The river Dee washed the walls of the Water Tower, and great iron rings, to which the barges were moored, were fixed in the Tower walls. The ships brought wines from Gascony and cloth from Flanders, whither the monks of Vale Royal and Combermere sent the wool of the flocks that pastured on their meadows. Some of the Flemish weavers left their own country and settled on the shores of the Mersey near Birkenhead.
In nearly every field in the pastoral parts of Cheshire are to be found one or more small round pools, often fringed with willows and reeds. You know them well, for you have been to them often to watch the tadpoles and the minnows. But you have not wondered why they are there, and why there are so many of them. Yet they have something to tell of the wool-raising in the days of the three Edwards. For they are marl-pits, and many of them were dug first when the first Edward was king; the marl, which is a great fertilizer, being taken out of the earth and spread over the grass-lands on which the flocks were pastured. The farmers do not use it now, for new and easier ways of enriching the soil have been found.
The marl-diggers, or 'marlers' as they were called, had their own particular feast-day once a year, when they claimed toll of every passer-by, and in the evening sang their marling songs in the village ale-house.
When shut the pit, the labour o'er,
He whom we work for opes his door
And gies to us of drink galore,
For this was always Marler's law.
Who-whoop who-whoop wo-o-o-o-o.