118 
Though Grammar Schools had been founded in various parts 
of the county long before the end of Elizabeth’s reign, their 
effect was not yet felt on the general population. Education had 
made but comparatively little progress, and the men of Lanca- 
shire, though the merriest of Englishmen, were ignorant and 
superstitious. Nowhere was the belief in witchcraft and super- 
natural agency more rife than in the palatinate. The shaping 
power of the imagination had clothed every secluded clough and 
dingle with the weird drapery of superstition and made every 
ruined or solitary tenement the abode of unhallowed beings who 
were supposed to hold their diabolical revelries within it. 
Many sumptuary laws for regulating the conduct of society 
existed in the towns.and in the court rolls of the several manors : 
much valuable information is to be gleaned relative to the usages 
and the mode of local self-government that prevailed among our 
forefathers, before the last traces of the medieval system and 
mediewval manners had disappeared. Such records are further 
valuable as pictures of the habits and modes of life of the period, 
showing how the people in small communities lived and bought 
and sold, cleared and cultivated, built and pulled down, and also 
the fines and punishments they were subjected to for those lighter 
offences of which the common law failed to take cognizance. We 
learn from these records how each man took his part in the 
business of his own locality; how the tenantry of the several 
estates attended at the manorial courts at which the business of 
their respective districts was transacted, how they discharged the 
various offices pertaining to the manor, served on the juries 
empowered to decide causes, and reconcile differences among 
their neighbours, and to determine agreements as to meadows, 
lands, and pastures: how they also awarded satisfaction for 
trespass, and decreed the fines and punishments that should be 
inflicted for other minor offences, and misdemeanours. 
[Mr. Croston here quoted a passage from Mr. Harland’s volume 
of ‘Court Leet Records of the Manor of Manchester from 1552 
to 1586,” published by the Chetham Society, which reproduced 
the picture of the capital of the Lancashire manufacturing in- 
dustry in its everyday dress in the Tudor reigns, and concluded 
with the following remarks] :—— 
In those days every man was taught to feel that he was a unit 
in the community in which he dwelt, that he had duties to per- 
form, and that he owed the time necessary to the discharge of 
those duties as his contribution to the common good, and if he 
was conscious of the privileges he was not forgetful of the 
responsibilities of citizenship. When those constitutional prin- 
ciples were active, the people grew up among them and learned 
what they themselves, as responsible members of the community, 
would have to do; and so, when their time came, each man, 
