"living far from Godly fear
They sold the Church Bible to buy a bear."
The old Cheshire, everywhere in evidence with its timber-and-plaster houses, distracts the mind from this new industrial Cheshire. We visited Macclesfield, but I forgot its factories, its ribbons and sarcenets, silks and satins and velvets, because of the valiant Leghs. Two of them sleep in the old Church of St. Michael, under a brass that states in a stanza ending as abruptly as human life itself:
"Here lyeth the body of Perkin a Legh
That for King Richard the death did die,
Betray'd for righteousness;
And the bones of Sir Peers his sone,
That with King Henrie the fift did wonne
In Paris."
I have read that Sir Perkin was knighted at Crecy and Sir Peers at Agincourt, and that they were kinsmen of Sir Uryan Legh of Adlington, the Spanish Lady's Love.
"Will ye hear a Spanish Lady,
How she wooed an Englishman?
Garments gay and rich as may be,
Decked with jewels, she had on."
This Sir Uryan was knighted by Essex at the siege of Calais, and it was then, apparently, that the poor Spanish lady, beautiful and of high degree, lost her heart. The Elizabethan ballad, whose wood-cut shows a voluminously skirted dame entreating an offish personage in a severely starched ruff, tells us that she had fallen, by some chance of war, into his custody.
"As his prisoner there he kept her;
In his hands her life did lie;
Cupid's bands did tie them faster
By the liking of an eye.
"But at last there came commandment
For to set all ladies free,
With their jewels still adorned,
None to do them injury."
But freedom was no boon to her.