curious history. By a clerical
*™ L. and P. Hen. VIII, xvi, 1377. *! 31 Hen. VIII, cap. 13. 7? Thi ee The draft schemes are contained in vol. 24 of the Mie. Bks. of hee Off. at the ono ere id Pat. 33 Hen. VIII, pt. 2, mM. 23, reprinted in full in Rymer, Foedera, xiv, 717-24. _ ™ As already stated Lancashire north of the Ribble was in Richmond archdeaconry, and south of that river in Chester. The latter archdeaconry contained the deaneries of Warrington Wine better Blackburn and Leyland; that of Richmond the deaneries of Amounderness, Kirkby Lonsdale Kendal F d ia pomne others outside the county. , pee oth these patents, dated Walden, 5 Aug. 1541, are entered : That to the bishop granting him the renee) of a. in Lonsdale Ba sepa ae nani A ce
is printed in abstract in Ormerod, Ces. i, 96. That to the dean and chapter do printed. .
sessions in various counties €s not appear to have been
40
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
slip in the enrolment of the grant the name of Chester was omitted *” from the designation of the dean and chapter, so that the grant runs as follows: ‘ Dedi- mus et concessimus ac per praesentes damus et concedimus decano et capitulo ecclesiae cathedralis Christi et beatae Mariae Virginis per nos dudum erectis omnia illa maneria,’ &c. The omission proved of serious consequence, for under Edward VI the grant was impugned and the lands under a compulsory conveyance passed to Sir Richard Cotton, comptroller of the household, charged only with a fee-farm rent to the dean and chapter. The fee-farm rent of course remained stationary, whilst the lands themselves have increased in value. The practical result was to deprive the dean and chapter of the endowment intended for them by Henry VIII.
At the time of the foundation of the new see of Chester both the arch- deaconries within its limits were held by Dr. William Knight, a well-known ecclesiastic and statesman, frequently employed by Henry VIII as his ambas- sador abroad. The licence for Knight’s election as bishop of Bath and Wells was issued on g April, 1541 ; he was confirmed on 19 May and con- secrated on the 2gth. He had previously, by a deed dated 10 February, 1541," resigned the archdeaconry of Richmond, while the other archdeaconry he resigned by a charter dated 20 May, 1541.% The jurisdictions hitherto appertaining to these archdeaconries were vested thenceforth in the bishop of Chester, who was empowered to delegate to the future archdeacons such and so much jurisdiction as he should please. As a consequence these dignitaries were henceforth shorn of that extensive and almost independent jurisdiction which had hitherto distinguished them. Under the terms of this authoriza- tion the first bishop, John Bird, kept the archidiaconal powers of Chester and Richmond in his own hands, and did not during his episcopate appoint any archdeacons. His successor, George Coates, did, it is true, appoint to each archdeaconry—at what exact date is not known, but probably in 1554 —and from that time onwards the succession of the archdeacons is unbroken, though the dates of some of them are not clear. But none of these officials possessed any jurisdiction, that anciently appertaining to their dignity being exercised by the bishop through his vicar-general or chan- cellor for the diocese generally, or by the bishop’s commissary for the arch- deaconry of Richmond in particular.” The arrangement by which the new see was placed within the province of Canterbury did not endure for long. By an Act of 1541-2* the bishoprics of Chester and Man were severed from the southern province and annexed to that of York.
So much for the merely formative results of the first Reformation period. But that period, using the term in the widest sense, had a more
7 That the omission was a slip is proved by the fact that in the margin of the entry on the roll it is clearly stated that the grant was to the dean and chapter of Chester : ‘Decano et Capitulo ecclesie cathedralis Cestrensis.’
88 Confirmed on 8 Mar. by a charter of Edward, archbishop of York.
*89 Confirmed by a charter of Rowland, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, dated 24 May, and by a charter of the dean and chapter of Coventry and Lichfield dated 26 May.
8 As to this latter a misconception seems to exist. The letters patent of 4 Aug. 1541 erecting the bishopric contain a proviso of reservation of the metropolitical and archiepiscopal prerogative within the see of Chester as usual and proper in other dioceses. This has been magnified by Whitaker (Richmondshire, i, 34) into a special reservation intended to exclude the quasi-independent jurisdiction and liberties of the ancient archdeacons of Richmond. There is no justification for this view. The clause is quite the usual proviso clause, with no special import, and the name of Richmond is not even mentioned.
71 33 Hen. VIII, cap. 31. 2 41 6
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
general effect on the county of Lancaster than the mere territorial ae ments of jurisdiction which followed on the erection of the as . th affected the parochial clergy and the parishioners themselves, thoug eon extent it is not easy to determine. It is clear that the Lance ae te gt and his Privy Council, was highly suspicious of the attitude of the northern ecclesiastics. This suspicion was possibly justified by the delay and Opposi- tion made during May, 1532, by the Convocation of York in the recognition of his supremacy.” In the next year, 1533, Dr. Nicholas Wilson of Cambridge, a north-countryman, on behalf of the * Popish clergy,’ travelled about Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cheshire preaching against the supremacy. But on 1 June, 1534, the acknowledgement of the king’s claim by the ce province was duly made in Convocation, which had met at York on 5 May. In the course of the following months, July and August, this collective acknowledgement was followed by the individual subscriptions of the clergy throughout the country which are now known technically as ‘ renunciations of Papal supremacy.’ Only certain portions of the returns of these sub- scriptions have survived, and do not include those for the northern province at all, although Wharton asserts that to his certain knowledge the original subscriptions of the remaining dioceses were in existence.” The absence of any returns for Lancashire makes it impossible to say how far the clergy of this part of England actually acquiesced in the measure. If the argument from silence is safe the assumption is that acquiescence was general, for there is no hint of any refusal.
In the following year the administration busied itself with a scheme of spreading the doctrine of the royal supremacy amongst the laity. Letters were sent out in June, 1535, from the Privy Council to all the bishops re- quiring them to see that the people in their respective dioceses were effectually instructed in this point. The replies from Edward Lee, archbishop of York, to this missive have been preserved.** Although they are somewhat enigmatic the archbishop informed the king clearly that he had spared no pains in distributing among the clergy of his diocese the ‘book’ containing the new order for preaching and for bidding the beads which contained the king’s new style as head of the Church, and he does not give the slightest hint of any opposition or dissatisfaction among either clergy or laity save only from the priors of Hull and Mountgrace. Incidentally the correspondence yields the informa- tion that there were not in the diocese of York at the time twelve preaching resident secular priests: a remark that may cover the archdeaconry of Richmond. The probability is therefore great that in the northern counties the supremacy was dutifully accepted, and that this question alone would not have raised a revolt. There is nothing to show that the riots and unlawful assemblies in Lancashire, Westmorland, Cumberland, and Craven which caused
2 Strype, Eccl Mem. i ; ee, ha rea em. 1 (1), 205; Cott. MSS. Cleopatra, E. 6, 216; Cabala, p. 2443 Fuller,
*3 Rymer, Foedera, xiv, 492.
