Chapter VIII · ADLINGTON AND ITS EARLIER LORDS—THE LEGHS—THE LEGEND OF THE SPANISH LADY’S LOVE—THE HALL.

Cheshire, says Speed, in his “Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain” (1606), “may well be said to be a seed-plot of gentilitie and the producer of many most ancient and worthy families.” Smith says that “it is the mother and nurse of gentility of England;” and, if we may believe the author of “The Noble and Gentle Men of England,” it contains at the present day a larger number of old county families than any other English shire of equal size. “Cheshire, Chief of Men,” or, as it is versified,

is a popular proverb in the palatinate, though Grose maliciously insinuates that the Cheshire men fabricated the proverb themselves. If, however, Menestrier’s definition of a gentleman, that he must be one “de nom d’armes et de cir,” holds good, then the men of Cheshire may pride themselves upon a lineage unsurpassed by the gentry of any other county. Among those who have brought renown, the Leghs have ever held a foremost place, and have proved themselves the worthy compeers of the Grosvenors, the Egertons, the Davenports, and other of the valiant men of Cheshire whose names are

Adlington, the ancestral home of one of the older branches of this widespread family, is a pleasant old mansion, possessing, besides its own particular attractions as a good specimen of the half-timbered manor house of bygone days, much that is interesting in its memories and associations. It lies, too, in the midst of a spacious park, prettily feathered with woodlands, and environed with much rural beauty, so that it is altogether a pleasant place to spend a summer day in—a spot where you may find enough to occupy your thoughts without satiety or weariness.

The railway carries you within a hundred yards or so of the park-gates. A roadside inn—the Unicorn’s Head—(the crest of the Leghs), and a few picturesque cottages, with cunningly devised porches of open rustic work, and little plots of garden in front, gay with flowers of every hue—tall lilies and roses that sway their heads in the passing breeze, and sweet-scented creepers that trail around and half hide the little old-fashioned windows—constitute what there is of village. Close by the station, and abutting upon the high-road, is the old smithy. As we go by, the smith is hard at work, the sparks fly merrily, and under the ponderous strokes of his hammer the anvil rings as melodiously as it did a hundred years ago, when, on a bright morning, Handel, while taking a constitutional with his host, Charles Legh, of Adlington, listened to it and first conceived the idea of the “Harmonious Blacksmith,” the score of which he wrote down immediately on his return to the hall, where it was long preserved. The park, which is well stocked with deer, is of considerable extent, varied and picturesque, and marked by much unrestrained beauty; for Art and Nature seem both to have stopped short of “improvement,” and to have given Time the opportunity of softening the harsh outline of man’s labours. It is not too tamely kept, however, nor yet too rigidly subjected to rule, the open lawns and broad sunny glades being chequered with clumps of wood and sturdy trees—

whilst through the grassy meads and beneath the woodland shade, pranked with a thousand silvery shapes of beauty, the freakish Deane—

as it hastens on to mingle its waters with the Bollin, and unite with it in helping the Mersey to do honour to the British Tyre. It is a lovely summer day, with just sufficient breeze to cool the overheated atmosphere, and give a pleasant and invigorating freshness to it; the sunbeams are dappling the rich sward with their playful and ever-changing patches of light, and the air is balmy with the odours of the new-mown hay. The lark carols joyously in the bright blue sky, the insects are busy in the tall grass, and the lowing of the kine in the distant meadows, the merry song of the haymakers spreading out the fresh-cut swaths, and the creaking of the waggon as it bears its fragrant load to the stackyard, blending together, make a rustic music delighting to the heart of him who loves the sounds of country life.

As we leisurely wend our way along the broad gravelled path we have time to note the more prominent features of the surrounding country; and assuredly there are few localities in the county where the scenery is more agreeably diversified, the prospect embracing—

A long line of stately chestnut trees bounds one side of the walk. Eastward the view is limited by a range of undulating eminences that stretch along the line of the horizon, dark, shadowy, and lonely-looking, in places, a kind of mountain wall—the outwork, so to speak, of the Peak hills beyond—with upland pastures and sweet verdant slopes, green where the grass has been newly mown, and tinged with yellow where the grain is ripening in the bright August sunshine, showing where man has encroached upon Nature’s wild domain, and what good husbandry has won from the bleak wastes that once formed part of the great forest of Macclesfield. Hidden from view in a green, cup-like hollow in the hills is the “lordly house of Lyme,” that calls up memories of the deeds at Crescy, in which the flower of the Cheshire chivalry were engaged; for it was in acknowledgment of the seasonable aid Sir Thomas Danyers rendered to the “Boy Prince,” when on that bloody field his Royal father bade him “win his spurs and the honour of the day for himself,” that Richard the Second bestowed the fair domain of Lyme upon Sir Piers Legh, a younger son of the house of Adlington, who had wed Sir Thomas’s daughter. Just above the hall the “Knight’s Low” lifts its tree-crowned summit; tradition hovers around it, and tells us that far back in the mist of ages a knightly owner of Lyme there found his resting-place.

Peeping out from the thick umbrage on the adjacent height we get a glimpse of the modern mansion of Shrigley—the successor of an ancient house that for full five centuries and a half was the abode of the once famous, though now extinct, family of Downes; the chiefs of which held the hereditary forestership of Downes and Taxal, in the Royal forest of Macclesfield, with the right of hanging and drawing within their jurisdiction, and further claimed the privilege of holding the King’s stirrup when he came a-hunting in the forest, as well as of rousing the stag for his amusement; in allusion to which office they bore a white hart upon their shield of arms, with a stag’s head for crest. But Shrigley has other associations. In more recent times the name was identified with an outrageous case of abduction—the carrying off and pretended marriage of the youthful heiress of that pleasant domain by the notorious adventurer, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, in 1826. Below, where the great break occurs in the mountainous ridge, and the hills look as if riven asunder by the stroke of a giant’s hand, lies the little town of Bollington, where the cotton trade has established itself, and the tall chimneys—the “steam towers,” as Crabbe calls them—do their best, though in a small way, it is true, to detract from the natural beauties of the landscape. The hill which terminates the ridge nearest to us bears the name of the Nab, and the one that bounds the opposite side of the defile, the summit of which is crowned with a whitewashed summer-house that gleams brightly in the sunshine, is popularly known as White Nancy. With White Nancy the Kerridge hills, famed for their freestone quarries, come in view. The name (Cær Ridge) suggests the idea that the Romans had a camp or minor station in the vicinity, and the opinion is strengthened by the fact that one of their highways led eastwards over the rocky ridge.

Southwards, near the foot of the Kerridge range, lies the old and somewhat dingy-looking town of Macclesfield, the view of which is, however, happily shut out by intervening plantations and the eminence on which stands Bonishall, for a time the residence of Lord Erskine, the grandson of the distinguished Lord Chancellor, and occupying the site of an older house, where, in the days of the Virgin Queen, a branch of the Pigots of Butley, had their abode. Round towards the right, through the openings in the dark belt of trees, the long crescent-like sweep of Alderley Edge is seen rising sheer from the plain to a considerable elevation, and extending a couple of miles or so, with its rough projecting rocks full of changeful picturesqueness of indentation, and rich in their exquisite variety of form and colour. The steep slopes are clothed with vegetation and crested with a miniature forest of pines and fir trees that mingle their dark-hued verdure with the brighter foliage of the oak and the birch, making a little fairyland of woodland beauty, the natural charm of which is heightened by the cloud-shadows gliding slowly across. With a keen eye Stormy Point can be discerned standing out a mass of sombre crag, in striking contrast to the scenery around. The Beacon close by reminds us of the troublous times when our grandfathers were in daily dread of invasion, and erected this signal that they might pass the warning on should their Gallic neighbours put foot on British soil. The Edge is not without its tale of wonder, nor will it lose the recollection of it while the sign of “The Wizard” adorns the neighbouring hostelry, or “The Iron Gates” that of its rival. But we are not now concerned with the legend of the countless milk-white steeds or the nine hundred and ninety-nine slumbering knights—“the wondrous cavern’d band”—

Our walk has brought us to the lawn in front of the mansion, but before we enter let us take a glance at the past history of the house and its possessors.

Before the days of Duke William, the Norman conqueror, Adlington formed part of the demesne of the Saxon Earl of Mercia. The name is supposed by some authorities to be derived from the Saxon words adeling (noble), and ton (a town), but in the Doomsday Book it is written Edulvintone, signifying Edwin’s town, the inference being that Edwin, then Earl of Mercia, a grandson of Earl Leofric and that fair Lady Godiva whose memory the good people of Coventry delight to honour, had a residence here, and this is the more probable origin. The account in the great Norman survey is summed up in the word “Wasta,” from which it is clear that the district had at that time been devastated or laid waste by the invaders, and the reason of this is not far to seek, though the story is not without a spice of romance. Edwin and his brother Morcar, Earl of Northumberland, were two of Harold’s chief generals at the battle of Hastings. Knowing the power and influence they possessed throughout the country north of the Trent, William set himself diligently to discover the means of effecting their overthrow. The Saxons generally were more impassioned than politic, and Edwin, having conceived an affection for the conqueror’s daughter, Adela, consented to abdicate his position as a condition of obtaining that princess’s hand. As far as a Norman word could bind she was given to him, whereupon he laid down his arms and undertook to pacify and to bring over to the invader nearly a third of the kingdom. Immediately he had done so the treacherous William, feeling himself secure, broke the promise he had given and refused to accept him for his son-in-law. Stung with the insult thus offered to himself and his house, Edwin and his brother flew to arms, and roused their countrymen into open revolt. The brave Saxons entered into a solemn league and covenant to expel the foreigners from their soil, or perish in the attempt. Famine, pestilence, and war did their worst. The Normans devoted themselves on the one hand to havoc, ruin, and desolation; while on the other, the outraged Saxons dealt death around them wherever they had the power. The foreigner was bent upon extermination, and between him and the native Saxon no intercourse existed save that of revenge and a rivalry as to which should inflict the greatest amount of injury upon the other. As a consequence, the country was drenched with slaughter and made the scene of violation, rapine, and murder. In the bloody conflict no place suffered more than this part of Cheshire, the frequent occurrence of the phrase “Wasta” in the survey evidencing the destruction accomplished by fire and sword. After fruitless struggles, Edwin, with a small band of followers, fled towards Scotland, but being overtaken near the coast he turned upon his pursuers. A fierce resistance was made, in which he was slain, when his head was cut off and sent as a trophy to the victorious William, and so perished the first owner of Adlington of whom history has furnished us with any particulars.

