Edward Byrom, the eldest son, took up his abode at Kersall, and he had also a house at Hyde’s Cross, which, with Withy Grove—Within Greave, as it was called—was then a pleasant outskirt, and the fashionable quarter of Manchester. In 1680 he married Dorothy, daughter of Captain John Allen, of Redvales, near Bury, and granddaughter of the Rev. Isaac Allen, rector of Prestwich, by whom he had, in addition to seven daughters, two sons, Edward, who, on his death in 1611, succeeded as heir, and John Byrom, the famous poet and stenographer.
The men of seclusion were by no means insensible to the beauties of Nature, but, on the contrary, in the selection of the sites for their religious houses usually displayed considerable judgment—
The cunning rooks,
Pitched, as by instinct, on the fattest fallows—
and Hugo de Buron was no exception, for he must have been imbued with the feeling so characteristic of the monkish fraternity when, in the days of Ranulph Gernons, he withdrew himself from the world and settled as a solitary recluse in the quiet secluded hermitage on the banks of the Irwell, which afterwards became an appendage of the Cluniac monastery of Lenton, in Nottinghamshire, and, in turn, the home of the opulent Manchester merchant, Edward Byrom, and his descendants. Fairer spot than that which Hugh de Buron chose it would be difficult to conceive, or one better suited for a life of monastic seclusion. It was then remote from the haunts of men, the atmosphere was not dimmed by the smoke of innumerable chimneys, nor the broad stream polluted with the abominations of countless manufactories. With its breezy moor and low wooded hills, its ferny hollows and forest avenues, and its wide shimmering river gliding swiftly yet silently along, and heightened in beauty by the noble oaks and stately elms that feathered down almost to the water’s edge, it was just the place where the soul might commune with itself, and feed on thoughts and fancies ever new and ever beautiful. A place where the purest and noblest impulses might be awakened and the mind stirred to many a holy thought and deed—where in leaf and blossom, in wood and water, might be discovered the parallelism between the Great Artificer’s work and His precepts, or, as Charles Kingsley puts it, “The work of God’s hand, the likeness of God’s countenance, the shadow of God’s glory.”
It stood embosomed in a happy valley,
Crowned by high woodlands, where the Druid oak
Stood like Caractacus, in act to rally
His host, with broad arms ’gainst the thunderstroke.
After the Reformation, when this little sanctuary passed into lay hands, a house was built upon the site—a picturesque black and white structure with projecting oriels, quaint mullioned windows, and gabled roofs, and here Edward Byrom took up his abode when he attained to manhood, for he was a youth of but twelve summers when his father died; to this house he took his youthful bride, Dorothy Allen, in 1680, and here many of his children were born. He had another house, as already stated, at Hyde’s Cross, and, besides this, his burgage shop or place of business in the market stead opposite the Cross, to which he afterwards added a stall, as appears by the following entry on the court rolls of the manor of Manchester:—