© They are contained in two volumes at the Record Office ; Exchequer, cellaneous Books, 63-4. These portions concern only the Southern Province, any entries relating to the archdeaconry of Chester. ,
*5 Wharton, De Epis. et Decan. Londin. 286. The statemen on the Close Roll of 25 Hen. VIII is incorrect.
* Cott. MSS. (Cleop. E. 6, 234-9, dated 14 June, 1535, and are summarized in Strype, Eccl. Mem. ii, 287-91.
42
Treasury of the Receipt Mis- and even these do not contain
t that some of the subscriptions are entered
and 19 July, 1535, and 14 Jan. 1535-6)
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
anxiety in this year, 1535, had a basis of religious discontent. They appear to have been purely secular.’”
But when towards the end of this year the visitation of the monasteries began a very different popular feeling was at once aroused. As far as Lanca- shire is concerned the Pilgrimage of Grace is of importance only as indicative of the discontent at the threatened destruction of the monasteries. At first it was supposed that the forces in Lancashire would be available to put down the rebels in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and on 10 October, 1536, the king warned the earl of Derby to get his men together with this object. But almost immediately it was found that the commons in the West Riding and Lancashire were up. On the day named the commons of the north of Lancashire and of the West Riding forcibly reinstated the abbot and twenty- one monks in the Yorkshire abbey of Sawley, four miles from Whalley. Accordingly, on the twentieth of the same month, the king ordered the earl of Derby to go against the Lancashire rebels because of their ‘insurrection and assembly lately attempted in the borders of Lancashire specially about the abbey of Sawley.’ On the 28th the earl assembled a force of nearly 8,000 men at Preston, with the object of forestalling the rebels and of occupying Whalley Abbey. The commons received an accession of strength from the north. In Cartmel they had against his will reinstated the prior in the priory there; and another body from Kendal had joined hands with the commons in the neighbourhood of Sawley. Some time between the 28 and 30 October the earl sent the rebels word to disperse to their homes or else to meet him in battle on Bentham Moor, the place where they were accustomed to muster. The rebels, led by John Atkinson, captain of the commoners in Kendal, replied that they had a pilgrimage to do for the commonwealth which they would accomplish or jeopard their lives in that quarrel, and further that they would not fight with him unless he interrupted them of their pilgrimage. Before any further action the earl’s hand was stayed by the receipt of word from the earl of Shrewsbury announcing that the Yorkshire rebels had dispersed, and requiring him to disband his men. On their side too the rebel leaders had dispatched word to the commons of Cumberland, Westmorland, Kendal, the side of Lanca- shire and Craven and all others of the north to leave besieging of houses and disperse homewards.
Evidently this command was not received in Lancashire in time to prevent the rebels making their attack on Whalley Abbey. After appointing a rendezvous at Stoke Green near Hawkshead kirk on the 28th, and another on Clitheroe Moor apparently on the 3oth,
the commons of the borders of Yorkshire near to Sawley with some of the borders of
Lancashire near to theym assembled theym together and with force then unknowen to me [the earl of Derby] sodenly toke the said abbey of Whalley.
Immediately afterwards, however, hearing of the general disbandment, the rebels quietly dispersed. The proclamation of a general pardon for the town of Lancaster and northwards in Lancashire, with the exception of four ring- leaders of Tynedale, Ribblesdale, the borders of Lancashire and Kendal, was issued on 2 November, and the trouble was practically over. For
*7 T. and P. Hen. VIII, viii, 863, 1008, 1030, 1046, 1108. 43
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
although on 6 November letters were sent from Aske to Lancashire and other parts moving them to insurrection—letters which were followed in the middle of the month by rumours that Kendal intended to come into Cartmel and Furness, and possibly to march through Lancaster to Preston—no further movement followed.”
As far as Lancashire is concerned the Pilgrimage of Grace was of small importance. Only the wild northern borderland was affected by it, and its duration was a mere matter of weeks. The earl of Derby’s forces were in arms for not more than five days at the outside. Nor were the subsequent proceedings of much note as far as the county is concerned. The reinstated monks were still in possession of Sawley in December, but early in the following year, 1537, they were seized, and after a trial at Lancaster William Trafford, the abbot, was executed in March. After similar proceedings John Paslew, abbot of Whalley, and William Haydock, one of the senior monks, were also executed in the same month. Whilst the movement was thus insignificant in extent it is also clear that its basis was as much social as religious. The economic effect of the Dissolution touched the laity as closely as, if not more so than, the religious effects. This general conclusion is borne out by the survey of the action of the clergy themselves.
For the wider evidence of the attitude of the latter towards the course of the Reformation in the years covered by these events we are obliged to fall back on the broken and not very trustworthy testimony of the statistics of the incumbents. At the time of the Valor Lancashire contained sixty rectories or vicarages, and within these parishes there were contained in addition ninety-three chapelries and sixty-nine chantries or stipendiary priests.
Arguing, unsafely as ever, from silence it would seem that during the first period of the Reformation—that of the divorce, supremacy, and suppres- sion—the clergy of the county of Lancaster conformed easily and almost universally to the wishes of the king, and that in the southern parts of the county the laity also were equally docile. Such a conclusion is equally applicable to all the succeeding years of Henry’s reign. The numerous religious changes which followed each other swept in successive waves over the county without leading to any recorded disturbance or removal of the clergy or to any persecution of the laity.