On the death of Edwin the manor with other of his possessions were given by the Conqueror to that pious profligate, Hugh d’Avranches, surnamed Lupus, whom he had created Palatine Earl of Chester, and who, being more concerned for the pleasures of the chase than the cultivation of the soil, appears to have retained Adlington in his own hands as a hunting seat, for in the Norman Survey it is mentioned as then having no less than seven “hays” (deer-fences or enclosures in which deer could be driven) and four aeries of hawks. It remained in the possession of the Norman earls until the time of John Scot, the seventh and last, who died without male heirs, when Henry the Third, with somewhat indistinct ideas with regard to meum and tuum, took the earldom into his own hands, deprived Earl John’s sisters of their heritage, and so sowed the seeds of discontent that produced a plentiful crop of troubles for King Henry’s grandson when he succeeded to the crown.

Immediately after this high-handed procedure Adlington is found in the possession of Hugh de Corona, who would appear to have held it by a grant direct from the Crown, for a Crown rental was payable for the manor for centuries. He also held the superior lordship of Little Neston-cum-Hargrave, in the Hundred of Wirral, as well as lands in Penisby, in the same hundred, formerly belonging to the hospital of St. John, at Chester. By his wife Amabella, daughter of Thomas de Bamville, of Storeton, near Chester, he had, in addition to a son, Hugh, two daughters—Sarah, to whom he gave his lands in Penisby, and Lucy, who became the wife of Sir William Baggaley, or Baguley, according to the modern orthography, whose monumental effigy has lately been placed in the old hall at Baguley.[27] In 1316 Hugh de Corona gave the whole of his manors of Parva Neston and Hargrave, excepting a third part of the same held in dower by his wife Lucy, and the tenements held in dower by Margaret, his mother, to John de Blount, or Blound, citizen of Chester, in consideration of an annual payment of ten marks; by another charter, executed about the same time, he granted the reversion of the said third part to the said John, and in the same year the grantee was released from the payment of the ten marks, and an amended grant of the manors “in fee simple” was made to him, with the exception of the dower estates. On the 15th March, 10 Edward II. (1316–17), Thomas de Corona appeared in the Exchequer at Chester, and prayed that these three grants might be enrolled, and they now appear on the Plea Rolls, together with a separate one granting the reversions. Finally, in the 27 Edward III., Thomas de Corona, the grandson of Hugh, quit-claimed to John, son of John de Blound, all title to the manors.

Having in this way completely alienated the Wirral estates, Adlington seems to have been made the chief abode of the Coronas. Lucy, the daughter of Hugh de Corona, who became the wife of Sir William Baggaley, had a son, John, who died without issue, and two daughters—Isabel, who married Sir John de Hyde, and Ellen, who became the wife of John, son of Sir William Venables, of Bradwell, Knight, younger brother of Sir Hugh Venables, Baron of Kinderton, but who assumed the surname of Legh, the maiden name of his mother, Agnes de Legh, as also of the place (High Legh) where he was born and resided until he became the possessor by purchase of Knutsford-Booths-cum-Norbury-Booths, from William de Tabley, 28 Edward I., 1300.

Hugh de Corona, the second of the name who resided at Adlington, had a son, John, who inherited the estates, and was in turn succeeded by his son, Thomas de Corona, who died unmarried in the reign of Edward III., when the male line of the family became extinct. By a deed executed in the early part of Edward II.’s reign, this Thomas granted to John de Venables, alias Legh, and Ellen de Corona, or Baggaley, his wife, all his part of the manor and village of Adlington, excepting the lands which Margaret, his mother, and Lucy, the widow of his grandfather, Hugh de Corona, the second of the name, had in dower; and by another charter, dated 9 Edward II., he gave to the said John Legh and Ellen, his wife, all the rest of his lands in Adlington previously held in dower by his mother and grandmother. Thus John de Legh became lord of Adlington, and on the paternal, as his wife Agnes de Legh was on the maternal side, founder of the house of Legh of Adlington, a house that has held possession of the manor for an uninterrupted period of more than five centuries and a half.

John de Legh, who acquired the lordship of Adlington by his marriage with Agnes de Corona, could boast a lineage as ancient and honourable as that of the Conqueror himself. When the subjugation of England was accomplished the Norman invader was enabled to reward his faithful followers out of the numerous forfeitures that had accrued through the fruitless insurrections of Earl Edwin and the other Saxon nobles. Hugh d’Avranches, or Hugh Lupus, as he was more generally designated, from the wolf’s head which he bore for arms, and which may have been given as symbolical of his gluttony, a vice Oderic says he was greatly addicted to, though he does not appear to have been with the invading army at Hastings, having followed the victor in the succeeding year, was largely instrumental in establishing William upon the English throne. In acknowledgment of his services, as well as for his valour in reducing the Welsh to obedience, he had conferred upon him in 1070 the whole of the fair county of Cheshire, “to hold of the King as freely by the sword as the King himself held the realm of England by the crown”—he was, in fact, a Count-Palatine, and all but a king himself. Thoroughly appreciating the conditions of his tenure, he, in order the more effectually to secure it, divided his palatinate into eight or more baronies, which he distributed among his warlike followers upon the condition of supporting him with the sword as he was in turn to support the King. He also established his officers as well as his own courts of law, in which any offence against the dignity of “the Sword of Chester” was as cognisable as the like offence would have been at Westminster against the dignity of the Royal crown.[28]

One of the eight barons created by Hugh Lupus was Gilbert, a younger son of Eudo, Earl of Blois, and a first cousin of the Conqueror. He was one of the combatants at Hastings, where he received the honour of knighthood for his valour in the field, and he afterwards rendered important services against Edgar Atheling, as well as in the subjugation of the Welsh, for which welcome aid Earl Hugh rewarded him with considerable estates in the newly-acquired county, and he chose Kinderton as the seat of his barony. Like his patron, he was devoted to the pleasure of the chase, and from that circumstance acquired the name of Venables (Venator abilis), which some of his descendants have retained to the present day, in the same way that another Norman chieftain, a nephew of Hugh Lupus, and a mighty hunter withal, took the name of Grosvenor—Gilbert Le Gros venor—which is now perpetuated by the ducal house of Westminster.

Gilbert Venables, Baron of Kinderton, who was a widower at the time of the Norman Conquest, again entered the marriage state, his second wife being Maud, the daughter of Wlofaith Fitz Ivon, another Norman soldier, who had the lordship of Halton, near Daresbury, conferred upon him by the gift of his brother Nigell, Baron of Halton. This lady bore him in addition to a son, William, who succeeded to the barony of Kinderton, and a daughter, Amabella, who became the wife of Richard de Davenport, a second son, Thomas Venables, whose exploits, if that most respectable authority, tradition, is to be believed, rivalled those of the mythical champion, St George, and that more modern hero, More of More Hall, who—

Here is the story as veraciously recorded by an ancient chronicler in the Harleian MSS. (No. 2,119, art. 36) In the time of this Thomas Venables, it says, “Yt chaunced a terrible dragon to remayne and make his abode in the lordshippe of Moston, in the sayde countye of Chester, where he devowred all such p’sons as he lay’d hold on, which ye said Thomas Venables heringe tell of, consyderinge the pittyfull and dayly dystruction of the people w’thowte recov’ie who in followinge th’ example of the valiante Romaynes and other worthie men, not regarding his own life, in comparison of the commoditie and safeguard of his countrymen, dyd in his awne p’son valiantlie and courragiouslie set on the saide dragon, where firste he shotte hym throwe with an arrowe, and afterward with other weapons manfullie slew him, at which instant tyme the sayd dragon was devowringe of a child. For which worthy and valiant act was given him the Lordshippe of Moston by the auncestors of the Earle of Oxford, Lord of the Fee there. And alsoe ever since the said Thomas Venables and his heires, in remembrance thereof, have used to bear, as well in theire armes, as in their crest, a dragon.”[29] The old chronicler has omitted to give us a description of this wonderful creature, but doubtless it bore a close resemblance to the monster of Wantley, whose appearance is thus pourtrayed in the “Percy Reliques”:—

The sixth in direct descent from the first Baron of Kinderton was Sir William Venables, who, by his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir Thomas Dutton of Dutton, had two sons, Sir Hugh, who inherited the barony, and Sir William, to whom his father gave the lordship of Bradwall, near Sandbach. This William was twice married, his second wife being Agnes, daughter and heir of Richard de Legh, of the West Hall, near Knutsford, and the widow of Richard de Lymme. By her he had John Venables, who, as previously stated, assumed his mother’s maiden name of Legh. He became the owner by purchase of Norbury Booths, and married some time previous to 1315 Ellen de Corona, who inherited the Adlington estates under the settlement of her grand-nephew, Thomas de Corona. Four sons were born of this marriage, three of whom became the founders of distinct houses: John, ancestor of the Leghs of Booths; Robert, to whom, at the death of his mother in 1352, the manor of Adlington reverted under the Corona settlement, and who thus became progenitor of the Leghs of Adlington, Lyme, Ridge, Stoneleigh, Stockwell, &c.; William, founder of the line of Isall in Cumberland, and from whom descended Sir William Legh, Bart., Lord Chief Justice of England; and Peter de Legh, who in right of his wife Ellen, daughter and heir of Philip de Bechton, acquired the Bechton estates, which were in turn conveyed by his two daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth, to their respective husbands, Thomas Fitton, of Gawsworth, and John de Davenport, of Henbury.

