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employed by it in detail it may be acting upon a right or a wrong 
principle. The right principle for a museum in a minor pro- 
vincial town is to get what is most instructive, most charming, 
most interesting, in the greatest possible quantity and variety, 
and not to despise beautiful things because they happen to be 
cheap, or can be easily seen at some place hundreds of miles 
off that the people never go to. The wrong principle is to buy 
things out of pride, because they are reputed to be very fine and 
are known to be rare and expensive. 
LIFE IN LANCASHIRE IN THE TUDOR REIGNS. 
By JAMES CROSTON, F.S.A., September 27th, 1881. 
Lancashire has many characteristics that are peculiar and dis- 
tinctive, and which seem to give it a history of its own, yet it is 
somewhat remarkable that, though in dignity a royal palatinate, 
and at the present time the most populous, and with perhaps 
one exception, the most wealthy of the English shires, it had no 
existence as a separate county until long after the others had 
been constituted. There is no mention of it in the Doomsday 
survey. At that time, the whole of the country lying between 
the Ribble and the Mersey—the Christ’s Croft as it was called in 
the old Law, 
‘‘When all England is aloft, 
Weel are they who are in Christ’s croft, 
And where should Christ’s croft be 
But between Ribble and Mersee ;--”’ 
a district of moss and moor, of forest waste and fell, embracing 
within its limits the now populous hundreds of Salford, West 
Derby, Leyland, and Blackburn, was then intended in Cestre-scire 
or Cheshire ; while the country extending northwards from the 
Ribble to the Lune, comprising the hundred of Amounderness 
and the southern portion of Lonsdale, belonged to Eurwie-scire 
or Yorkshire: the remaining portion of Lonsdale, that north of 
Morecambe Bay was accounted as part of Westmoreland. It was 
not till long after the Conquest and when the lords of the honor 
of Lancaster had enriched themselves out of the forfeited 
possessions of the leader of the vanguard at Hastings that 
Lancashire as a County had a separate existence. 
It is not the early history of the county, however, that we are 
now about to consider, but the condition of society, the life and 
habits of the people, during the reigns of the Tudor sovereigns. 
When Henry of Richmond came out of the field of Bosworth a 
victor, it was to rule over a nation weakened and bleeding at 
every pore. It is however remarkable that this county was never 
once made the scene of the contest between the houses of York 
and Lancaster, 