The simple fact of course is that except sentimentally and economically the suppression of the religious houses did not in most cases affect the people, the laity that is, as parishioners.** It did not touch the secular priests or the ordinary ministrations. But when towards the close of his reign Henry cast covetous eyes on the chantries,™ a very different result ensued. For they were supplied by secular priests, who in many cases performed the ministrations of baptism, marriage, and burial, and to lay hands on t to touch the parishioners themselves in a most vital spot.
ordinary hem was It ig a speaking
* For the whole of this episode see the Derby Correspondence (Chet. Soc.) . Exceptions have teen pointed out above—at Lytham, &c , ® By the Act 37 Hen. VIII cap. 4, the Parliament grante. ing (i j ACO 37 - Will, cap. 4, l granted to the K hte oe and stipendiary priests chargeable a tmeein eee fens en. Page 8) ane 25 Lee 47 Mens VII (ices) + and Gi all such i fee &e., as between 27 and 37 Hen. VII had been fraudulently tae diode oe ie oe as if only the latter of these two items was granted to the king. But Henry’s commi : eo epee recites that the Act gave him also the first-named items. - Se ASHES Se a 8)
and L. and P. Hen. VIII.
44
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
testimony to the silent progress of the Reformation that whereas the dissolu- tion of the monasteries, which directly touched the laity hardly at all, should have provoked the Pilgrimage of Grace, the suppression of the chantries, which touched the laity closely and deeply, should have taken place without apparent protest from the people.
Henry’s commission for an inquisition into the chantry foundations within the diocese of Chester was dated Westminster, 13 February, 1545-6, and directed to the bishop of Chester, Sir Thomas Holcroft, John Holcroft, Robert Tatton, John Kechyn, and James Rokeby.™
So far as relates to Lancashire the return is contained in the Duchy Records.** It is not dated, and we know nothing in detail as to the pro- ceedings of the commissioners.*%* Whether or how far Henry took steps to sell the chantry lands in Lancashire we do not know ;_ the Commission Book does not contain the record of any authority for such sale, nor is there record of any leases of chantry lands in the county earlier than 1548.
In spite of strong opposition the scheme was again taken up after the accession of Edward VI. The first Parliament of Edward VI passed a similar Act to that above named, but much more explicitly and clearly drafted. This Act** granted to the young king all colleges, free chapels, and chantries existing then or five years before, excepting the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, parochial chapels of ease, &c. Under the powers conferred by this Act Edward in 1548 issued commissions under the Great Seal. That for the counties of Chester and Lancaster and the city of Chester was directed to Sir Hugh Cholmeley, Sir William Brereton, John Arscott, James Sterkye, George Browne, and St. Thomas Carewes, esqs., and John Kechyn, Thomas Fleetwood, and William Leyton, gents.**
The returns were probably made before Easter, and certainly before 11 August, 1548,°° for on that day the king signed a commission %” dated at Cranborough, giving Sir Walter Mildmay, one of the surveyors- general of the Court of Augmentations, and Robert Keylway, surveyor of the liveries in the Court of Wards, authority to assign pensions to priests and schoolmasters, &c., in the duchy in accordance with the provisions of the Act.*
501 Although the Act makes no mention of plate or ornaments the commission authorized the commis- sioners to make an inventory of them, and the returns accordingly contain such inventories.
502 Division 25, u. third portion, No. 45.
%3 Tt is likely that the inquiry was held and finished and the report of the commissioners sent in by way of certificate to the Chancellor of the Duchy, at Westminster, before July, 1546, for in that month the commissioners for certain other parts of the duchy, viz. for Norfolk, were empowered by a fresh commission of 8 July, 1546, to make sale of certain chapels asin their certificate of survey thereof, which said certificate had been returned on the previous Ascension Day ; Duchy Rec. Bk. of Com. vol. 95,
. 170. 0 1 Edw. VI, cap. 14.
8 Pat. 2 Edw. VI, pt. 7, m. 13. This and all the commissions were dated 14 Feb. 1547-8.
°° These returns are preserved among the duchy records; Colleges and Chantries Certificates: (1) 37 Hen. VIII; (3) 2 Edw. VI. The printed text of these returns (Cher. Soc. vols. lix, Ix) does not follow either (1) or (3), but runs the two together. It is printed from an inaccurate transcript. The footnotes also are rendered valueless in numberless cases by the fact that the editor relied on Piccope’s confused transcripts of undated Chester visitations.
57 Duchy Com. Bk. vol. 96, p. 25. ;
% This commission of 11 August is itself based upoa a previous one of 20 June, 1548, empowering the same two persons to make grants for grammar schools, pensions to priests, &c.; Pat. 2 Edw. VI, pt. 4, m. 334.
45
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
The commission laid down the proportions of the pensions to be allowed as follows :
ion to be Value of living seized Pensi
to the king Pegiies ri : ¢ @ © Below £5 ‘ ; ; ‘ 2 : ‘ ; Between £5 and £6 135. 4d. : : : ; ‘ ; : . Between £6 135. 4d. and {10 . : : ‘ ; . a Between {10 and £20 3 4
In accordance with their powers the commissioners on 28 August returned a list of the pensions which they recommended to the chantry priests and schoolmasters of the duchy;*”
whereupon letters patent are to he made out in due form under the seal of the county
Palatine of Lancaster and this warrant subscribed by the said Mildmay and Keylway to be a sufficient warrant to the Chancellor etc. of the Duchy to make forth the said letters
patent.
Before leaving these pensions there is one question calling for elucida- tion. A pension would in no case be granted before the endowments of the particular chantry had been seized into the king’s hands, and had either been sold or let on lease. Thus the Lancashire chantries had been sold or leased before the date of the above-named return, and in all probability before the preceding Easter. A more explicit date cannot, unfortunately, be given.*” ae
The net result of an examination of the leases and pensions is as follows :— The return as to pensions accounts for sixty-six out of the full total of the sixty-nine chantries within the county. For these sixty-six confiscations there are forty-eight existing leases. Outside these chantries the county con- tained ninety-four chapelries, and there is no existing record of their having been touched at all. The present transaction was intended only as a first instalment. As a commencement the Privy Council had ordered £5,000 per annum of the chantry rents to be sold, and further instalments followed at later points in the reign ; but there is no record of any further general sale transaction in the county of Lancaster on the lines of that just recorded. There is not the slightest proof that chapelries had been touched by Henry VIII, for the only distinctive reference to proceedings on this head in Henry’s reign mentions only chantries.** The inevitable conclusion is that the chapelries remained untouched. There are few subjects on which greater confusion of view and error of statement abound than this subject of the chantries. The view ordinarily put forth is as follows :—(1) Henry VIII’s suppression of them was prevented by his death; (2) The suppression was undertaken de novo by Edward VI, and completed within the first and second years of his reign ; (3) Mary restored them ; (4) Elizabeth again suppressed them and seized their revenues ; (5) The pensioned chantry priests became
* This list has often been referred to, mostly at second hand. Willis, Mitred Acéeys, ii, 107. The original is contained in the Du *° The draft leases still exist (Duchy Rec. Draft Leases, bdles. They generally end with the formula, ‘Make a lease of the premise at Easter, 1548, paying yearly at terms usual X Y Z rent.’ “There were many separate subsequent commissions relatin to indivi i goods, but no general survey and sale of = chapelries in bulk on the Pie at
g ve e lines of this sale of the chantri F i si2 Acts of the P. C, ili, 74; Henry VIII resumed the chantries, ‘and did well change ane eae to other use;
An incomplete abstract of it is given in chy Rec. Accts. Var. 28.