Robert de Legh, who succeeded to the manor of Adlington on the death of his mother in 1352, had a commission as a justice in eyre for Macclesfield, and was also appointed a steward of the manor and forest of Macclesfield. He was twice married, his first wife being Sibilla, the daughter of Henry de Honford, of Honford (Handforth), by whom he had, in addition to two daughters, Robert, who succeeded as heir to the Adlington estates, and Hugh, who predeceased him. His second wife was Maud, the daughter and heir of Adam de Norley of Northleigh, of the manor of that name, near Wigan, Knight. This lady, who is said to have been his second cousin, and very young at the time of her marriage, bore him two sons in his old age, Peter or Piers, and John. Peter, who was born about the year 1361, married in 1388, Margaret, the daughter and heiress of that famous Cheshire hero, Sir Thomas d’Anyers, who distinguished himself at the battle of Crescy[30] by taking prisoner the Count de Tankerville, chamberlain to the King of France, and rescuing the standard of the Black Prince when it was in danger of being captured, in acknowledgment of which services his daughter afterwards received a Royal grant of the manor of Lyme Handley, and, with her husband, became progenitor of the Leghs of Lyme and the Leghs of Ridge. John de Legh, the younger son by the second marriage, was keeper of Macclesfield Park prior to 1395, and was sometimes designated John de Macclesfield. He was living in 1399, and had issue.

Robert de Legh died at Macclesfield, about the year 1370. Before his death his wife Maud, who survived, conveyed to him all her estates in trust for their son, Piers Legh, who, at the time of his father’s death, was a child of nine years. Six years after the death of Sir Robert the name of his widow was unpleasantly associated with a charge of fraud, as appears by the Chamberlain’s accounts at Chester, she being indicted with one Thomas le Par, who possibly may have been more active in the matter than herself, with fabricating, in the name of Adam de Kingsley, the trustee, a false settlement of the Broome estates within Lymm in fraud of the heir and in favour of her youngest son, John, and his heirs male; and with having, through such false charter, unjustly retained possession of the land for six years after her husband’s death. The issue of the indictment is not recorded; but it is clear that if she had succeeded her act would have given to her son John a considerable estate, to the disadvantage of his elder brother.

Robert de Legh, who inherited the manor of Adlington on the death of his father, circa 1370, was, in 1358, in the retinue of Edward the Black Prince in the war in Gascony; and there is an entry in the Palatinate Rolls at Chester that he, with William de Bostock and Hugh, son of Thomas le Smyth, of Mottram, entered into a recognisance indemnifying the chamberlain for any moneys that might be due to two of the Cheshire archers who were serving under him while with the prince. In 1360–61, as appears by the Recognisance Rolls, he had granted to him the custody of the lands in Cheshire lately belonging to Henry de Honford, then deceased, with the wardship and marriage of his daughter and heiress, Katherine. In 1382, Joan, Princess of Wales, the widow of the Black Prince, and the once “Fair Maid of Kent,” gave to him and William del Dounes a lease for twelve years of her part of the town of Bollington, with the water-mill there, on a payment of eight marks yearly. He appears to have succeeded his father in the office of bailiff of the manor of Macclesfield, and to have held it until 1382, when his half-brothers, Peter and John, were appointed in his stead. He died on the 9th November, 1382, leaving by his wife Matilda, daughter of Sir John Arderne, of Aldford, Knight, a son, Robert, born at Roter-le-Hay, and baptised at Audlem on the 2nd March, 1361–2, and then aged 20; and two daughters—Margery, who became the wife of Thomas de Davenport, of Henbury, and Katherine, who married Reginald Downes.

Robert de Legh made proof of age on the 3rd March, 1382–3. On the 13th May following he had livery of his father’s lands, and on the 18th June he had also, as heir of his mother, livery of what pertained to her as one of the heirs of Alina, daughter of Robert Daa, whose lands were then in the king’s hands. In 1385, or thereabouts, he married Isabel, daughter and heir of Sir Thomas de Belgrave, Knight, who brought him the manor of Belgrave, with several other estates in Cheshire and Flintshire. With these, and the lands in Hyde, Stockport, Romiley, and Etchells, the inheritance of his mother, the influence and social importance of the family were largely increased, while Robert de Legh himself, by the active part he took in the service of his country, as well as in the administration of the affairs of his own county, attained to considerable distinction, and well sustained the honour and dignity of his house. In July, 1385, shortly after his marriage, he had protection of his lands guaranteed to him on his departure to Scotland in the King’s service, the occasion being the expedition headed by Richard in person, following upon the invasion of John of Gaunt, which, however, terminated without any trial of strength in battle, for while the English army proceeded northwards, took Edinburgh, and marched towards Aberdeen, wasting the country as it advanced, the Scotch, with their French allies, in turn entered Cumberland and Westmorland, burning and plundering as they went on every side. In the succeeding year Robert de Legh had the honour of knighthood conferred upon him, and shortly after (September 26, 1386), on the threatening of a French invasion, he, with Robert de Grosvenor, Knight, Reginald del Dounes, and William de Shore, had protection granted on his departure for the coast, there to stay for the safe custody of those parts and the defence of the realm. In 1389 a contention arose between Sir Robert and his kinsmen Peter, of Lyme, and John, his brother, a renewal probably of a former dispute, touching the manner in which they should discharge their several offices within the hundred of Macclesfield, when Sir Robert with his sureties entered into recognisances to the King for one thousand marks, to keep the peace towards Peter and John Legh, they at the same time entering into counter-recognisances of the same amount to keep the peace towards Sir Robert. He and Peter de Legh, of Lyme, having been entrusted with the custody of John, the son and heir of William Launcelyn, during his minority, an order was made to them in 1392, as appears by the Recognisance Rolls, to deliver possession of all his inheritance to the said John on his making proof of age; at the same time a like order was made with reference to Thomas, son and heir of William Voil, who, while under age, had been in their custody, and in the same year a commission was issued to Sir Robert, jointly with Peter Legh, to arrest all malefactors and disturbers of the peace within the hundred of Macclesfield. On the 12th October, 1393, John de Massey, of Tatton, Sheriff of Cheshire, having been attainted, a commission was issued to Sir Robert Legh and others, directing them to arrest him and Thomas Talbot, Knight, and convey them to the castle of Chester, and two days afterwards another commission was issued appointing Sir Robert de Legh sheriff of the county during pleasure, in the place of Massey. In 1394, when Richard the Second proceeded to Ireland to quell the revolt which had broken out among the native chiefs, taking with him four thousand knights, and thirty thousand archers, including many of the noted Cheshire bowmen, we find Sir Robert Legh, of Adlington, accompanying him, he being in the train of Thomas, Earl of Nottingham; before his departure license was given to William de Shore, William de Prydyn (afterwards rector of Gawsworth), and Henry Marchall, to act as his attorneys during his absence. On the 23rd September, 1396, a commission was issued appointing him one of the King’s justices for the three hundreds of the eyre of Macclesfield; on the 12th February following he was a second time made Sheriff of Cheshire; six months later (August 20th, 1397) he had a grant of an annuity of £40, the King retaining him in his service for life; and as a further mark of his sovereign’s favour he had conferred upon him on the 4th October following the office of Constable of the Castle of Oswaldestre (Oswestry) for life, with £10 yearly and the accustomed fees. In 1398 he was again named one of the justices for the three hundreds of the eyre at Macclesfield, and on the 20th August in the following year, when the banished Bolingbroke, taking advantage of the King’s absence in Ireland, had returned to England, raised the standard of insurrection, and eventually compelled the humbled and wretched Richard to renounce the crown, John de Legh, of Booths, one of the seven gallant Cheshire men who had met the King on his landing in Wales, submitted himself to the usurper, when Sir Robert de Legh of Adlington and Sir John Stanley became sureties in £200 for his good behaviour. Unlike his relative of Lyme, Peter Legh, who remained true to his sovereign to the last, and at Chester sealed his loyalty with his life, as his monumental inscription in Macclesfield old church still testifies, and whose name Daniel thus perpetuates—

