120 
of them were certainly Manor Houses, viz :—Coldcoates, and Great, 
and Little Mearley, and these halls occupy more commanding 
situations on the slopes than those of their neighbours—Wiswell, 
Pendleton and Worston. All are close to streams, tributaries of 
the Ribble, and it is easy to see that the situations were chosen 
because of their contiguity to these refreshing waters. But though 
they are all more or less shorn of architectural attraction, no one 
who takes an interest in the past can fail to be influenced by the 
bygone events connected with their weather-beaten walls and the 
parts which their respective inhabitants have played. 
The now insignificant building known as Wiswell Hall will 
recall the effete rebellion in which the imperious ecclesiastic 
John Paslew, B.D., (the last of the abbots of the proud monastery 
of Whalley), took part. Coldcoates is associated with the family 
of Judge Walmsley ; Pendleton is the home of a branch of the 
Hoghtons, of Hoghton Tower. The mansion house of Mearley 
Magna saw a daughter's birth, who was the mother of the 
Nowells of Read, from whom Dean Nowell sprang, and whose 
representatives are with us to this day; and that of Agnes 
Greenacre, whose knightly father became in the course of events 
seized of the ancient estate, and who stood in patriarchal rela- 
tion to the Karls of Sussex, a noble family now passed from the 
peerage. Little Mearley—perched on an abrupt, narrow eleva- 
tion of land at the foot of a gorge-like chasm, and favoured with 
a fine and noble view over some of the fairest portions of 
Ribblesdale—had for its first resident the wily old Henry Nowell, 
who in 1472, with one Johanna his wife, became partaker of the 
revenues of a charitable institution at Wisbeach, which sinecure 
he enjoyed for nearly half a century, and whose daughters in 
ancestral descent became the wives of illustrious men, one of 
whom presented a Library to the fair town of Preston. Worston, 
the last hall of our series, was the home of a family who furnished 
a representative in Parliament for the neighbouring borough of 
Clitheroe when that town was first enfranchised in the 16th 
century. 
WISWELL HALL. 
To take these domestic relics seriatim, leaving the main road 
leading from Whalley to Clitheroe almost half a mile from the 
former town, and passing along a leafy lane, itself the old high- 
way to Clitheroe and Yorkshire, we arrive at the village of 
Wiswell and its central point of interest, ‘‘ Wiswell Hall,” the 
birthplace of the illustrious and illfated Abbot of Whalley. 
We have to travel back to the reign of Henry V., of Agincourt 
fame, to rescue from oblivion the earliest recorded progenitor of 
the Paslew family. In the reign of that monarch it is believed 
that one Francis Paslew, probably a native of Wiswell, acquired 
