A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE 



In several of the riverside localities in the township 

 osiers are much grown, this industry having been in- 

 troduced in 1 803, when a successful attempt was 

 made by a Warrington resident to supply English 

 basket-makers with willow, when the foreign materials 

 were unobtainable. 



Though the growth of the town has caused the 

 destruction of many of the small two-story houses 

 which were characteristic of its streets, a good num- 

 ber still remain. The oldest are of timber con- 

 struction, such as the old Fox Inn in Buttermarket 

 Street, now a tobacconist's shop, and though much 

 altered retaining sufficient old work to mark its date 

 as belonging to the sixteenth century. 1 In the 

 seventeenth century Warrington houses seem to have 



BARLEY Mow INN, WARRINGTON : ROOM ON FIRST FLOOR 



been commonly dated by inscriptions over the door- 

 ways, giving not only the year but the day of the 

 month, with the owners' initials. Nearly opposite 

 the Fox Inn is a house with IVN . xxi . 1649 . AK IK EK, 

 and in the Warrington Museum are several beams 

 from destroyed houses with similar inscriptions, all 

 ranging between 1645 and 1658. In Church Street 

 is a good timber house with a projecting upper 

 story, of early sixteenth-century date, but the finest 



specimen of timber work is the Barley Mow Inn, on the 

 west side of the market place, belonging to the latter 

 part of the sixteenth century, with low wood- 

 mullioned lattice windows and quatrefoil panelling 

 of black wood filled in with plaster. The gables 

 toward the market place are now covered with flimsy 

 weather boarding, but otherwise the outside of the 

 house has preserved much of the original work. The 

 interior is naturally less perfect, but on the first floor 

 is a room completely panelled and with a good 

 chimney-piece of Jacobean style, and the staircase has 

 good turned balusters and newels of seventeenth-century 

 date. In the windows are a few quarries of coloured 

 glass, and in one of the ground-floor rooms is a fine 

 carved and panelled chimney-piece, removed from 

 a small room on the first 

 floor.' 



A second type of house 

 which is found in the town 

 is of brick with projecting 

 labels over the windows and 

 simple patterns on the wall 

 surfaces ; such houses appear 

 to be of seventeenth-century 

 date, and an earlier example 

 of the kind occurs at Newton- 

 le- Willows Hall. 



The White Cross, formerly 

 at the west entrance of the 

 town, has disappeared. 3 



Before the 



HUNDRED Conquest WAR- 

 RINGTON was 

 the head of a hundred com- 

 prising the parishes of War- 

 rington, Prescot, and Leigh, 

 and the township of Culcheth 

 in Winwick. 4 Afterwards this 

 was merged in the hundred of 

 West Derby, in which it has 

 since remained. 



In the time of Henry I a barony or fee 

 BARONY was formed for Pain de Vilers, Warring- 

 ton being its head and giving it a name. 

 It descended in regular hereditary succession in the 

 Vilers and Pincerna or Boteler family until nearly 

 the end of the sixteenth century, when the Boteler 

 manors and estates were broken up and the Irelands, 

 who purchased the principal share, enfranchised the 

 subordinate manors of the fee. 3 