5 & 6), but these drafts are not dated. s to A B for twenty-one years, beginning
45
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
loafing out-of-works. Every one of these statements is doubtful or untrue, for (1) Henry probably suppressed some of the chantries ; (2) What was done in 1547-8 was only a first instalment, successive commissions of inquiry being issued all through his reign ; (3) Mary did not restore a single chantry : on the contrary, fresh commissions of inquiry were issued during her reign, and she herself gave leases of chantry lands to laymen; (4) In Elizabeth’s reign there were no chantries left to suppress—the bones had been picked too clean for that ; (5) There is evidence that some of the old chantry priests remained as pensioned clergy, performing service and administering the sacraments in the localities where they are supposed to have been thrown out of work, and the presumption is that many more of them did so than we have actual proof of.
The series of commissions of inquiry relating to Lancashire which were issued in the time of Edward VI and Mary are recorded in an appendix (pp. 96-8 m/fra),** and other evidence on the matter will be found in the accounts of the churches in the topographical section of this work.
Many of the chantry priests continued to enjoy their pensions long into the reign of Elizabeth, being paid by the separate local or county receivers of the various parts of the duchy.™* It is evident from the contemptuous way in which some of them are later referred to as ‘old popish chantry priests’ that a portion of them remained recalcitrant ‘papists.’ But such a statement applies to only a portion, possibly a small portion, and others remained on active service as priests administering the sacraments in the chapelries.*
As to the larger question of the general attitude of the parochial clergy and of the laity of Lancashire towards the various phases of the Edwardian Reformation there is a remarkable dearth of information. There does not appear to have been any appreciable displacement of the clergy at any time during Edward’s reign, i.e., such a displacement as would argue revolt against the reforming measures of authority."° Nor is there any record of any protest on the part of the laity against the stripping of churches or the abolition of the chantries. Does this prove that the clergy of the county had become Protestant? By no means. It merely proves that the clergy clung to their livings, casting conviction to the winds.
How then was the county taught the reformed doctrine? Of the actual process we catch few glimpses, but these, though mainly retrospective, are significant. An entry in Edward’s Diary under 18 December, 1551, affords the earliest form of the institution which was later to grow into the
518 By the aid of the list it will be possible in future to arrange the existing skins of returns in accordance with the actual commissions, and thus to give a scholarly account of both the suppression of the chantries and the sale of church goods,
514 Tt is on account of this method of payment that there is no general account of the payment of pensions preserved among the records of the duchy. In his annual account the receiver-general of the duchy only accounts for the net sum received by him from each separate or local receiver, and the subsidiary accounts of these local receivers have not survived.
515 A direct statement to this effect is contained in the chantry lease No. 2 (Duchy Rec. bdle. 5) with regard to the chapel of Bailey, near Ribchester, where it is said of Robert Taylor, late incumbent of the late dissolved chantry there, that the ‘said incumbent doth at this day [1548] celebrate there and doth minister to the inhabitants adjoining at such times as the curate of the parish church cannot repair to them for the floods of the river’ (See also Strype, Eccl. Mem. ii (1), 100).
316 Details as to the clergy will be found in the accounts of the parish churches.
47
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
king's or queen’s four Lancashire preachers ;*” but there is no record of any such preacher save John Bradford having visited Lancashire. If the scheme were carried out instantly and in full it could only have been in operation for a year and a half—from December, 1551, to July, 1553—and as the first payment to these chaplains on their £40 per annum was only made in October, 1552, it may be that they commenced their preaching tours later than the beginning of 1552. On the supposition that the first year’s course was carried out as outlined, then Bradford and another were preaching in Lancashire and Derbyshire during part or all of the year 1552, Bradford probably choosing Lancashire. Short though the time was, the ground covered by him seems to have® been remarkably small. Hollinworth says that ‘God gave good success to the ministry of the Word and raised up and preserved a faithful people in Lancashire, especially in and about Manchester and Bolton.’ In Bradford’s ‘ Farewell to Lancashire and Cheshire,’ dated 11 February, 1554-5, he enumerates the places in Lancashire where he had ‘truly taught and preached the Word of God’ as follows : Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne, Bolton, Bury, Wigan, Liverpool, Eccles, Prestwich, Middleton, and Radcliffe. Looked at broadly, such a circuit and con- stituency is practically only a Manchester one. The farewell is addressed ‘to all that profess the true religion in Lancashire and Cheshire and especially abiding in Manchester.’ A similarly disappointing conclusion is deducible from the meagre biography of George Marsh.** He was charged with having preached heretically in January, February, or about that time in 1553-4 in Deane, Eccles, Bolton, Bury, and many other parishes in the bishopric of Chester. This statement of time and area is confirmed by his own account of his proceedings.*
That the spirit of Protestantism had spread further afield than the Manchester district is, however, evident from the story of the mayor of Lancaster, who jeered at the rood which had been re-erected in the church of Cockerham.’ Marsh also hints that the schoolmaster at Lancaster was a Protestant. There is a very instructive story relating to the Reformation in Shackerley in Foxe,”' but it is not possible to date it exactly. It seems clear, therefore on the existing evidence that the reformed doctrine was as yet confined to the populous towns and to the south-east, and had made no impression on the moor country and the west.
