22 
Life was then taken more leisurely and easier than now. Men 
and women lived then where now they existed. The one blot 
on the life of the 16th and 17th centuries was the belief in 
witcheraft, but for honest sincerity of thought and deed the 
people of 200 years ago were, if he might be permitted to say so, 
immeasurably superior to the people of modern days.—Many 
points of interest were raised in the discussion which followed. 
ROADS ABOUT BURNLEY. 
By WALTER SOUTHERN, February 8rd, 1891. 
In that chapter of his history in which he describes the state 
of England, in 1695, Macaulay cautions us that ‘if we would 
study with profit the history of our ancestors, we must be 
constantly on our guard against that delusion which the well- 
known names of families, places, and offices naturally produce, 
and must never forget that the country of which we read was a 
very different country from that in which we live ;” and 
subsequently he draws a lively picture of the troubles and 
dangers which beset the traveller and the trader even so late as 
the end of the 17th century, in consequence of the badness of 
the roads and the bands of highwaymen which infested them. 
We need Macaulay’s warning when we try to call up a picture 
of the state of our. own particular hills and valleys as they were 
two centuries ago. Whilst the names of Towneley and 
Shuttleworth, of Halsted and Parker, and Hargreaves and 
Whitaker, are still household words to us, whilst the copyholder 
still goes half-yearly to the manorial court to render suit and 
service, and whilst nearly every hill and valley, township and 
stream, clough, road and lane retains the same old Roman, 
Saxon, or Danish name, it is difficult to realise Macaulay’s 
statement, undoubtedly true though it is, that ‘could the 
Kngland of 1685 be by some magical process set before our eyes, 
we should not know one landscape in a hundred or one building 
in ten thousand; the country gentleman would not recognise 
his own fields, the inhabitant of the town would not recognise 
his own street. Hverything has been changed, but the great 
features of nature and a few massive and durable works of 
human art.”’ 
Of the agencies which have wrought such a change in the face 
of nature within the short space of two centuries, the vast 
improvement in the means of communication has been the most 
powerful. During the fifty years from the time of which 
Macaulay was speaking, a great movement had begun and was 
