Cheshire - Its Traditions and History - Including a Record of the Rise and Progress of Freemasonry in this Ancient Province

Alfred Ingham

• Publisher: White Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781528769068
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'architecture

"Cheshire - Its Traditions and History" is a fascinating account of the history of Cheshire, a county in North West England. This concise history of the English county spans the earliest records to modern times, exploring the introduction of Christianity, its history of conformity, government, traditions, folklore, and much more. This volume will appeal to those with an interest in Cheshire's interesting history, as well as the history of England itself. Contents include: "Prehistoric Salt Mines—Poets and Geological Science", "The Genesis of Cheshire History—Sir Peter Leycester's Illustrious Work", "Feudalism and the Divine Right of Kings", "Whence Came Christianity to Cheshire—Cheshire Saints", "Foundation of Nonconformity to Cheshire?--Cheshire Saints", "Foundation of Nonconformity in England", etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork.

Cheshire: Its Traditions and History

CHAPTER I.

Origin of the Earth, the Nebular Theory—Early geological history—The periods of rock formation—An imaginary voyage over an early developed surface—Prehistoric Cheshire; its characteristics, rock formation, salt mines—The fate of Northwich prophesied—Typical subsidences—The legend of Rostherne Mere—Poets and geological science—Conclusion.

ASTRONOMY and Geology twin sisters of Science, have made us acquainted with the story of the origin and formation of the globe, which was once enwrapped in the mysterious regions of superstitious speculation. Whether it had a nebular origin, or that our earth was once a mass of fiery substance, from which was detached a huge mass known to us as the moon, cannot be determined.

In the earth’s crust various processes have modified the primeval rocks, which were first solidified from its original molten condition and composed entirely of igneous rocks, formed by the action of heat, and from aerial deposits produced by the action of atmospheric agencies. Early geologists thought this beneficent change from volcanic rocks and the fire-smitten deserts of the early world to the fertile fields which now grow ripe to harvest and the kindly soil on which man lives, must have been due to some correspondingly extraordinary change in the order of Nature. They were always ready to invoke the aid of some gigantic cataclysm to explain its geological history.

Hence we are driven to further exploration in the solar system and to seek for an explanation of these terrestrial changes to “the glorious firmament on high,” for the proclamation of their great Original and Architect. Sea and land have changed places again and again in the history of the earth. The sea has not changed so much as the land, but we do not measure these changes geologically by thousands of years but by eternities. In the earth’s existence we find processes which modified the primeval rocks, which were first solidified from its original molten condition and entirely composed of crystalline rocks.

In beautiful language Tennyson has expressed a far-reaching geological fact when he says—

There rolls the deep where stood the tree;

O Earth, what changes hast thou seen;

There where the long street roars hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mists, the solid lands;

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

Hugh Miller says:—“There are no sermons that seem stronger or more impressive to one who has acquired just a little of the language in which they are preached, than those which, according to the poet, are to be found in stones. . . . The eternity that hath passed is an ocean without a further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span it over. . . . We see on towards the cloudy horizon many a dim islet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchre of successive eras—the monuments of consecutive creations; the entire prospect is studded over with these landmarks of a hoar antiquity, which, measuring out space from space, constitute the vast whole a province of time; nor can the eye reach to the open shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only God existed,” and “we borrow a larger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from the vastness of the measured periods that occur between.”

He adds a charming picture of the earth’s appearance in its early stages of development. He points out that there existed dry land in the coniferous lignite of the lower (middle) Old Red Sandstone, and that land wore, as at after periods, its soft mantle of green, and he takes us for an imaginary voyage on some prehistoric ship.

We proceed, he writes, upwards into the high geological zones, passing from ancient and still more ancient scenes of being, and, as we voyage along, find ever in the surrounding prospect a graceful intermixture of land and water, continent, river and sea.

We first coast along the land of the Tertiary, inhabited by the strange quadrupeds of Cuvier, and waving with the reeds and palms of the Paris Basin; the land of the Wealdon with its gigantic iguanodon rustling amid its tree ferns and its cycadaec comes next; then comes the green band of the oolite, with its little pouched insectiverous quadrupeds, its flying reptiles, its vast jungles of the brora equisetum, and its forests of the Helmsdale pine; and then dimly, as through a haze, we mark, as we speed on the thinly scattered islands of the Red Sandstone, and pick up in our course a large floating leaf veined like that of a cabbage, with not a little that puzzles the botanists of the expedition.

And now we near the vast Carboniferous continent, and see along undulating outlines, between us and the sky, the strange forms of vegetation, compared with which that of every previously seen land seems stunted and poor. We speed along endless forests, in which gigantic club mosses wave in the air a hundred feet overhead, and skirt interminable marshes, in which thickets of leaves overtop a masthead.

And where mighty rivers come rolling to the sea, we mark, through long, retiring vistas which open into the interior, the higher grounds of the country covered with coniferous trees, and see doddered trunks of vast size reclining under the banks in deep muddy reaches, with their decaying tops turned adown the current.