Putting aside the stories of Bradford, Marsh, Holland, and Hurst, there is less information concerning the religious history of the county under Mary than the reign of Edward yielded. The story of the riot in Billinge chapel in Wigan parish in August, 1§53, which ensued on the reading of Mary’s proclamation for the exercise of Catholic religion ** has a significance
*” «Tt was appointed I should have six chaplai di ‘ aplains ordinary, two to be ever present and four al bsent os ee agian Wales, two in Lancashire and Derby, next a two in the Merche oe otland, two in Yorks the third year, two in Devon, and two in H i ge ee F ; in Hants, the fourth year, two in Norfolk and an Nothing is recorded as to the reasons which made Marsh one much earlier than Bradford’s visit to the county. Perhaps Le preached there. *° Foxe, Acts and Monuments (ed. Cattley), vii, 50. Ibid. vi, 564. Foxe describes thi ‘ aah ate » 564 escribes this man as ‘an old favourer of the Gospel—which is rare in that * Ibid. vill, 562.
a Protestant, but he seems to have become ver and other Lancashire men had already
*™ A good contemporary account of it is given in Chet. Soc. Publ. cxiii, 79 48
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
which is only half religious. The inhabitants speak as Roman Catholics, but apparently were concerned primarily about the property of the chapel. Beyond this episode almost the only evidence bearing on the attitude of the county towards the Marian reaction is afforded by the mere names of the clergy who vacated ** in the years 1553 or 1554 and the numbers ordained to supply vacancies.°* The cathedral clergy have hardly the same importance for this question as the parochial ; but the deprivation of Bishop Bird in 1554 is of account.
For the story of the general legislative settlement of the Elizabethan Church Lancashire would have little importance were it not for the personality of the bishop of Chester, Cuthbert Scott, a native of the county.* Even before the passing of either the Supremacy Act or the Uniformity Act Scott had got into trouble for his uncompromising attitude both in Parliament and Convocation, and at the disputation at Westminster, 31 March, 1558-9, between the Protestant and Roman Catholic champions. But until the passing of those Acts no specifically penal proceedings were taken against him or his fellow bishops. Both Acts passed on 28 April, 1559, and on 23 May following, a royal commission was issued to the Privy Council to administer the oath of Supremacy. Between 21 and 26 June the oath was tendered to Scott, and on his refusal of it he was on the latter date deprived. After a four years’ imprisonment in the Fleet, he was allowed to live in Essex under surveillance, but escaped to Belgium, where he died in 1565. Having disposed of the Marian bishops, who were all** deprived by November, 1559, the administration turned to the general body of the clergy. On 28 May, 1559, a general visitation of all the dioceses was resolved upon. The articles of inquiry, which were practically those of the Edwardian Injunctions, were ready by 13 June, and on 24 June writs of visitation were issued to all the dioceses. Five sets of visitors were appointed for the southern province and one set for the northern province. The fourteen commissioners who composed this latter comprised noblemen, knights, divines, and lawyers: but the work fell mainly on Edwin Sandys, afterwards archbishop of York, Henry Harvey, a civil lawyer, Thomas Gargrave, speaker of the House of Commons, and Henry Gates. In the course of September they visited the dioceses of York and Durham, Carlisle in the first week of October, and then entered the diocese of Chester. On Monday, 9 October, 1559, Sandys and Harvey sat at Kendal to visit Kendal, Copeland, and Furness.*” There is no mention in their proceedings of any clergy refusing the oath in these deaneries. We are only told that the visitors heard two causes, one as between Cockermouth and Embleton, the other as between Crosthwaite and Heversham. On the 12th they sat at Lancaster, and at Wigan on the 16th,
8 These names include among the parochial clergy the following: Warrington—Edward Keble
deprived, his successor instituted in Nov. 1554; and North Meols—Lawrence Waterward, deprived before Aug. 1554, when his successor was instituted.
™ See the Ordination Book, printed by the Record Society of Lancs. and Ches. There were no ordinations at all according to the new ordinal in the time of Edw. VI. The figures show that Bishop Bird ordained 48 priests in 1542, 41 in 1543, 38 in 1544, 22 in 1545, 44 in 1546, and 14 in 1547; Bishop Coates 12 in 1555; Bishop Scott 17 in 1557 and 68 in 1558. ‘The last number affords an indication that Scott had got his diocese into something like working order.
8 The earl of Derby’s attitude is related in V.C.H. Lancs. iii, 162.
6 Except Kitchin of Llandaff. The bishop of Sodor and Man was perhaps not touched by the Acts ; at all events he retained his bishopric and his three Lancashire benefices till his death.
37 The proceedings of this visitation are preserved in P.R.O. S.P. Dom. Eliz. vol. x.
2 49 7
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
and here again we read of no refusers of the oath or articles. On 18 and 19 October they sat at Manchester, the visitors now being Sandys, Harvey, and George Browne. On the first of these days they heard a case of adultery between George Holme and Elizabeth Robinson, and on the last day they visited the college of Manchester. Instead of appearing, Lawrence Vaux, the warden, sent a deputy, Stephen Beshe (Beck), who stated that Vaux had gone to London.** John Coppage, a fellow of the church, appeared not. Robert Erlond (Ireland), another fellow, appeared and subscribed. Robert Prestwich, a stipendiary priest, appeared and also subscribed, but was threatened with suspension if he frequented taverns any more. Richard Hart, another fellow of the college, appeared and obstinately and peremptorily refused to subscribe the articles.
The rest of the visitation concerns the county of Chester. In the whole diocese the visitors only made one institution, viz. the church of Langton in Yorkshire ; in Lancashire they specify (counting Winwick and Wigan as one) only eighteen clergy as absent (non comparentes) as follows :-—
Leytanp Deangry.—Croston, Thomas Lemyng, vicar ; Leyland, Charles Wainwright, vicar ; Eccleston, John Modye, rector.
Warrincton Dganery.—Winwick, Thomas Stanley, non-resident; Wigan, the bishop of Sodor and Man, non-resident ; Prescot, Robert Nelson, curate ; Aughton, Edward Morecroft, rector ; Halsall, Richard Halsall, vicar, and Henry Halsall, curate ; Sefton, Robert Ballard, rector; Ormskirk, Elizaeus Ambrose, vicar ; Walton, Antony Molyneux, rector.
Furness Deranery.—Hawkshead, Richard Harris, curate (afterwards appeared) ; Thomas Syngilton, stipendiary priest ; Richard Ward, stipendiary priest (afterwards ap- peared) ; Hugh Kellete, stipendiary priest.
Mancuester Deangry.—Prestwich, William Langley, rector (afterwards subscribed) ; Rochdale, John Hamson, curate.3#
Of the seventeen non comparentes only Hamson of Rochdale was deprived.
