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Burnley in 1569 evidently shared in the unsettled state of 
the country at large. It is easy to infer that in the matter of 
religion the little community of Burnley was in a most perturbed 
condition. Dean Nowell’s entertainer during his stay was Mr. 
Towneley, of Towneley, whose loyal holding to the creed of his 
fathers brought upon him political persecution. At this very 
time these northern parts were in a political ferment, which by 
and by culminated in that rising in the North of which Words- 
worth has made such capital use in his “ White Doe of Rylstone.” 
We can trace the religious difficulties even in Dean Nowell’s 
gifts. On this very day, July 26, 1569, he made a present of 
some kind or another to one William Dickson, curate of Burnley. 
No such name occurs in the list of Burnley clergymen given in 
Wilkinson’s History of the Parish Church, nor in the later 
editions of Whitaker’s History of Whalley. This Dickson, then, 
must have been in charge of the Burnley Parish Church some- 
time between the death of Sir John Aspden in 1567, and the 
commencement of the clerical duties there of Sir William Dux- 
bury in 1583. It seems probable that this Dickson took up a 
more strongly Protestant position than was palatable to the rul- 
ing families of the district at that time, and that they, holding 
authority as churchwardens, in their capacity, revenged them- 
selves, for having listened from his lips to teaching which they 
could not appreciate, by omitting his name altogether from the 
records of Burnley Parish Church. The Dean also made a gift 
of some kind to one Lawrence Yeate, schoolmaster of Burnley 
Grammar School, and oddly enough the records of the masters 
of Burnley Grammar School, published by the late Mr. T. T. 
Wilkinson, contain no mention of a master bearing such a name. 
But there is reason to believe that Mr. Yeate later on became 
master of the Blackburn Grammar School, and if so he is the 
individual who is mentioned in very complimentary terms by 
Mr Bolton, a great Puritan writer of that town. This heightens 
the suspicion that the name of Lawrence Yeate was obliterated 
from the records of the school because of his Puritan propensi- 
ties, just as that of William Dickson was omitted from those of 
the Parish Church for pretty much the same reason. 
Some more instances of the Dean's liberality were then 
noticed, and reference was made to the stipulation of Robert 
Nowell in his will that out of the money that was left at his 
death forty marks should go to the poor of Burnley, forty to the 
poor of Whalley, and forty to the poor of Holborn and Hendon, 
in Middlesex. The generosity of the brothers to scholars of 
both Oxford and Cambridge, and the famous men who were 
helped by these gifts were alluded to, and the essayist passed on 
to a discussion of the causes of beggary in the Elizabethan 
period, and the measures which had been adopted for restraining 