Sir Robert of Adlington elected to join the winning side, and repaired to Shrewsbury, where he made his submission to the victorious Bolingbroke, and afterwards joined with Sir James Booth and other Cheshire men in furthering his cause. In this it must be admitted the lord of Adlington showed as little gratitude as loyalty, for it was only a few short months before that he had been retained and pensioned by the king, and made constable or keeper for life of Oswestry Castle, with an adequate salary; and had, moreover, been honoured in receiving his sovereign as his guest during the sitting of the Parliament at Shrewsbury, the occasion being the memorable one when Bolingbroke charged the Duke of Norfolk with treason to his liege lord the king. After Richard’s deposition and the accession of Bolingbroke as Henry IV., Sir Robert was made one of the conservators of the peace for the hundred of Macclesfield, and about the same time had a confirmation of the letters of the 20th August, 1397, granting him the annuity of £40 for life. Hugh le Despencer, Knt., having in 1401 been appointed steward of Macclesfield, and surveyor, keeper, and master of the forests of Macclesfield and Mara, and all other of the Prince’s forests in Cheshire for life, Sir Robert de Legh was appointed by him to act as his deputy. In the follow-year (Oct 16, 1402) he was again named one of the justices for the three hundreds of the eyre at Macclesfield, and at the same time a commission was issued to him and the other justices, directing them to inquire into the doings of certain malefactors and disturbers of the peace in the hundred of Macclesfield of whose enormities the Prince (as Earl of Chester) had been informed. After the battle of Shrewsbury, in which the valorous Hotspur lost his life, Henry, who had found the throne of an usurper only a bed of thorns, had to direct his arms against the obnoxious Glendower, and the young Prince of Wales, then only seventeen years of age, who was appointed to head the expedition, issued his precept (11th January, 1403–4) to Sir Robert Legh and others “to hasten to his possessions on the Marches of Wales, there to make defence against the coming of Owen Glendower, according to an order in council, enacting that, on the occasion of war against the King and the kingdom of England, all those holding possessions on the Marches nearest to the enemy should reside on the same for the defence of the realm.” This order, however, would seem to have been countermanded, for in an old MS. account of the family, beautifully written on vellum, and still preserved at Adlington, it is stated that on the breaking out of the revolt in the north of England, when the Earl of Northumberland, the Earl of Nottingham, Lord Bardolf, and Scrope, Archbishop of York, confederated to place the Earl of March on the throne, Sir Robert Legh received a summons from the Prince of Wales, as Earl of Chester, countermanding one previously issued, and “requiring him to attend him (the Prince) in person at Warrington on Thursday the next, or on Friday at Preston, or on Saturday at Skipton-in-Craven, with 100 defensible, honest, able bowmen, in good array for war, to go with him thence to his father the King, then on his journey to Pontefract.” This was on the 26th May, 6 Henry IV. (1405), and it is the last occasion on which Sir Robert’s name occurs in connection with any important movement, for three years later (August, 1408) he brought to a close a short but very active and eventful life, being then only forty-seven years of age.

Sir Robert Legh, of Adlington, made his will on the 9th August, 1408, and he must then have been in extremis, for he died before the 18th, and was buried, in accordance with his expressed desire, in the Church of St. Mary de la Pree, near Northampton. Among other things, he directed the payment of 14 marks (£9 6s. 8d.) to a priest celebrating in the church of Prestbury for two years—probably the priest serving at one of the chantry altars there. The inquisition taken after his death is interesting as showing the extent of the family possessions at that time. They included the whole of the manor of Adlington, a moiety of the manor of Hyde, the manor of Belgrave, 40 acres of land in Eccleston, 12 messuages and 20 acres of land in Stockport, three messuages and 20 acres of land in Romiley, one messuage and 20 acres of land in Cheadle, one messuage in Macclesfield, one messuage and three acres of land in Rainow within the forest of Macclesfield, two messuages and two acres of land in Bollington, one messuage and 10 acres of land in Budworth, in the Fryth (the forest of Delamere), one messuage and 10 acres of land in Tyresford, two messuages and two acres of land in Kelsall, one messuage and 20 acres of land in Legh, four salt pits, four shops and land in Northwich, three messuages in Chester, one messuage and 20 acres of land in Warford, two messuages and 40 acres of land in Mottram Andrew, one messuage and 20 acres of land in Fulshaw, and the third part of one messuage and two acres of land in Mottram-in-Longdendale. By his wife, Elizabeth Belgrave, he had two sons—Robert, who inherited Adlington, and Reginald, of Mottram Andrew, who built the tower and south porch of Prestbury church, as the inscription on his sepulchral slab in the chancel there, which may still be seen, testifies,[31] and two daughters. The name of his second wife is not known with certainty, but she did not long wear the trappings of widowhood, for on the 28th February, 1409–10, as appears by an enrolment on the Recognisance Rolls in the Record Office, she had a pardon granted to her for marrying Richard de Clyderhow without the licence of the Earl of Chester.

Robert Legh, who succeeded as lord of Adlington, though he was only twenty-two years of age at the time of his father’s death, did not long enjoy possession of the property. Dr. Renaud, relying apparently on the MS. at Adlington, says that he died in 1410, but this statement, as we shall hereafter see, is inaccurate. Shortly after he entered upon his inheritance, a dispute arose between him and the Grosvenors, of Eaton, touching their respective rights to certain lands at Pulford and other places in the neighbourhood of Chester, under the settlement of Robert Legh’s maternal grandfather, Thomas de Belgrave, and his wife, who was heiress of Pulford. Eventually the two disputants, with their relations and friends, on the 14th April, 1412, repaired to the “Chapel” at Macclesfield—the old church of St Michael—when a very remarkable ceremony took place, which is thus recorded in the pages of Ormerod:—

A series of deeds relating to these lands having been publicly read in the chapel, it was stated that Sir Robert de Legh, Isabel, his wife, and Robert de Legh, their son and heir, having claimed them, it had been agreed, in order to settle their differences, that Sir Thomas Grosvenor should take a solemn oath on the body of Christ, in the presence of 24 gentlemen, or as many as he wished. Accordingly Robert del Birches, the Chaplain, whom Robert de Legh had brought with him, celebrated a mass of the Holy Trinity, and consecrated the Host, and after the mass, having arrayed himself in his alb, with the amice, the stole, and the maniple, held forth the Host before the altar, whereupon Sir Thomas Grosvenor knelt down before him whilst the settlements were again read by James Holt, counsel of Robert de Legh, and then he swore upon the body of Christ that he believed in the truth of these charters. Immediately after this Sir Lawrence de Merbury, sheriff of the county, and 57 other principal knights and gentlemen of Cheshire affirmed themselves singly to be witnesses of this oath, all elevating their hands at the same time towards the Host. This first part of the ceremony concluded with Sir Thomas Grosvenor receiving the sacrament, and Robert Legh and Sir Thomas kissing each other in confirmation of the aforesaid agreement. Immediately after this, Sir Robert publicly acknowledged the right to all the said lands was vested in Sir Thomas Grosvenor and his heirs, and an instrument to that effect was accordingly drawn up by the notary, Roger Salghall, in the presence of the clergy then present, and attested by the seals and signatures of the 58 knights and gentlemen.

The historian of Cheshire, in commenting upon the pomp and circumstance attending the settlement of this family dispute, remarks: “Seldom will the reader find a more goodly group collected together, nor will he easily devise a ceremony which will assort better with the romantic spirit of the time, and which thus turned a dry legal conveyance into an exhibition of chivalrous pageantry.”

Robert Legh inherited the martial spirit of his father, and was not long, after he had succeeded to the estates, in seeking an opportunity to display his prowess. In 1415, Henry V., having revived the old claim to the crown of France, determined upon an invasion of the French King’s dominions, whereupon Robert Legh engaged himself to join in the expedition, and accordingly, on the 18th July, protection of his lands whilst abroad in the retinue of the King was granted him. The force mustered at Southampton early in August, and on the 11th of the month the fleet, consisting of 1,400 vessels, with 6,000 men-at-arms and 24,000 archers, an army of picked men, strong of limb and stout of heart, caring little for the abstract justice of the cause for which they were to fight, content to know that they would receive their due share of the “gaignes de guerres,” set sail. On the 14th, the force—

A city on the inconstant billows dancing,

arrived in the Seine, and landed near the fortified town of Harfleur, which surrendered on the 22nd September. Henry’s army had, however, to contend with a more powerful foe than the French. Disease made frightful ravages in his camp, the poisonous miasma of the marshes of Harfleur carrying off in those few weeks fully five thousand of the besiegers. On the 7th October the remnant of the army advanced, and on the 25th the splendid victory of Agincourt was achieved. Robert Legh, however, was not permitted to share in the glories of that memorable day, he having died of the pestilence five days after the surrender of Harfleur, and an inquisition by virtue of a writ of diem clausit extremum, dated 16th October, 1415, was taken.

He was succeeded by his only son, also named Robert, who, though then only five years of age, boasted the possession of a wife, he having, in accordance with the fashion of the time, and well nigh before he could quit his cradle, been wedded to Isabel, one of the daughters of Sir John Savage, of Clifton, Knight, who was entrusted with the custody of his lands during his minority. On the 16th October, 3 and 4 Henry V. (1416), Robert Legh’s young widow petitioned for and had livery of dower, and shortly after she became the wife of William Honford, of Chorley, a younger brother of Sir John de Honford, of Handforth.

