Echoes of old Lancashire

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Axon William Edward Armytage. Echoes of old Lancashire

Preface

The “Lancashire Plot.”

De Quincey’s Highwayman

Some Lancashire Centenarians

What was the First Book Printed in Manchester?

Thomas Lurting: a Liverpool Worthy

Kufic Coins found in Lancashire

Newspapers in 1738-39

A Lancashire Naturalist: Thomas Garnett

The Traffords of Trafford

A Manchester Will of the Fifteenth Century

A Visitor to Lancashire in 1807

How the First Spinning Machinery was taken to Belgium

Merry Andrew of Manchester

A Manchester Jeanie Deans

Some Lancashire Giants

A Note on William Rowlinson

Literary Taste of the Eighteenth Century

Hugh of Manchester: A Statesman and Divine of the Thirteenth Century.10

Mrs. Fletcher in Lancashire

Manchester and the First Reform Agitation

The Folk-Lore of Lancashire

Manchester Grammar School Mill

The Rising of 1715

The Fool of Lancaster

Alexander Barclay and Manchester

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The town of Manchester was in a state of indignant and feverish excitement on the 17th of October, 1694, being the sixth year of the reign of William the Deliverer. Everywhere groups of townspeople were discussing the all-absorbing topic of the “Lancashire Plot,” for on that day there came to the town four of their Majesties’ judges, with every circumstance of pomp and parade, to try for their lives gentlemen of the best blood of Lancashire and Cheshire; unfortunate prisoners who were accused of having conspired against the Deliverer, of having been guilty of the treason of remaining faithful to the old King, whom the rest of the nation had cast off. The prisoners were brought into town strongly guarded, amidst the sympathetic demonstrations of their neighbours, who were equally liberal of groans and hisses for the wretched informers who were about to do their endeavour to bring them to the scaffold.

Lancashire, which in the civil war struck some hearty blows for the Parliament, was now a hotbed of disaffection. The old cavalier families, in spite of bitter experience of Stuart ingratitude, remained faithful in spirit to the exile of St. Germains; and the common people would have no love for King William, who was a foreigner, nor for Queen Mary, who sat upon the throne of her royal father, whilst he wandered a weary exile in a foreign land. The accused would have been pretty certain of sympathy had the public mind been convinced of the reality of the supposed conspiracy. How much more so, then, when it was shrewdly suspected that the charge had been trumped up by a gang of villains eager for blood-money, and supported by greater rogues anxious for a share of the estates which would be forfeited upon the conviction of their victims? Nor was the suspicion altogether groundless; covetous eyes were fixed longingly on these fine Lancashire acres, and the Roman Catholic gentry ran great danger of being defrauded of their inheritances.

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1782. – Henry Lord, of Carr, in the Forest of Rossendale, 106. He was a soldier in the service of Queen Anne. Martha Ramscar, of Stockport, 106.

1783. – Thomas Poxton, of Preston, 108. He was formerly a quack doctor. He attended Ormskirk market, twenty miles distant, constantly till within a few years of his death; was healthy and vigorous to the last, and was generally known by the name of Mad Roger. William Briscoe, Park Gate, 101. Mrs. Holmes, Liverpool, 114. She was married at 48 years of age, and had six children.

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