Squirrels in search of food
Might jump straight from tree to tree,
So thick the forest stood.
Sir Philip was being entertained by John Stanley. In the evening, when the festivities were at their height, young William Stanley ran away with Joan de Bamville, Sir Philip's only child. Through forest and over moorland they spurred their horses, and stayed not till the wide Cheshire plain lay between them and their homes. At Astbury Church they were wedded, and after the old knight's death, the Stanleys succeeded to the forestership and the estates that went with it.
Scarcely any churches were built in Cheshire in the latter part of the fourteenth century, though the chancel of West Kirby was put up in the reign of Richard the Second. The carved heads on one of the window-hoods are those of Richard and his queen. Labourers were very scarce, owing to the ravages of the terrible calamity known as the Black Death, and the men who returned from the wars had no fancy for doing the work of the mason and the builder. Men refused to work; wages and the price of bread rose so high that a limit had to be set to them by law. Even so great a person as the Abbot of S. Werburgh was fined because his steward charged too big a price for the abbey corn.
When the next century dawned and the land had rest for a while under the Lancastrian king, churches were no longer built in the Decorated style of the fourteenth century. Another style of church-building prevailed.
The curious Chester 'Rows' were originally built during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though they have been altered and rebuilt many times since then. There is nothing quite like them in any other English city. The 'Rows', or galleries, run continuously for most of the length of the four principal streets over the shops on the street level, as if the front rooms on the first floor of all the houses had been taken out and a thoroughfare made through them. At the ends of the Rows, and at street corners, you may descend by a staircase to the pavement below.
Chester Rows, Watergate Street