On the 4th May, 1431, Robert Legh made proof of age, when his mother’s second husband, William Honford, “aged 60 and upwards,” was one of the witnesses, and testified “that the said Robert was born at Adlynton, and baptized in the church at Prestbury, the Tuesday on the feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (March 25, 1410), and was aged 21 on the feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross (May 3) then last past; and that he, William, was present at Prestbury the day when Robert Hyde, his godfather, came to the church at Prestbury with the said Robert.” (Earwaker.)

The name of Robert Legh appears among those who on the 3rd March, 1435–6, were summoned to attend the Council of the boy King Henry VI. at Chester, when he and the others then assembled, in the name of the whole community of the county of Chester, granted to the King a subsidy of 1,000 marks (£666 13s. 4d.); and on the 28th May, in the same year, he with Robert de Honford, Knight, Robert Massy of Godley, and John Pygot were appointed collectors of the subsidy within the hundred of Macclesfield. In March, 1441–2, a further subsidy of 3,000 marks (£2,000) having been granted by the county, Robert Legh was again deputed, with the others named, to collect the same within the hundred.

In the MS. account of the Legh family, preserved at Adlington, and to which reference has already been made, it is said that, in 1447, Robert de Legh obtained a licence from the Bishop of Coventry “to keep a chaplain to perform mass and other divine offices in any of his manor houses within the diocese for the term of thirty years, without prejudice to the curate of the place, on which licence a domestic chapel was built at Adlington.” The chapel thus erected stood in the park, within a few hundred yards of the front of the present mansion, and on the site known at the present day by the name of the Chapel Field.

The first connection of the Leghs with the manor of Prestbury dates from 1448, when the manor with the great and small tithes, which had previously been leased to the Pigots, of Butley, were demised by the Abbot of St Werburgh’s, Chester, to Robert Legh for thirty-nine years, together with the Heybirches and Ewood, and also the advowson of the church of Prestbury, and all other rights and appurtenances belonging to it and the manor, the vicar’s endowment excepted—one of the conditions being that the lessee should provide a fit and proper chaplain to celebrate divine service in the chapel of Poynton, within the parish of Prestbury, during the continuance of the lease, a condition, however, that was not always observed, for in 1500 the tithes of Poynton were sequestrated in consequence of the omission or neglect to fulfil the condition named. Some dispute having subsequently arisen, a new lease was granted in 1461, which was renewed in 1493. This last expired in 1524, and in the year following another lease was granted for forty years. On the 9th March, 1462 (2 Edward IV.), the King, as Earl of Chester, granted to Robert Legh a licence to enclose and impark a certain wood called Whiteley Hay and Adlington Wood, and also a place called Whiteley Green, with liberty to hold the park so enclosed and imparked to him and his heirs for ever. The place remained enclosed until the early part of the last century, when it was disparked, and a tract of land more conveniently near the hall applied to the purpose. In 1478 his mother, Matilda, who had survived her first husband sixty-three years, and had also outlived her second husband, William de Honford, died. She must have been very old, for in the inquisition taken after her death her son Robert was said to be sixty-eight years of age. He had livery of the lands held by her in dower, but did not long enjoy possession of them, for his death occurred on the 21st January following. As already stated, he had been married in his infancy to Isabella, daughter of Sir John Savage, of Clifton. This lady predeceased him, and he afterwards married Isabella, a daughter of Sir William Stanley, of Stanley, Stourton, and Hooton, who, according to the Adlington MS., was within the prohibited degrees, being of the blood of his first wife, and, consequently, it was thought prudent, if not indeed necessary, to make the marriage valid, to obtain a dispensation from the Pope.

On the death of Robert Legh, his eldest son, who bore the same name, and who was then fifty years of age, and married to Ellen, daughter of Sir Robert Booth, of Dunham Massey, Knight, succeeded to the patrimonial lands. Two years afterwards, a quarrel having arisen between Edward IV. and James III. of Scotland, which resulted in the breaking off of the marriage treaty between the English Princess Cicely and the son of the Scottish King, and the resumption of hostilities between the two countries, a commission was issued (November 18, 1480) to Robert Legh, and other persons therein named, requiring them to array the fencible men of the hundred before the Christmas following, and to command the same to be in readiness in warlike attire to attend upon the Earl of Chester on three days’ notice; and on the 15th January following another commission was issued to the same persons, requiring them to communicate with the gentlemen of the hundred to determine the number of horsemen, with their harness, that could be raised in their households, and to make a return before the Wednesday next before the Feast of the Purification. A third commission was issued to them in May, 1481, to array the fencible men of the hundred between the ages of sixteen and sixty, and to appoint a certain day for the same to depart “pro viagio dicti partes nostri versus partes socie.” Mr. Earwaker cites a deed from which it appears that on the 6th December, 1483, John Legh, a younger brother of Robert, a priest in orders, and then rector of Rostherne, and Douce or Dulcia, his sister, granted to the said Robert all their right and title to the manor and church of Prestbury.

The fierce struggle of the Red and White Roses destroyed the power and weakened the influence of the English nobility and their feudatory chiefs by sweeping away the heads of the principal families. Their sun went down when the stout Earl of Warwick, the renowned “King-maker,” lay weltering in his gore upon the field at Barnet; Tewkesbury extinguished their hopes; and the fight at Bosworth ended a contest which, in the field and on the scaffold, had cost the lives of more than sixty princes of the royal family, above one-half of the nobles and principal gentlemen, and above a hundred thousand of the common people of England. Fortunately for themselves, the lords of Adlington passed harmless through that eventful period. It does not appear that Robert Legh took any very active part in the protracted struggle between the rival houses of York and Lancaster. The Lyme Leghs had plucked the “pale and maiden blossom” and given their verdict “on the White Rose side,” but there is reason to believe that, in the closing years of his life at least, the sympathies of Robert Legh were on the side of the Red Rose of Lancaster. It may be that, like the kinsmen of his father’s second wife, the Stanleys of Lancashire, he believed that to be “the true policy which had the most success,” and, like them, have been a faithful adherent of the party of “good luck.” Certain it is that the great and exhausting quarrel between these rival houses, which brought death and destruction to so many an English home, left his house with unimpaired estates and undiminished power; but he did not long survive the close of that unhappy struggle, his death occurring on the 8th December, 1486, when he must have been sixty-eight years of age. By his wife, whom he predeceased, and who died in 1504, he had Thomas Legh, who succeeded as his heir, four younger sons, and one daughter.

Thomas Legh was thirty-five years of age when he entered upon his inheritance, and he had then been married about seven years, his wife being Katharine, daughter of Sir John Savage, of Clifton, and sister of Thomas Savage, Archbishop of York, the founder of the Savage chantry in Macclesfield church, and of Ellen Savage, who married Sir Piers Legh, of Lyme.

Two years after the victory at Bosworth, which gave the crown of England to Henry of Richmond, a desperate effort was made by the friends of the fallen tyrant, Richard III., to secure the throne for the impostor Lambert Simnel, and when the new King’s crown was in peril at the battle of Stokefield, Thomas Legh’s relative, Piers Legh, of Lyme, drew his sword and fought valiantly to defend it. In November of that year (1487) a subsidy was voted to the King by his loyal subjects in the county of Chester, and the name of Thomas Legh, of Adlington, occurs inter alia among those authorised to collect the portion due from the hundred of Macclesfield.

In 1498 he obtained a licence from the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry to have mass and other divine offices performed by a fit chaplain in the chapel situated within his manor of Adlington—a renewal, it would seem, of the privilege conceded to his grandfather, Robert Legh, in 1447. When Henry’s eldest son, Arthur, Prince of Wales, succeeded to the earldom, he was at great pains to guard against any encroachment affecting the “sword and dignity of Chester,” and with that object made a searching inquiry as to the authority in which many of his feudatories exercised their privileges. Among them Thomas Legh, in 1499–1500, had a quo warranto, requiring him to show cause why he claimed to have a park at Whiteley Hay and to hold a court-leet, &c. He replied, setting forth the grant made by Edward IV. to his grandfather; he further pleaded right of free-warren in all his Cheshire possessions, and claimed the assize of bread and ale, the punishing of scolds by the cucking-stool, of bakers by amercement or the pillory, and brewers by judgment of the tumbrell, and to have amercements and fines for trespasses, offences, and effusions of blood in affrays presented within the leet to be assessed by the jury. The answer must have been deemed satisfactory, for no further action appears to have been taken against him in the Earl’s court.

