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sacrifice of human life. Odd people will have it that even yet 

 some serious accident befalls one or other member of the house 

 of Towneley every seven years. But that cannot be, for the 

 voice of tradition unanimously declares that the Towneley boggart 

 was successfully laid with bell, book, and candle far beyond living 

 memory. Dr. Whitaker vouches for it that the Towneleys had 

 been guilty of the illegal enclosure of the Hoare Law pasture, 

 and that in the time of Queen Elizabeth the Duchy of Lancaster 

 ordered 194 acres unlawfully filched from between Hoare Law 

 and HoUin Hey to be granted to Lord Mountjoy, Earl of Devon, 

 in consideration of his good services. The enclosures of the 15th 

 and 16th century laid the foundation at once of modern English 

 agriculture and of modern English pauperism. They displaced 

 a primitive system of common husbandry which was incompatible 

 with good farming ; but they did so with small regard to the 

 rights of the commoners. The Towneley boggart is a fossilised 

 declaration of the feeling of a group of wronged commoners cen- 

 turies ago. It was their way of giving expression to the public 

 feehng of the time, which we should put before the world by 

 means of an indignation meeting. 



Eaising the Dead at Walton-le-Dale. 



That the people of East-Lancashire, when the belief in bog- 

 garts was at its height, were very liable from their very faith in 

 such matters to fraud and deception, is evidenced by the story 

 which has come down about the pretended feats of Wizard Kelly 

 in the churchyard at Walton-le-Dale. That impostor professed 

 to raise, not only tbe common dead buried there, but the devil, 

 and that not once in a way, as the Burnley Grammar School 

 boys did to their horror ; but as often as he thought well, by mere 

 incantations. 



Chubch Boggarts. 



It is easy in our day, almost at the close of the nineteenth 

 century, to affect amazement that people could ever have been 

 found in East Lancashire or elsewhere so crassly ignorant as to 

 be duped by Kelly's profession that he could call the disembodied 

 spirit back to earth, or so painfully credulous as to believe that 

 departed souls could under any circumstances reappear in their 

 old familiar haunts. It was not, however, all ignorance ; nor 

 was it only the ignorant people of East Lancashire who in old 

 times believed in boggarts. Whatever else the Monks were, they 

 were at any rate the learned and scholarly men of their day and 

 generation. And yet we have it gravely chronicled that months 

 after Paslew, the last Abbot of Whalley, paid the penalty of a 

 shameful death for his loyalty to the old rehgion, his disembodied 

 soul appeared on a certain occasion at midnight to one of his old 

 companion . monks. It is the monk himself who has left on 



