32 
THE DEAN AND THE BEGGAR: 
AN INCIDENT OF BURNLEY CHURCHYARD. 
By JAS. McK AY, F'.R.Hist.S. March 12th, 1889. 
On July 26th, 1569, Dean Nowell gave a poor impotent beggar 
a groat in Burnley churchyard. 
On this incident Mr. McKay founded an interesting lecture on 
the condition of Burnley at the time, the story of Dean Nowell, 
and the laws relating to pauperism. He said, 
The churchyard then in all probability was open to the green 
fields, quite unenclosed, with views which stretched away with- 
out interruption to the hills that encircled the little town on 
every side. The struggling cluster of houses along the rough 
unpaved road which was all that represented the town of Burn- 
ley at that time had taken a very long time to bring together. 
There certainly were not more than 250 families in the whole 
township, and it had taken the whole era from the Saxon Con- 
quest to bring that collection of little homesteads together. 
Looking round the churchyard the Dean would see the embryo 
Grammar School and would recall his nephew, destined to become 
increasingly famous throughout the Christian world as a con- 
troversialist of the very highest order England has ever produced. 
The Grammar School was bound to recall the thoughts of the 
Dean to the scholarly Whitaker, because in that humble 
seminary the great divine of the new faith received the rudi- 
ments of his education. Among the peasants who were waiting 
his arrival in the church porch or the church vestry, the Dean 
encountered a whole group of Spensers, Edmund and John, 
Janet and Isabella, and others, and these Spenser beneficiaries 
in their turn would direct the thoughts of the Dean to that 
marvellously endowed boy, Edmund Spenser, who had only a 
few days before entered his name as a student of Pembroke 
College at Cambridge, after having finished his career at 
Merchant Taylors’ School, where he had been placed by the 
liberality of the Nowell family. The Dean and his brother, 
indeed, were among the foremost men of the Reformation era 
who showed by their living and dying acts that they were 
anxious to put the coming generations of Knglish youth in 
possession of the fullest means of education. Robert Nowell, 
with his dying breath, besought the Dean not to forget the 
Grammar School at Middleton, at which they had both received 
most of their early education, and the ecclesiastic carried out the 
request to the full. 