If we may judge from some of the enrolments on the Recognisance Rolls, Thomas Legh must have been a somewhat turbulent subject, and have been frequently at variance with his neighbours and friends. Impatient of the dilatory and uncertain processes of the law, he sometimes had recourse to the simpler and less tardy method of taking the adjustment of his differences into his own hands, a mode of procedure that occasionally brought him into trouble, and subjected him to the inconvenience of having to find sureties for his good behaviour. He oftentimes appeared in the legal arena, and not unfrequently his quarrels were with his wife’s father, Sir John Savage, who was then residing at the park at Macclesfield, the custody of which had been granted him by King Henry in acknowledgment of his services at Bosworth. Thus, on the 14th November, 1488, he was required to enter into a recognisance of 1,000 marks that he and all his children and servants would keep the peace towards Sir John Savage, sen., knight, and on the same day he entered into another recognisance of the like amount that he, his children, and servants would keep the peace towards Nicholas Davenport, of Woodford, and his servants. On the 28th April, 1489, he again gave sureties in two sums of 1,000 marks each that he would keep the peace towards his father-in-law, Sir John Savage, his children, and servants, and Nicholas Davenport, of Woodford, his children, and servants, and at the same time he entered into a further recognisance of £200 to keep the peace towards Hamo Ashley, Esq. Whatever may have been the cause of the difference with his father-in-law, it was a long time before the variance was composed, for on the 20th April, 1490, he again appeared in the law courts, when he was required to find sureties in 1,000 marks to keep the peace towards him. On the 11th May, 1495, he and his brother, John Legh, of Lawton, entered into recognisances of 1,000 marks each to abide the award of Hamnet Massy and others named, touching all disputes between the two brothers and Nicholas Davenport and William Honford, of Davenport and Honford, at the same time entering into recognisances for the same amounts. The arbitration must have been very protracted, for the recognisances and counter recognisances were renewed on the 12th April, 1496, again on 9th September in the same year, and a third time on the 19th June, 1498. On the 8th June, 1501, Thomas Legh was again required to give sureties, this time in £100, to keep the peace towards John Carter and Robert Rokeley; and on the 19th September, 1502, he entered into recognisances of £100 to keep the peace towards Richard Phillips, chaplain. He either lacked prudence, or his neighbours must have been more than ordinarily litigious, for it was not long before he was again involved in a suit, this time at the instance of Robert Walls, the representative of a family located at Adlington. He appears to have been then outlawed in error, for on the 5th March, 1st and 2nd Henry VIII., proceedings were taken against Roger Downes and others for restitution of goods seized under the outlawry. In July of the same year he entered into recognisances to the Earl of Chester to keep the peace towards his neighbour, Sir John Warren, of Poynton.

In the Calendar of Warrants, removed from Chester to the Public Record Office, London, there is one dated at Ludlow Castle, 1st April, 12th Henry VII., 1497, appointing the Bishop of Lincoln, the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and others named, a commission to levy money in the counties of Chester and Flint, to aid the King in repelling the unprovoked invasion of James IV. of Scotland, who, in violation of the treaty of 1493, had raised an army in support of Perkin Warbeck and crossed the borders, spoiling and plundering the country. The Parliament which assembled at Westminster in January of that year had granted him £120,000 under certain restrictions, and on the 6th April, Thomas Legh, and other loyal men of Cheshire, assembled at Chester, and in the name of the county granted him a further sum of 1,000 marks. Four days later a commission was issued to Thomas Legh and others to array the fencible men of the hundred before the 1st May following, for the purpose of aiding in the war against the Scotch. Henry VII., in the indulgence of his inordinate passion for money, had frequent recourse to a system of benevolences or contributions, apparently voluntary, though, in fact, extorted from his wealthier subjects, and also to the granting of subsidies—“reasonable aids,” as they were called. In 1501, on the occasion of the marriage of Arthur, Prince of Wales, with Katharine of Arragon, afterwards the unhappy queen of Henry VIII., a subsidy was granted by the county of Chester, and Thomas Legh was appointed with others to collect the portion due from his own hundred.

When Henry of Richmond came out of the field of Bosworth a victor it was to rule over a nation weak and impoverished, and bleeding at every vein. The sword had vied with the axe, and the nobles had shown themselves too powerful for the comfort or security of the monarch. To destroy their influence the King determined upon the suppression of their retainers—virtually the rent of the lands granted in knights’ service, thus freeing their properties from the burden of supplying the armies of the State. In this way peace and good order were re-established, and an end put to those intestine wars which had well-nigh exhausted the country. Though the Leghs had not suffered to any appreciable extent from these internal broils, it is more than probable that less attention had been paid to their ancestral home than would have been the case had public affairs been in a more settled state. With the return to a more peaceful order of things they had leisure to add to the beauty and convenience of their permanent home. Architecture marks the growth and development of human society, and the progress of refinement as well as the changes society had undergone rendered alterations at Adlington necessary for the comfort and convenience of the inmates. Thomas Legh, if he did not rebuild the house, remodelled and greatly enlarged it; and much of the traceried panel-work forming part of the ancient screen, as well as other carved work still remaining, was no doubt executed during his time. In commemoration of his work, he caused his name and that of his wife, with the date, to be affixed in carved Lombardic letters—

The inscription appears over the high-place at the west end of the great hall, and was probably replaced in the last century during the occupancy of Charles Legh.

Thomas Legh died August 8, 1519, leaving, with other issue, a son, George Legh, then aged 22 years, who succeeded as his heir.

“Better marry over the mixen than over the moor” has ever been a favourite proverb with the men of Cheshire; and the heads of the house of Legh evidently believed in the soundness of the advice it conveyed, for, from the time their Norman progenitor first settled in the county, they had been content to mate within their own shire. The first of the manorial lords of Adlington to depart from this long-established custom was George Legh, who, in 1523, married the daughter of a Huntingdonshire squire—Joan, daughter of Peter Larke, and a sister of that Thomas Larke on whom Cardinal Wolsey had bestowed the rich rectory of Winwick, in Lancashire—and it can hardly be said that the departure added much to the reputation of his house, the supposed antecedents of the lady having given rise to no inconsiderable amount of scandal. It is said that, previous to her marriage with Thomas Legh, Joan Larke had been the mistress (not the illegitimate daughter, as a recent writer has unnecessarily sought to disprove) of Cardinal Wolsey. The statement is evidently made on the authority of one of the “Articles of Impeachment” against Wolsey presented to Parliament by a committee of the House of Lords, December 1, 1529, and quoted in Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s “Life of Henry VIII.” The story is a curious one, and, if true, reflects little credit either upon the Cardinal or his frail companion. The accusation is embodied in the 38th article—

That the sd Cardinal did call before him Sir Jno. Stanley, kt., which had taken a farm by convent seal of the Abbot and Convent of Chester; and afterwards by his power and might, contrary to right, committed the said Sir Jno. Stanley to the prison of Fleet by the space of one year, until such time as he compelled the sd Sir Jno. to release his convent seal to one Leghe, of Adlington, which married one Lark’s daughter, which woman the sd lord cardinal kept and had with her two children; whereupon the sd Sir John Stanley, upon displeasure taken in his heart, made himself monk in Westminster, and there died.

The story, it must be confessed, has much improbability about it; and may, as has been suggested, have been prompted by feelings of malice against the fallen ecclesiastic. Certain it is, the charge was not pressed to a direct issue. Whatever may have been the relations existing between Wolsey and the wife of Thomas Legh, there is no doubt that in the short interval between the expiry of the lease of the Prestbury tithes, in 1523–4, and the granting of a new one by the Abbot of St Werburg, in the following year, a dispute had arisen between George Legh and Sir John Stanley respecting them. It is not improbable that the latter had endeavoured to steal a march upon his neighbour by securing a lease of a portion of them to the disadvantage of the Leghs, who, as we have seen, had been farmers of the impropriate rectory for a lengthened period, and that the Cardinal, who is known to have been a patron of the Larkes, was then appealed to with a view of inducing the monks of Chester to grant George Legh a renewal of the privileges his family had so long enjoyed. If so, the appeal was unsuccessful, for in 1524–5 a new lease for forty years was granted, which was subsequently renewed.

Sir John Stanley was a natural son of James Stanley, warden of Manchester, and afterwards Bishop of Ely, a younger son of that Thomas, Lord Stanley, who placed the crown of the vanquished Richard upon the head of the victorious Richmond on the field of Bosworth. He commanded his father’s retainers at the battle of Flodden Field, in 1513, when his uncle, Sir Edward Stanley, afterwards created Lord Monteagle, led the forces of Lancashire and Cheshire, and Sir Edmund Savage, mayor of Macclesfield, and so many of the burgesses of that town were slain; and on that occasion by his valour in the field won his golden spurs. He married Margaret, the only daughter and heir of William Honford, of Honford, by his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir John Savage, and was consequently closely allied to the Leghs of Adlington. In 1528 he and his wife prayed for a divorce in order that they might severally devote themselves to a religious life, and be quit of the world for ever. The divorce was granted, and he became a monk of Westminster, where he died; his wife also entered a religious house, but must have abandoned her intention of becoming a recluse, for she afterwards married Sir Urian Brereton, by whom she had a family, who through her inherited the Honford estates. Though Sir John assumed the cowl and tonsure of a monk, it is hardly credible, even supposing the story of Wolsey’s arbitrary exercise of power to have been true, that he forsook the society of his wife, retreated from the world, and disappeared in the shadow of the cloister “from displeasure taken in his heart” upon a matter of such comparatively little moment, and occurring four or five years previously.

A recent writer, in an account of Adlington, says that Sir John Stanley “was himself an ecclesiastic and warden of Manchester;” that his claim “was espoused by the Bishop of Ely, his father;” and that “the battle seems in reality to have been fought between the powerful Bishop of Ely on the one hand, and the yet more powerful Cardinal on the other.” These statements are entirely erroneous. Sir John, in early life, had embraced the profession of arms; as a soldier he had earned his knighthood by bravery on the field; and, being married, he would by the canons of the Church be disqualified from holding an ecclesiastical preferment, while, as a fact, his father, the Bishop of Ely, had been in his grave eight or nine years when the dispute respecting the Prestbury tithes arose.