To these should doubtless be added Vaux, the warden, and Coppage, a fellow of the college of Manchester. James Hargreaves, the noted ‘ papist ’ rector of Blackburn, was not deprived until 1562. Inthe absence of any further notes of deprivations or resignations the presumption is that the rest of the Lancashire clergy quietly acquiesced in the Elizabethan settlement.
The visitation thus described is to be regarded as a purely temporary outcome of the powers given by the Act of Supremacy to the queen to appoint commissioners who should exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction. A more permanent outcome was the fixed ecclesiastical commission sitting in London which in its first form was created in July, 1559, and which began to sit in the November following. It was to this body that the temporary provincial visitors as just described bound the recalcitrant clergy to appear. Quite different from both royal commissions were the episcopal visitations which
8 He had in fact gone to Ireland, removing not only himself i college and the plate and vestments of the dak. The rf eee een Ei
Spey Ne mata eeds he had already assigned to the care of Alexander *® The commissioners took from him a recogni S tor gnizance of {30 and a London ais the Ecclesiastical Commission] on 20 Noone. following. t was also presented to the commissioners that at Rad life ( not read the Gospel, Epistle, &c. according to the Poe masa i aaa Presentations of non-residence and dilapidations.
Manchester and two of the fellow , the vi eee s, the vicars of Rochdale and Lancaster, and perhaps one or two others, lost
50
surety of £100 for his appearance in
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
followed in 1560 and 1561. As the see of Chester, vacant by Scott’s depri- vation, was not filled up till May 1561 by the appointment of William Downham,"™ the visitation in the northern province was delayed until that year. There appears to be no extant record of this visitation so far as the see of Chester is concerned, unless it is at York or Chester.
On 20 July, 1562, the permanent Ecclesiastical Commission [in London], which had practically ceased to act after 1560, was revived in a different form. This second ecclesiastical commission had for its object no longer the enforcement of subscription from the general body of the clergy. That had been already accomplished by the first body. It was rather a precautionary institution created to watch the ‘papists,’ whose hopes had been roused by the events on the Continent, especially by the persecution of the Protestants in France. The first act of this new commission was to order the bishops to inquire after recusants*™’ in their various dioceses. ‘The outcome was the first small list of imprisoned recusants, which may be dated about August 1562. It yields three Lancashire names.**
It is not to be understood that this diocesan inquiry just described was an episcopal one, relating only to the clergy and resting for its authority on the ordinary episcopal right of visitation. It was in each case a separately constituted local commission to the bishop and others, and was to cover the laity as well as the clergy in its purview.** In this instance a commis- sion was issued on 20 July, 1562, to the earl of Derby, the bishop of Chester, and others, appointing them commissioners for ecclesiastical causes in the diocese of Chester to enforce the Acts of Uniformity and Supremacy.**
There was as yet, however, no evidence of the application of penalties to the body of the laity. The State was busied only with a minority of recalcitrant clergy. The first severe penal statute of Elizabeth’s reign ** was the outcome of the religious wars in France and of the discovery of a plot in favour of Mary queen of Scots.” The Act received the royal assent on 10 April, 1503"
The clause in the Act which required justices of peace to inquire as to offences against the Act led to the Privy Council inquiry in the course of October, 1564, into the general well- or ill-affectedness of the justices of peace.” The certificate returned by the bishop of Chester shows that in
3! Stubbs, Reg. Sacr. Angi. (1st ed.), 84. 97 §.P. Dom. Eliz. Add. vol. 11, No. 45.
388 Lawrence Vaux to remain in co. Worcester ; Richard Hart and Nicholas Banester to remain in Kent or Sussex.
*4 The appointment of these commissions by the civil power rested on the powers conferred on the crown by the Act of Supremacy. They were issued very frequently throughout Elizabeth’s reign, and cause much confusion to the student. These special, local, and temporary ‘ Commissions for Ecclesiastical Causes,’ as they were styled, have to be kept most jealously distinct, not only from each other, but also from the permanent Ecclesiastical Commission in London on the one hand, and from the various diocesan visitations on the other.
335 §.P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 23, No. 56. ;
888 5 Eliz. cap. 1 an Act for the assurance of the queen’s royal power over all estates and subjects in her dominions. _ ™ Thid.
888 Besides prescribing a praemunire and treason for all persons upholding the jurisdiction of the see of Rome in England it enacted that the oath of Supremacy should be taken by graduates, schoolmasters, officers of courts, and members of Parliament as well as ecclesiastics. Except for office holders the Act affects the laity only by implication, viz. in the clause giving the Lord Chancellor power to issue commissions to administer the oath to such persons as the said commissioners should by their commission be empowered to tender the oath to. In the main it was directed against the clergy, and there is no evidence either of perse- cution arising on it or of any popular or lay disaffection as underlying it. An imperfect list of the clergy of the diocese who took the oath is printed in Ces. Sheaf (Ser. 3), i, 34-5.
3° The returns to this inquiry have been printed by the Camden Society (Ser. 2), vol. 53.
51
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
Lancashire out of twenty-five justices only five were known to be favourable to the proceedings of the government in matter of religion, the remaining twenty being not favourable thereto, and as a consequence inclinable to the Papists. Among these twenty are some of the most representative and best- known names in the county. Later on the administration took steps to purge and reinforce the bench, but at the moment it would appear that the bishop found difficulty in suggesting Protestant names of standing in the county fit to be made justices. In the hundreds of Amounderness and Leyland he can suggest none, and in the remaining three hundreds only ten names.
It is unfortunate that no clear indication of the immediate effect of the Act of 1563 can be given, as the 1564 visitation of the diocese of York did not extend to the see of Chester. The bishop of Chester compounded with the archbishop for it, and refrained from visiting his diocese, contenting him- self with collecting the procuration moneys by means of his servants.* So that all the information we possess relating to it is confined to the bishop of Durham’s letter to the archbishop of Canterbury on the state of his three parishes of Rochdale, Blackburn, and Whalley. It is probable that the Act of 1563 was enacted only in terrorem, and would have remained unused but for the events of the pontificate of Pius V. With his advent in 1566 a change came over the attitude of the English Roman Catholics. Hitherto the laity had so far acquiesced in the Church settlement as to attend their parish church, although a committee appointed by the council of Trent had decided against this practice. On his accession Pius V appointed two English exiles in Louvain, Dr. Sanders and Dr. Harding, apostolic delegates to make known to the faithful in England the papal sentence which declared it a mortal sin to frequent the Protestant church service. Accordingly Sanders wrote a pastoral letter which he entrusted to Lawrence Vaux, late warden of Manchester. Vaux crossed to England, and making for Lancashire, issued on 2 November, 1566, a circular to his Lancashire friends in which he gave the substance of Sanders’ pastoral. ‘What I write heare to youe I wold wysse Sir Richard Mollineux, Sir W. Norris and other my friends to be partakers.’ *”
This letter appears to have reached the hands of the government in the following year. On 20 December, 1567, information was sent to the Privy Council that certain gentlemen in Lancashire had taken a solemn oath not to come to communion and rejoiced greatly at the report of a Spanish invasion.”
