ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



had decreased in this age. In this period, too, the leper hospitals at Preston 

 and Lancaster were allowed to fall into decay and disuse. What has been 

 said of the ecclesiastical state of the county in the fifteenth century is generally 

 true also of the early years of the sixteenth down to the abrupt changes of 

 Henry VIII. The tendencies already noted became perhaps a little more 

 marked, but that was all. 



Of the three chapels (all in Whalley parish) which are expressly 

 recorded to have been erected during the first half of the sixteenth century . 

 one only, Newchurch in Rossendale, preceded the breach with Rome.''^'' It 

 was built by the inhabitants in 1 5 1 1 as a chapel of easement, the way to 

 their parish chapel at CHtheroe from the forest being ' penefuU and perilous.' 

 Some, however, of the many chapels of which the first mention occurs in 

 documents of the time of Edward VI may have been built under Henry VII 

 and Henry VIII, while others no doubt were older.^" Not all were parochial, 

 but certain chantry chapels served as chapels of ease where the parish church 

 was remote or difficult of access."*^ Until the very eve of the Reformation the 

 foundation of chantries went on even more rapidly than before. In the course 

 of a generation almost as many came into existence as in the whole of the 

 previous century. Most of the founders were still drawn from the landed 

 gentry and the clergy, but the Manchester chantries reveal the rise in that 

 town of a class of merchants enriched by its nascent manufactures. Pre- 

 eminent among them for his munificence was Richard Beswick the younger, 

 who, besides founding a chantry for two priests, one of whom was to teach a 

 free school — thus anticipating the larger endowment for education made some 

 years later by his brother-in-law Bishop Oldham — bore part of the cost of the 

 Jesus Chapel in which his chantry was installed, and restored at his own ex- 

 pense the choir and nave of the church.^" He was assisted in the erection of 

 the chapel by the other members of the gild of St. Saviour and of the Name 

 of Jesus ; Richard Tetlow, also a merchant, and others left money for the 

 maintenance of a second gild, that of Our Blessed Lady and of St. George ; ^™ 

 but neither these nor any other Lancashire gild, if such existed, seems to 

 have received a separate and permanent endowment, for no associations of 

 the kind are noticed by the commissioners of 1546 and 1548. A sign of the 

 times is the provision made for grammar schools in connexion with chantries 

 at Manchester, Liverpool, Warrington, Blackburn, Leyland, and Rufford. 

 The chantry priest at Blackburn, for instance, was required to be ' sufficiently 

 learned in gramer and plane songe to keep a fre skole.' All seem to have 



'*' The others were Goodshaw (l 540) and New Church in Pendle, built by the inhabitants and consecrated 

 as a parochial chapel in 1 544. 



'" They include : in Bury parish, Edenfield, Heywood, Holcomb ; in Deane parish, Westhoughton ; 

 in Bolton parish, Rivington ; in Croston parish, Becconsall, Tarleton ; in Kirkham parish, Lund ; in Leyland 

 parish, Euxton, Heapey ; in Middleton parish, Ashworth ; in Prestwich parish, Shaw ; in Ribchester parish, 

 Longridge ; in Rochdale parish, Whitworth ; in Sefton parish, Crosby ; in Walton parish, Formby, Kirkby ; 

 in Whalley parish, Accrington ; in Tunstall parish, Leek ; in Cartmel parish, Cartmel Fell, Flookborough. 

 This list is doubtless incomplete. 



'" Becconsall, e.g., being separated from Croston Church by an arm of the sea, was sometimes cut off from 

 it for four days together (Lanes. Chant. 171), during which the chantry priests ministered the sacraments 

 to the inhabitants. Rufford and Tarleton were in the same case. The rector of Ribchester sometimes could 

 not visit Bailey chapel owing to floods in the Hodder (ibid. 212). We may here notice that the chapelry of 

 Deane was now formed into a parish separate from Eccles {Not. Cestr. 37) and that the ancient parochial chapels 

 of Bispham and Goosnargh were now occasionally and loosely called parish churches. {Hist, of Bispham, 26 ; 

 Lanes. Chant. 242). 



'«' Lanes. Chant. 48 sqq. "° Ibid. 41, 44. 



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