George Legh died on the 12th June, 1529, at the early age of thirty-two. His will was only made on the day preceding his decease, and the broad lands of Adlington were transmitted to his only son, Thomas Legh, then an infant two years of age. His wife survived him, and was remarried to George Paulet, brother of the Marquis of Winchester, and she with her second husband appear to have resided at Adlington during the minority of the heir, for in a return of the clergy serving at the various chapels of ease within the parish of Prestbury there occurs the name of Sir James Hurst, a stipendiary priest, paid by George Pollet (Paulet), and apparently serving in the chapel at Adlington. By an unaccountable error Thomas Legh, of Adlington, has been confounded with another personage of the same name, who, as one of the commissioners under Sir Thomas Cromwell, took an active part in the suppression of the religious houses. The mistake will be apparent when it is remembered that at the time (1536) that worthy was denouncing monachism and despoiling the monks of their lands and houses Thomas Legh, of Adlington, was only in his ninth year, and before he had attained to manhood the great and lesser monasteries had been swept away.

Whilst he was in his minority he had been united in marriage with one of the younger daughters of the great house of Grosvenor—Mary, the daughter of Robert Grosvenor, of Eaton, the direct ancestor of the present Duke of Westminster. It is not known with certainty how the match was brought about, but in those days the lord of the fee was entitled to the wardship of the heir, with the right to put up his or her hand to sale in marriage; and if Richard Grosvenor, as is not unlikely, had the wardship of the Adlington estates, he may have thought the alliance a desirable one for a younger member of his numerous family. It was to avoid the evil arising from this feudal practice that so many early marriages were in former times resorted to, parents being oftentimes prompted to seek an eligible match for their heirs while under age to free them from the exactions and other consequences of wardship—a circumstance that could have been little understood by the President Montesquieu, when he cast the sneer upon our country in saying there was a law in England which permitted girls of seven years of age to choose their own husbands, and which, he added, was shocking in two ways, since it had no regard to the time when nature gives maturity to the understanding, nor to the time when she gives maturity to the body. Mary Grosvenor survived her husband and remarried Sir Richard Egerton, of Ridley, Knight, with whom she appears to have resided at Adlington during the minority of the son by her first husband. She had the manor and tithes of Prestbury settled upon her as dower; and in 1558 her second husband is found attending a meeting in the church at Prestbury, and acting there in the capacity of warden—an office then held in much higher esteem than at the present day. The lady deserves to be held in special remembrance by the men of Cheshire, from the circumstance that she is generally believed to have superintended the education and taken a kindly interest in the well-being of a notable Cheshire worthy, who attained the highest honours of the peerage, Richard Egerton’s base-born son by Alice Starke, of Bickerton—Thomas Egerton, Viscount Brackley, Lord Keeper and Chancellor of England, ancestor of the great Duke of Bridgewater, as well as of the present Earl of Ellesmere—a worthy who, if precluded by the circumstances of his birth from deriving honour from an illustrious ancestry, reflected on them, his descendants, and his county the lustre of a name brighter than any other its annals can boast. It is pleasant to think that some of the earlier years of the great Chancellor were spent within the old house at Adlington, and that the generous-hearted lady to whom he owed so much was not forgotten when he had attained to distinction, and she in her old age had become the victim of religious persecution.[32] She died in 1599, having survived her first husband for the long period of fifty-one years. In her will, dated 18th October, 1597, she appoints the Lord Keeper Egerton, whom she designates her “wellbeloved sonne,” one of her executors, and bequeaths to him “one ringe of Goulde having thereon a Dyamond.” She is buried at Astbury, where her altar-tomb, with a recumbent effigy upon the top, may still be seen.

Thomas Legh, the first husband of Mary Grosvenor, did not long enjoy possession of the ancestral domains, his death occurring at Eaton, May 17, 1548, the year in which he attained his majority. The only issue by his marriage was a son, Thomas, aged one year at the time of his death, so that the broad lands of Adlington were once more held in ward through the infancy of the heir.

On the 21st April, 1548, three weeks before his death, Thomas Legh granted to his wife’s eldest brother, Thomas Grosvenor, of Eaton, all the lands which his family had held in Belgrave from the time of the marriage of Sir Robert Legh with the heiress of Sir Thomas Belgrave, circa 1385; and four days later he settled the remainder of his estates, including “the Hall of Adlington,” in trust for the benefit of himself and his wife and his heirs in tail male.

Sir Urian Brereton, who married the widow of Sir John Stanley, the quondam recluse, seems to have acquired, with the lady, Sir John’s craving for the Prestbury tithes, for in 1538, during the minority of Thomas Legh the elder, he obtained from the Abbot of St. Werburg’s, in the names of himself and John Broughton, the reversion of the lease of the manor and advowson, to commence on the expiry of the one for 40 years renewed to George Legh in 1524; and this reversion was afterwards purchased by Richard and John Grosvenor, the brothers of Mary, the wife of Thomas Legh, in trust, and to prevent their alienation from the other Adlington properties. But a great revolution in religious thought and action was then gradually gaining strength and power, and the day was near at hand when the monks and their system were to be overthrown. On the dissolution of St. Werburg’s Abbey the manor and advowson of the church of Prestbury were granted to the Dean and Chapter of the newly-founded Cathedral of Chester. They did not, however, long enjoy possession; William Clyve, the third dean, and two of the prebendaries, were confined in the Fleet by procurement of Sir Richard Cotton, of Werblington, comptroller of the King’s household, a Hampshire knight, who appears to have shared the acquisitive properties of his elder brother, Sir George Cotton, another courtier and favourite of the King, who had had conferred upon himself the dissolved abbey and the greater part of the demesne of Combermere, in Cheshire, and who, in other ways, had increased his worldly possessions out of the spoils of the religious houses. While in the Fleet, under intimidation, as was alleged, the dean and canons granted to Sir Richard (20th March, 1553), for ever, most of their lands on the payment of a yearly rental; he in turn, on the 28th July, 1555, re-conveyed the manor and advowson of Prestbury to Richard and John Grosvenor, who, in 1559, are found presenting to the vicarage. The validity of the grant to Cotton was subsequently disputed, and on the Cheshire Recognisance Rolls, under date January 13th, 5 and 6 Elizabeth (1563–4), there is the enrolment of a complaint exhibited by Richard and John Grosvenor. Eventually the feoffees surrendered to the Crown; on the 19th December, 1579, the whole of the lands formerly held by the abbey were granted by Elizabeth to Sir George Calveley, Knight, George Cotton, Hugh Cholmondeley, Thomas Legh, Henry Mainwaring, John Nuthall, and Richard Hurleston, Esquires, and their heirs for ever; and, by another indenture, dated 6th August, 1580, the counterpart of which is preserved among the Adlington charters, these fee farmers, after reciting the grant of Elizabeth, for divers good causes and considerations them specially moving, demised and quit-claimed to Thomas Legh and his heirs the rectory, church, and manor of Prestbury, with the appurtenances, excepting the certain messuages, tenements, and hereditaments, with the appurtenances and the tithes, oblations, and obventions, of Chelford and Asthull (Astle). They have since continued in the possession of the Leghs, and have descended with their other estates.

Thomas Legh had a long minority, and it was a fortunate thing for him that in those early years of his life he had a good mother, who, with the aid of her powerful kinsmen, was able to guard his estates and protect him from undue taxation. On the 16th March, 1567–8, he obtained livery of his father’s lands, he being then of full age. He had, five years previously (29th June, 1563), being then in his sixteenth year, married, at Cheadle, Sybil, the youngest daughter of Sir Urian Brereton, of Honford, by his first wife, Margaret, daughter and heir of William Honford, and widow of Sir John Stanley, a marriage that it may be fairly assumed happily terminated the long-standing disputes between the two houses respecting the tithes of Prestbury.

Following the example of his father-in-law, who rebuilt the hall of Handforth, Thomas Legh, in 1581, rebuilt, or at all events, greatly enlarged, the house at Adlington, as the following inscription, in black-letter characters, over the entrance porch leading from the court-yard testifies:—

In 1587 Thomas Legh had the shrievalty of Cheshire conferred upon him. The time was one of considerable excitement and no little anxiety, for scarcely had he entered upon the duties of his office than news came that the “Invincible Armada,” so long threatened and so long deferred, had unfurled its sails, and was then actually advancing towards the English coast. The spirit of patriotism was aroused; Roman Catholic and Protestant united as one man to repel the haughty Spaniard, and the Queen issued a proclamation to her sheriffs and others, urging them by every consideration of social and domestic security to call forth the united energies of their respective counties, in common with the country in general, to resist the meditated attack. Thomas Legh, who was then in the prime of manhood, was not likely to be idle on such an occasion, and doubtless he acted with much the same spirit that Macaulay’s sheriff did when the signal fires announcing the approach of the enemy flashed along the southern coasts,—

In the later years of his life Thomas Legh added considerably to the patrimonial lands. Towards the close of the century, when the Butley estates, which had been held for so many generations by the Pigots, were partitioned among three co-heiresses, he acquired by purchase the manor and a moiety of the lands, which descended with the Adlington property until the present century. On the 20th April, 1596, an enrolment was made, as appears by the Cheshire Records, at the instance of Dame Mary Egerton, his mother, then a widow, of a covenant by which he undertook to convey the mansion house of Adlington, with other properties, to her use for life, and afterwards to himself with successive remainders in fee tail to his sons Urian, Thomas, and Edward, and his daughter, Maria Legh, and his right heirs for ever. In the same year his eldest son, Urian Legh, brought distinction to the family by his gallant bearing at Cadiz, where he earned for himself the honour of knighthood, an event respecting which we shall have more to say anon. Proud as the father must have felt at his son’s conspicuous bravery, the pleasure must have had its alloy when, in the following year, he had the misfortune to lose his younger son, Ralph, who was slain by the insurgents in an attack upon Newry, in Ireland; and, to add to his sorrow, in the next year, 1598, he lost another son, Thomas Legh, who, with his commander, Sir Henry Bagnall, was killed in the disastrous attempt to relieve the fortress of Blackwater,—the most signal defeat ever experienced by an English force in Ireland,—when Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who had been for some time in insurrection against the English rule, was besieging it, and who had, at the same time, burned down the castle of Kilcoleman, where

the “Faery Queen” had been written, and its gifted author, Edmund Spenser, was then residing.