Some three weeks or a month before Christmas, 1567, the bishop of Chester was also informed of great confederacies presently in Lancashire by sundry Papists there lurking who have stirred divers gentry to their faction and sworn them together not to come to church; and he was advised to execute the ecclesiastical commissions with the earl of Derby, or else it can- not be holpen, for many church doors be shut up and the curates refuse to serve as It 1s now appointed to be used in the church. The bishop replied he had heard Mr. Ashton, and would send for the offenders by precept.“
240 Strype, Life of Parker, i, 361. “1 Thi 7 S.P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 41, No. 12, Nov. 1566. idly 92s
*" Thid. vol. 44, No. 56. The | j i i i PN pea niche ed s e letter just quoted was probably an inclosure in this paper, and has been
“4 Thid. vol. 48, No. 35, undated. 52
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
On Tuesday before New Year’s Day the matter was again pressed on the bishop by Sir Edward Fitton, who informed the bishop that Mr, Westby his kinsman had told him he would willingly lose his blood in these matters. Also he said that from Warrington all along the sea coast in Lancashire the gentlemen, except Mr. Butler, beginning with Mr. Ireland then Sir William Norris and so forwards other gentlemen there, were of the faction and withdrew themselves from the religion.
The bishop again refused to execute the commission, but afterwards signed precepts for divers ‘ Papistical priests’ and some gentlemen to appear before the commissioners.“* A second paper, almost as confused, relating to this affair yields further details.
Again Edmund Holme informed of a letter from Dr. Saunders to Sir Richard Molineux and Sir William Norris to exhort them to own the Pope’s supremacy. Hereupon Sir Richard Molyneux vowed to one Morne a/ias Butcher alias Fisher of Formeby and to one Peyle a/ias Picke (who reported that he had the Pope’s authority) and so received absolution at Picke’s hand. His daughters Jane, Alice and Anne and his son John did the same. And so did John Mollin of the Wood, Robert Blundell of Ince, Richard Blundell of Crosbye.*#° These informations stand curiously alone ; but on 3 February, 1567, Elizabeth dispatched a letter to the earl of Derby, the bishop of Chester, and others, commanding them to arrest persons who, under pretence of religion, draw sundry gentlemen from their allegiance.’ Before the receipt of this letter the earl had arrested all the persons in question ; but who they were we do not know. A fortnight later, 21 February, 1567-8, Elizabeth wrote to the sheriff to arrest certain deprived ministers.** And on the same day the queen dispatched a severe letter to Bishop Downham upbraiding him for the disorders in his diocese, ‘as we hear not of the like in any other parts,’™? and requiring him to repair into the remotest parts in Lancashire to see that persons most justly deprived be not secretly maintained. Accordingly in the summer following Downham visited the whole diocese ; and reported on 1 November, 1568,*° that he found the people very tractable and obedient. In the same letter in which he gives this report to Cecil the bishop furnishes a summary account of the proceedings which had been taken against certain Lancashire gentlemen, on the ground of their not repairing to church and their entertaining priests. From this report it appears that on 31 July, 1568 Edward, earl of Derby, the bishop, and others, Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes in the diocese, sat in the dining chamber at Lathom, where six Lancashire gentlemen appeared on their recognizance, viz., Francis Tunstall, John Talbott, John Westby, John Rigmayden, Edward Osbaldeston, and Matthew Travis, the last-named being a yeoman. With the exception of John Westby they proved submissive, acknowledged their fault in enter- taining priests, and promised to conform. By the queen’s directions they were, therefore, treated leniently. ‘Their punishment,’ adds the bishop, has done so much good in the county that I trust I shall never be troubled again with
the like : beside (Nowell) the Dean of St. Paul’s, at his being in the county with his continual preaching in divers places in Lancashire hath brought many obstinate and wilful
people into conformity.**
45 S.P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 48, No. 35. #6 Thid. No. 34. “7 Thid. vol. 46, No. 19. 48 Thid. No. 32. 9 Thid. No. 33; Strype, Annals, i, 254-5. 350 $.P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 48, No. 36. %1 More instructive than the bishop’s meagre account are the papers appended to his letter. They are _ printed in Gibson’s Lydiate Hall. The concluding paper of these depositions is entitled ‘ Articles objected by the Commissioners against Sir John Southworth.’ But as Southworth’s name does not occur in any ot the prior proceedings herein the paper is probably misplaced. He had been examined before Parker at Croydon shortly before 13 July, 1568, but had refused to subscribe to a form of submission (S.P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 47, No. 12).
53
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
It is perhaps significant that just about this time a number of incum- bents disappear for one reason or another.
In spite of the unusually vivid interest attaching to these early glimpses of Lancashire recusancy it cannot be said that they indicate the existence in 1568 of any very numerous or very virulent ‘ Papist party. The harvest which Allen was destined to reap was of slow growth. Until he had founded the seminary at Douay and trained a band of priests and sent them forth into England, thus inaugurating a new era in English Catholicism, the recusancy of the county palatine is to be regarded as little more than a survival of Marian Catholicism. Indeed, it is more than likely that the rebellion of 1569 in the northern counties had a steadying effect on the loyalty of the Lancashire Catholics, for we hear of no movement occurring, although at one time fears were entertained of them ;** and when in the course of the following year a fresh disturbance is traceable in the county it is to be attri- buted, as before, to the compulsive force of papal intrigue. The bull of Pius V, dated 5 Cal. March, 1569, was set up, or made known in London by John Fel- ton in March, 1569-70. In the national domain this bull, which denounced Elizabeth as a heretic and absolved her subjects from allegiance, was followed by Elizabeth’s proclamation of 1 July, 1570, against Papists bringing in traitor- ous books and bulls, and by the Acts of 1571 against imagining the death of the queen, and against bringing in bulls from Rome.“ A letter from the bishop of Carlisle to the earl of Sussex reveals the effect which the pope’s action had in Lancashire; how all things in Lancashire savour of open rebellion ; provision of men, armour; assemblies of 500 and 600 at a time; wanton talk of invasion by the Spaniards ; in most places most people fall from religion and refuse to hear service in English ; since Felton set up the bull the greatest there never came to any service, but openly entertained Louvainist massers.* The result of these commotions was a series of fresh admonitions from the Privy Council to the bishop of Chester to appear in London to answer for the disorders in his diocese, especially committed in Lancashire and Richmondshire in matters con- cerning religion.** As we hear nothing further of the matter it would seem that the effervescence died down, and until the advent of the seminary priests there is no further reference to recusant disturbances in Lancashire.
