[3] A singular tradition, alluded to by Camden, has long prevailed, that previously to the death of a heir of the house of Brereton, trunks of trees were observed to rise from the bottom of the lake of the neighbouring Bog Mere, and to float for several days. One historian of Cheshire, sensible of the credulity of the great antiquary, would resolve the pleasant dream of olden fancy by the laws of modern statics.
[4] Brereton is the “Bracebridge Hall” of Washington Irving.
[5] The Cheshire carpenters of old seem to have been not sparingly endowed with the “noble” aspiration. In an inscription on the fine carved oak ceiling of the neighbouring Church of Astbury, bearing date 1616 and 1617, in which occurs the name of a William Moreton, we have that also of Richard Lowndes, Carpenter;—his work, however, is of no mean desert.
[6] Hales and Tonkin state, that “about the middle of the fourteenth century the Treffry family largely contributed towards the building of the church, and erected, adjoining to it, a magnificent castellated mansion for their own residence.” We imagine there is an error in the date of this, and should rather refer it to the middle of the fifteenth century, after the French had destroyed the town; which they did about the year 1453.
[7] The following inscription upon the tomb of one of them was “formerly in the Church:”—
“Sir Rowland Vaux that sometime was the Lord of Triermaine,
Is dead, his body clad in lead, and ligs law under this stane;
Evin as we, evin so was he, on earth a levan man;
Evin as he, evin so maun we, for all the craft we can.”
“According to the tablet in the church (we quote from the ‘Border Antiquities’ of Sir Walter Scott), this was a monastery of St. Augustine, and founded in 1116; but no mention of it in the records occurs earlier than the 16th of Henry II., 1169. Its endowments consisted of all the lands lying between Picts’ Wall and Irthing, and also between Burgh and Poltross, and several other valuable possessions. Bernard, Bishop of Carlisle, dedicated the Church to Mary Magdalen. * * * * Edward I. granted to the Prior and Convent the advowson of two churches in his patronage, because the Priory had been burnt and the lands ravaged by an incursion of the Scots. He wrote an epistle to the Pope, expressly to obtain his sanction to this grant, which was not withheld. Many other liberal donations were made to this monastery, and some of them exhibited the peculiar character of the times—such as the tithes of venison, and the skins of deer and foxes; tithe of the mulcture of a mill, pasture for milking and sheep, the bark of trees, a well or spring, and sundry villeins their issue and goods.”
[8] The sad death of this “last Lord Dacre” is thus recorded by Stow. The event occurred on the 17th of May, 1559.
“He was by a great mischaunce slayne at Thetford, in the house of Sir Richard Falmenstone, Knight, by meane of a vaunting horse of woode, standing within the same house; upon which horse, as he meant to have vaunted, and the pins of the feet being not made sure, the horse fell upon him and bruised the brains out of his head.” In the January following, Leonard Dacre, Esq., of Horsley, in the county of York, second son of Lord William Dacre, of Gilsland, “choosing,” according to Camden, “rather to try for the estate with his prince in war, than with his nieces at law,” entered into rebellion, with a design to carry off the Queen of Scots. This object was frustrated by Mary’s removal to Coventry; subsequently he seized upon Naworth and other Castles, but having been attacked and defeated by Lord Hunsdon, he fled into Flanders, where he died.
[9] To understand the full importance of this appointment it is necessary to offer some explanations of the state of the Border at that period. The accession of James VI. to the English crown, although it produced the effect of converting the two extremities into the middle of the kingdom, contributed but little to arrest the system of plunder and depredation which had existed there for centuries. The inhabitants generally, on the Scottish side, were unrestrained moss-troopers (so called from the sloughs and bogs to which they resorted), “Knowing no measure of law,” says Camden, “but the length of their swords,”—men of whom Fuller quaintly writes, “they come to church as seldom as the 29th of February comes into the kalendar.” According to Sir Walter Scott, “the hands of rapine were never there folded in inactivity, nor the sword of violence returned to the scabbard.” The habits of these marauders, and the “interesting nature of their exploits,” are pictured in a strong light by the historian Camden. “They sally out of their own Borders in the night in troops, through unfrequented by-ways, and many intricate windings. All the daytime they refresh themselves and their horses in lurking holes they had pitched upon before, till they arrive in the dark at those places they have a design upon. As soon as they have seized upon the booty, they, in like manner, return home in the night, through blind ways, and fetching many a compass. The more skilful any captain is to pass through those wild deserts, crooked turnings, and deep precipices, in the thickest mists and darkness, his reputation is the greater, and he is looked upon as a man of an excellent head. And they are so very cunning, that they seldom have their booty taken from them, unless sometimes, when, by the help of blood-hounds following them exactly upon the track, they may chance to fall into the hands of their adversaries.”