At length the furthermost promontory of this long range of coast comes into full view. We come abreast of it and see the shells of the mountain limestone glittering white along the further shore and the green depths under our keel lightened by the flush of innumerable corals; and then, bidding farewell to the land for ever, we launch into the unmeasured ocean of the Old Red, with its three consecutive zones of animal life. Not a single patch of land more do those early geologic charts exhibit.

The zones of the Silurian and Cambrian succeed the zones of the Old Red darkly fringed by an obscure bank of cloud ranged along the last zone in the series: a night that never dissipates settles down upon the deep. And it is in the middle of this vast ocean, just where the last zone of the Old Red leans against the first zone of the Silurian, that we have succeeded in discovering a solitary island, unseen before, a shrub-bearing land, much enveloped in fog, but with the hills that, at least, look green in the distance. There are patches of floating seaweed much comminuted by the surf all around it, and on one projecting headland we see a cone-bearing tree.

These coniferous trees are held to have preceded our true forest trees, such as the oak and elm, that in like manner the fish preceded the reptiles, that the reptile preceded the bird, that the bird preceded the mammiferous quadruped and the quadrumans, and that these preceded Man.

It is to the post glacial period that the appearance of man on the earth is assigned. This period is supposed to have originated in the Arctic regions and to have covered an incredible space, literally denuding vast areas, and leaving behind marks of its gigantic power in the shape of huge boulders, many of them hundreds of tons in weight, brought, it is estimated, far beyond what are now the Highlands of Scotland, and depositing them in various parts farther south. One of these boulders is in the Manchester Museum, and the student could not do better than pay a visit to that institution if only to view the remains of prehistoric gigantic lizards or crocodiles found in the Midland counties and other places.

As to the exact time of Man’s appearance on the earth all authorities on geological research are silent. The gap is too wide to be bridged, notwithstanding many discoveries of remains which point to a common ancestry. Darwin, who wrote several treatises bearing on the subject, in his latest volume, “The Descent of Man,” comes to the main conclusion which is now held, he says, by many naturalists who are competent to form a sound judgment, that man is descended from some less highly organised form. “The great principle of Evolution,” he says, “stands up clear and firm. It is incredible that all these facts (including geological distribution) in past and present times, and their geological succession should speak falsely. All point in the plainest manner that man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor. Nevertheless, all the races appear in so many unimportant details of structure and in so many mental peculiarities, that these can be accounted for only by inheritance from a common progenitor; and a progenitor thus characterised would probably deserve to rank as a man. . . . By considering the embryological structure of man—the homologies which he presented with the lower animals—the induments which he retains and the reversions to which he is liable, we can partly recall in imagination the former conditions of our early progenitors, and can approximately place them in their proper place in the zoological series. We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant.” There you get some idea of the Darwinian doctrine, pure and unadulterated. The reader who wishes to pursue this interesting, but argumentative, subject further, can have his views widened quickly and economically by applying for the various works now happily obtainable at any Public Reference Library.

It is now universally admitted that the East was the cradle of the human race. It is thence we get the first glimpses of a religion founded on the worship of God’s power exhibited in the forces of Nature. Lands, houses, flocks, herds, men, and animals were more frequently at the mercy of the wind, fire, and water than in Western climates, and the sun’s rays appear to be gifted with a potency quite beyond the experience of any European country. Honour and worship were accorded to the air, the rain, the storm, the sun, and to fire. For twelve or thirteen centuries before Christ the sky and air were deified by the Indo-Aryans, and there was evolved a belief in a divine power or powers regulating the universe. The belief in a personal God became the Pantheistic creed of India, and the ancient Vedic hymns deify the sky as Heavenly Father (the Zeus or Jupiter of the Greeks and Romans), until a more spiritual conception resulted which led to a worship which rose to the nature of a belief in the Great-Our-Father-which-art-in-heaven. A perusal of some of the Vedic hymns addressed to deified forces is most interesting. We have there pictured the various deities regarded as the union of the progeny of earth with heaven, and it is thought that these deified forces were not represented by idols in the Vedic period, though doubtless the early worshippers clothed their gods with human form in their own imaginations. Thus we have hymns in praise of Varuna, the investing sky, the sun, the dawn, the one God, death, etc. One of them conveys a remarkable setting forth of the mystery of creation, such as is found in the Bible when we are told that “In the beginning, there was neither naught nor ought, neither day or light, nor darkness. Only the Existent One breathed calmly, self-contained. . . . Who knows, who can declare how and from what has sprung this universe; the gods themselves are subsequent to its development. Who can penetrate the secret of its rise? whether ’twas framed or not, made. He only, who in the highest sits, the omniscient Lord assuredly knows all, or haply knows he not.”

Having suggested this train of thought without desire to introduce anything controversial or theological, we now proceed to deal with the subject from a local standpoint.

Cheshire does not seem to have presented “a happy hunting ground” for geologists, such as is to be found in other parts of the kingdom, especially the extreme north and south. The geological survey of the United Kingdom, with its maps, sections, and memoirs, together with the information to be found in the proceedings of the various Geological Societies of the country, is characterised by simplicity and uniformity. Nine-tenths of the area of Cheshire is composed of rocks belonging to one geological formation only—the Trias or New Red Sandstone. The remainder is composed of the Carboniferous Age, which forms the hilly region of the east and north-east.