The English college at Douay had been founded by Allen in 1568. From the first, doubtless in some part as a result of Allen’s connexion with the county, the number of Lancashire men who were attracted to the college was disproportionately large. For instance, in 1573 out of twenty-one new admissions no less than seven came from the diocese of Chester, almost entirely Lancashire men ; and when in the following year the first missionaries were
sent forth from Douay into the English harvest, this high relative proportion of Lancashire men is again noticeable.*”
Langley of Prestwich was deprived, because his conscience would no longer allow him to minister ;
Cross of Childwall resigned on a pension ; Lowe of Huyton disa fc Ormskirk was deprived. There may have been other are Percents sete ns
*°S.P. Dom. Eliz. Add. vol. 15, No. 113 ins i i » No. - 3 Eliz. cap. 1 and 2. a S.P. Dom. Eliz. Add. vol. 19, No. 16 ; S.P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 74, No. oe 21 and 27, 1570 ee He of the Sey 399 3 vill, 5, 12 Nov. 1570 and 13 Feb. 1570-1. : "Up to 1584 the college sent out 198 seminary priests. Out of these 31 were of i , : : the d Chester—practically all Lancashire men. From 1584 to the end of Elizabeth’s ee aeictopetin fl 2
in a most remarkable way, for out of a similar number of issi i exactly 198 missionaries sent out 1602) only five are of ascertainably Lancashire origin. ¢ ae ear
54
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
The other great source from which these missionary priests came was the English College at Rome, which was itself an offshoot from Douay. Unlike its parent institution this college was almost from the outset in the hands or the Jesuits. During its existence Lancashire sent to it over 200 students as against 133 sent from Yorkshire.** The first missionaries sent from it were dispatched in 1579, and out of five who composed this first batch one, Richard Haydock, was a Lancashire man; as was also another, Edward Rishton, out of the five dispatched in the following year.
The influence of these priests was instantly felt in Lancashire. The administration seems to have been alive to the danger. In 1574, the very year of the first arrival of the Douay missionaries, the Privy Council wrote several times to Henry, earl of Derby, touching Popish disorders in the county, ‘ being the very sink of Popery, where more unlawful acts have been committed and more unlawful persons holden secret than in any other part of the realm.’** A fresh Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes for the county was issued some time before 22 November, 1574, and the earl of Derby and the bishop of Chester were bidden to execute it and to arrest all persons suspected of having reconciled themselves to the pope.
For the following six years silence falls on the story of the seminary priests in the county, a silence broken only to-day by the records of the colleges of Douay and Rome. These six years were the seed-time of the harvest to be reaped in the county by Allen’s priests. Their proceedings must have been very secret and the bishop of Chester must have been very fast asleep, for it is clear that whilst the central government was still alive to the question of recusancy the local commissioners had no hint of the presence of seminary priests, and the recusant interest was supposed to be but small in the county."
In 1580 Allen returned to Douay from Rome after having concerted with the pope and the Jesuits a new missionary expedition to England on a large scale. This expedition was to be headed by Parsons and Campion on the Jesuit side, and on the secular side by Goldwell, the aged Marian bishop of St. Asaph, and Vaux, the late warden of Manchester. The idea that Allen’s previous efforts had been brought to naught by the watchfulness of the queen’s administration, and that this was a last effort on his part, is wide of the mark. The recusancy returns soon to be quoted disprove it, as do also the records of the dispatch of missionaries during the years 1574-80. A much more sinister significance indeed attaches to this departure of the year 1580. It marks the capture by the Jesuits of the missionary organization, and the entry of the English Catholic world upon that path of political intrigue under the guiding genius of Parsons which ultimately did more than anything else to blast the permanent prospects of Catholicism in England. The government was awake to the danger, for it had complete information as to the wide ramifications of this political plot of Catholic Europe. Vaux was arrested at Rochester almost immediately on his landing, about 12 August, 1580. The broader story of
88 For the records of this college see Foley, Rec. of the Engl. Prov. vi, 67 seq. 389 Acts of the P.C. viii, 276, 302, 317.
36 There is no extant record of the outcome of these proceedings (unless it is at Chester or in some
quarter sessions records). ; 31 §.P, Dom. Eliz. vol. 118, No. 45. It is printed by Gibson, op. cit.
55
A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
Campion’s fate does not oe y, wes kia we are told the names of who entertained him in Lancashire. te ae this date the Lancashire Roman Catholics had suffered a ee hardships as a body. The fines of the recusants in the cae! ha . granted to a courtier, Nicholas Anesley, and the Catholics had been i € boldened as to refuse to pay him their fines or even to make a mo erate composition with him, and the administration had looked on @ a time almost supinely.** But the new political danger brooked no suc ees Acting on information sent on 16 May, 1580, by Sir Edmund Trafford to the earl of Leicester as to the contemptuous and disobedient attitude of the Catholics in the county,** the queen issued a new Ecclesiastical Commission :n June to the archbishop of York, the earl of Derby, the bishop of Chester and others for the diocese of Chester to proceed against certain gentlemen and others in Lancashire lately fallen away in religion, and for the rest of the year the commission was active, the earl of Derby even lending his house in Liverpool as a prison for the recusants. But the existing mechanism of the law was not strong enough to cope with the growing danger.™® speordingly an Act was passed ‘ to retain the Queen’s subjects in their due allegiance.’* Besides strengthening the provisions of the Act of 1571 against bulls from Rome, this Act imposed the celebrated recusancy fine of £20 per month on persons neglecting to attend church, and empowered justices of the peace to inquire of offences herein. On 10 December, 1581, the Privy Council issued its mandate to the sheriffs and justices of peace of Lancashire to put the Act in execution, nothing having