Thomas Legh died at Adlington on the 25th January, 1601–2, in the fifty-fifth year of his age, and was buried at Prestbury, on the following day, as the parish registers show. The same year his widow caused a memorial window, a portion of which still remains, though in a very mutilated condition, to be placed in the church, on which is a shield of arms, with several quarterings, representing the alliances of the two families. Beneath is this inscription:—

Orate pro bono statv Thomæ Leyghe de Adlington armigeri et Sibilla vxoris svæ vni’ filiorvm Vriani Brereton de Handford militis defvncti qvi hanc fenestram fieri fecervnt in anno domini 1601.

She survived her husband eight years, and was buried at Prestbury, February 19th, 1609–10.

Sir Urian Legh, who succeeded as heir on the death of his father, in 1602, was born at Handforth in 1566, and was, consequently, in his thirty-sixth year when he entered upon his inheritance. As we have seen, he had early embraced the profession of arms, and in the service of his country had already won renown. It was the time when Elizabeth’s sea captains, Howard and Essex, and Raleigh and Drake, were adding to the national laurels by their achievements on the main, justifying the witty and well-timed impromptu which one of the courtiers gave when lament was made that England was then under the rule of a queen, instead of that of a king,—

In 1596, when Philip of Spain was preparing for a second invasion of England, Howard, the Lord Admiral, with his characteristic daring and love of adventure, urged that, instead of waiting for the enemy’s attack, a blow should be struck at Spain herself, by destroying the fleet before it could leave her harbours. The more cautious Burleigh counselled the less hazardous policy, but was overruled by the dashing and impetuous Devereux, Earl of Essex, who, with Howard and Raleigh, was eventually entrusted with the command of the expedition. Young Urian Legh could not remain a laggard when such opportunities for distinction offered; leaving the bower and the tilt yard for the Spanish main, and the saddle of the war horse for the deck of the war ship, he joined the expedition, and on the 1st of June, the fleet, then lying at Plymouth, loosed its sails and bore away towards the shores of Spain, arriving before Cadiz on the 12th. Essex, whose impetuosity could brook no restraint, and who had, moreover, a bitter aversion to the tyrant Philip, was so eager for action that he threw his hat into the sea in the exuberance of his delight. The attack was commenced on the following day, and with such fury that the Spanish Admiral’s ship and several others were blown up with all their crews on board, whilst the few vessels which were not either sunk or burned were run on shore, the English admiral refusing to accept a price for their release, declaring that “he came to burn and not to ransom.” This daring and successful enterprise was followed up by an attack on the strongly-fortified town of Cadiz. The impetuous Essex threw his standard over the wall, “giving withal a most hot assault unto the gate, where, to save the honour of their ensign, happy was he that could first leap down from the wall, and with shot and sword make way through the thickest press of the enemy.” The daring of the leader called forth the courage of his followers. The town was captured on the 26th June, and six hundred and twenty thousand ducats were paid as a ransom for the lives of the inhabitants. The heir of Adlington took the leading part in the attack, and displayed such conspicuous bravery that the Earl knighted him upon the spot. The display of British valour on the occasion has been justly described by Macaulay (“Essays,” art. “Lord Bacon,”) as “the most brilliant military exploit that was achieved on the continent by English arms during the long interval which elapsed between the battle of Agincourt and that of Blenheim.”

Sir Urian Legh stands out with marked individuality in any record of the house of Adlington. The Leghs have ever looked with pardonable pride upon the doughty deeds of their warlike ancestor, and the feeling has been nothing lessened by the romantic incident which tradition has linked with his name. He is commonly believed to have been the hero of the old legendary ballad,—“The Spanish Lady’s Love,” written by Thomas Deloney immediately after the return from Spain, and reprinted by the Percy Society from “The Garland of Goodwill”—

The story is that, while with Essex in Spain, a captive maid, “by birth and parentage of high degree,” was so overcome by Sir Urian’s kindness that she conceived an ardent attachment towards him, and when he was about to return, the amorous and high-born beauty, flinging aside the trammels of country and kin, begged that she might be allowed to accompany him and share his lot in life—a request the gallant Cheshire man, after urging many other objections, was compelled to refuse, for the best of all reasons—he had already a wife.

To which the disappointed lady magnanimously replies—

It has been stated by some writers that the ballad has reference not to Sir Urian Legh, but to Sir John Bolle, of Thorpe Hall, in Lincolnshire, the representative of a family remotely connected in a later generation with the Leghs of Adlington; while Dr. Percy, in his introductory remarks, inclines to the opinion that the original was either a member of the Popham family or Sir Richard Leveson, of Trentham, in Staffordshire, an ancestor of the Duke of Sutherland. The legend has doubtless some foundation in fact, though the actores fabulæ may be phantoms; it should, however, be said that, until recent years, when they were removed to Shaw Hill, in Lancashire, the Leghs, in proof of the identity of their kinsman with the hero of Deloney’s ballad, were able to show the veritable “chain of gold” and the casket in which through long generations it had been carefully preserved as an heirloom of the family. A half-length portrait of Sir Urian hangs upon the staircase at Adlington. It has been taken when he was in the fulness of manhood, and represents him as fresh complexioned, with a regular and rather handsome cast of features, suggesting the idea that comeliness of face and figure blended with courage and courtesy,—the characteristics of an old English gentleman. He wears a black felt hat with jewelled front, a black gown with vandyked and richly embroidered points, and round his neck a gold chain of many links that hangs down almost to the waist—whether the one given him by the “Spanish Lady” or not we will not undertake to say. In one corner of the picture is a shield of six quarters, and in the opposite corner this inscription:—

Sir Urian Legh of Adlington in the county of Chester Knight who went with Robert Devereux Earl of Essex to the siege of Cadiz and was by him knighted in the field for his great services in taking that Town in 1575 (should be 1596). He married Margaret daughter of Sir Edmund Trafford in the county of Lancaster Knight by whom he had four sons and three daughters.

On succeeding to his inheritance Sir Urian appears to have settled down to the discharge of his duties as a country gentleman, and to have applied himself to the further improvement of his patrimony, which he managed with so much thrift and care that before the close of the century he was able to make an addition to the family estates by the purchase of the lands and hall of Foxwist, in Butley township, from William Duncalf, whose ancestors had been resident there for more than three centuries, and in 1603 he built the Milne House, which long afterwards continued to be used as the dower house of the family. In 1613, the year following that in which Cecil died and the notorious Carr, a raw Scotch lad, was made Prime Minister, he was entrusted with the shrievalty of the county, and in local affairs he appears to have taken an active part, his bold and clearly defined autograph being of frequent occurrence in the parochial records. He was a man of some culture, had had the advantage of a university education, having matriculated at Oxford, and in his private life he would seem to have had a sweet fancy, turning to literature in the absence of action, for in the inventory of his effects, taken after his death, it is mentioned that there were in his closet at Prestbury “his bookes valued at xvjli.” He affected the society of men of letters: Dee, the “Wizard Warden” of Manchester, in his “Diary,” under date April 22nd, 1597, records that he was visited at his residence in the College by Sir Urian Legh and his brother (Edward Legh, probably, for the other brothers, Thomas and Ralph, were at the time in Ireland engaged in the suppression of O’Neill’s rebellion), a Mr. Brown, and Mr. George Booth, of Dunham, then Sheriff of Cheshire.

On the 6th of September, 1586, ten years before the affair at Cadiz, Sir Urian Legh was united in marriage to Mary, one of the daughters of Sir Edmund Trafford, of Trafford, Knight, that “hunter out and unkeneler of those slie and subtil foxes Iesuites and semenarei Priests.” The guests who graced the ceremony by their presence must have formed a goodly company, for William Massie, the rector of Wilmslow, who preached a sermon on the occasion, speaks of it as being delivered “before the right honourable the most noble Earle of Derby, and the right reuerend father in God the B(ishop) of Chester with diuerse Knightes and Esquires of great worship at the solemne marriage of your (Sir Edmund Trafford’s) daughter, a modest and vertuous Gentlewoman, married to a young gentleman of great worship and good education.”

Sir Urian Legh died at Adlington on the 2nd June, 1627, and two days afterwards, as the registers show, he was buried at Prestbury.

It is somewhat singular that Thomas Newton,[33] the famous Cheshire poet, who sang the glories of Essex and Drake in Latin verse, should have remained silent upon the daring deeds of his quondam friend and neighbour, Sir Urian Legh, leaving the “Water Poet,” John Taylor, to record in rhyme the virtues of the hero of Cadiz. Taylor was a guest at Adlington some time before the close of the century, and in his “Pennilesse Pilgrimage” describes the reception he met in a manner that recalls Ben Jonson’s lines in praise of the daily hospitalities at Penshurst:—