A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE 



respectively.'" Some information can be gleaned from the papal archives 

 and monastic chartukries. The latter contain abundant evidence ottnc 

 religious zeal of the people of Lancashire in hundreds of charters bestowing 

 lands and rents upon the local monasteries (half of which were founded in the 

 last quarter of the twelfth century) - 'for the health of ^heir own souls and 

 the souls of their ancestors and successors.' Until the removal of the monk 

 of Stanlaw to Whalley all the religious houses, with the unimportant 

 exception of Kersal cell, were in the western half of the county, and this form 

 of piety was comparatively absent in its eastern portions. The generosity ot 

 the laity to the religious occasionally led to friction between the latter and 

 the parochial clergy. Early in the thirteenth century Albert de Nevill, 

 rector of Manchester, complained to Pope Innocent III of the infringement 

 of the rights of his church by the Cluniac priory of Lenton, which was 

 admitting the inhabitants of Kersal to service in the chapel of its cell there, 

 burying them in a graveyard of its own and taking their tithes and offer- 

 ings.'*' A compromise was arranged by the bishop and the archdeacon of Ely 

 as papal delegates. The monks retained their cemetery and the tithe from 

 land which they had won from the waste. For the latter they were to pay 

 2s. a year to the mother church and its rights of sepulture were to be 

 recognized by the annual render of two candles, each of i J lb. of wax. No 

 parishioner was to make an offering or receive burial at Kersal unless the 

 church of Manchester were properly indemnified, and the monks must not 

 administer the sacraments to parishioners in their chapel."' Occasionally the 

 aggrieved party was itself a religious house, the appropriator of the church 

 whose dues were imperilled. Such a case arose when the hospital (soon 

 abbey) of Cockersand was founded in the parish of Cockerham, whose church 

 belonged to Leicester Abbey. The question was complicated by the fact 

 that the hospital had been established on the abbey's manor of Cockerham 

 during a temporary disseisin. A settlement was arrived at in 1204 or 1205 

 confirming the hospital in its share of the manor and making it extra- 

 parochial.'" The canons in their turn had to agree to waive, in the case of 

 any other lands they might acquire in the parish of Cockerham, the privilege 

 they had obtained from the pope of exemption from tithes.'" These papal 

 exemptions were another mode in which parish revenues were encroached 

 upon in favour of monasteries. After further dispute it was settled in 1242 

 that the abbey should not admit any parishioners of Cockerham to 

 confession, communion, or other sacraments, but only those of their own 

 establishment.'" 



Of some importance for the spiritual life of the county was the fact that 

 six of the religious houses which were new in the early part of the thirteenth 

 century consisted of canons.'" The institution of regular canons marked an 

 attempt to bridge the gulf between the older monks and the secular clergy. They 



'" Wilkins, Concilia, i, 168 ; Cockenand Chart. (Chet. Soc. 1). 



"'Conishead, Cockemnd, Cartmel, Hornby, Lytham, Burscough, (the short lived) Wyresdalc probablv 

 the httle hospital of St. Saviour at Stidd under Longridge (which was afterwards given to the Hosn^J^lVr.f 

 and the leper hospital of St. Leonard, Lancaster. The last was the second of Its kLd in tt^^' 

 That of St. Mary Magdalen, Preston, possibly dated from the reign of Henry I ^°"°'^- 



"• Lanes. Pipe R. 330. "« Ibid. 331. 



'" Cockersand Chart. 376-8. i« Ibid. 4. us jbij .0 



'" Coniihead, Cartmel, Cockersand, Burscough, Hornby, and Cockerham. ' 



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