Cheshire has been humorously described as roughly resembling a bird’s wing in shape, an axe head, and a shoulder of mutton: again, as a chicken with its head in featherbed moss; Macclesfield in its crop; and the tail formed by the Wirral Peninsula. It has also been likened to a broad, earth-tipped shield, of the College of Arms type, divided palewise by a central line of hills, of which the isolated rocks of Halton and Beeston occupy the chief point and the fesse point of the shield respectively. Geologically, the county really forms an exception to the fact that in England the oldest rocks occur, as a rule, in the north-west part of any district. In Cheshire the first formed and oldest rocks occur in the east and north-east, where the boundary line extends up to the Yorkshire moors. The cause of this is to be found in the upheaval of the Pennine Chain, so that the rocks of the lower Carboniferous Age have been brought to the surface and exposed by subsequent denudation. These lower carboniferous beds we find in their correct place on the west side of the River Dee, where a fine ridge of rocks of the age of the carboniferous limestone and millstone grit runs north and south for a distance of twenty-one miles, the town of Mold being the central point. Looking from these hills eastward we have before us an extensive plain of red rock of Triassic Age, thickly overlaid with boulder clay, and composing, as before noted, nine-tenths of the county. The plain is over forty miles in width, and its eastern boundary is formed by a repetition of the identical strata—the carboniferous limestone, millstone grit, and lower coal measures, upon which we have taken an imaginary stand in Flintshire. In the mountainous country to the eastward, with its fine and varied scenery, pastoral in parts and dotted at wide intervals usually, except occasionally, a little village nestles away on its sometimes sunlit slopes, we come across the mountain limestone, which is so prominent and profitable a feature in Derbyshire, and especially round Buxton, with its peculiar and rather weird “shivering mountain” in the distance. It peeps up in Cheshire only at one point, Astbury, near Congleton. This was said to have been the discovery of a Derbyshire servant girl a couple of hundred years or so ago. She noticed that the rock in the brook was the same she had seen burnt in her county. The Astbury lime works have been carried on for a long period, and not only is the lime produced used for agricultural purposes, but it is a splendid hydraulic lime which is used for foundations of bridges, and building purposes of a like character.

The majestic chain of hills in the Macclesfield district are around 4000 feet thick, consisting in the lower part of black shales, alternating with thick, black, earthy limestone, superimposed with hard, fine grained sandstone, surmounted in turn by alternations of dark shales and sandstone. Fossils are rare, but specimens have been found in the neighbourhood of Congleton.

The Cheshire coalfield is a prolongation of the coalfield of South Lancashire, and the middle coal measures contain the principal workable seams at Poynton, some coal being of excellent quality; but coal has been mined at Neston, on the other side of the county, and vast beds are supposed to exist under the Wirral Peninsula, but at a considerable and not yet tested depth. Passing over the rocks of the Permian formation, which is to be seen in the Stockport district, we pass to the Triassic formation, which here attains its chief British development, and is about 3000 feet in thickness and includes the keuper and bunter beds. It is at Alderley Edge, where in early days copper ore was worked, but for various reasons, chiefly commercial, it has practically ceased. The lower keuper sandstones are quarried in various parts of the county, and the beds are often traversed by sun cracks and footprints of what is said to be a remarkable reptile, the Labyrinthodon, a trace of which was to be seen in Bowdon forty or fifty years ago, and had been originally found in the neighbourhood of Lymm, probably Millington.

The salt beds of Cheshire demand more than a passing notice, for it is on the production of this valuable commodity that the commercial prosperity of Northwich and district for many miles round depends. There, salt beds are found as far south as Nantwich, and westwards at Lymm, the latter part being of quite recent discovery and working. Farther north, at Dunham Massey, there is what may be termed a portion of the same bed, and attempts to create another Northwich in that district proved futile. To trace the original formation of these beds we are led to believe that the Triassic rocks were de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Introductory Chapter
• Preface
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Chapter I. Prehistoric Salt Mines—Poets and Geological Science
• Chapter II. The Genesis of Cheshire History—Sir Peter Leycester’s Illustrious Work
• Chapter III. Feudalism and the Divine Right of Kings
• Chapter IV. Whence came Christianity to Cheshire?—Cheshire Saints
• Chapter V. Foundation of Nonconformity in England
• Chapter VI. Martial Cheshire—The Crusaders—Civil Wars
• Chapter VII. The splendid Traditions and Services of the Militia
• Chapter VIII. The Cheshire Regiment—Its Work on “India’s Coral Strand”
• Chapter IX. Cheshire Minstrels—Whitsun Plays and their Players
• Chapter X. Cheshire Sports and Pastimes—Wakes Revelry and May Day Festivals
• Chapter XI. Cheshire in the Days of Bluff King Hal—Murders, Abductions, and Affrays
• Chapter XII. Cheshire and Parliamentary Representation at Westminster
• Chapter XIII. Parliamentary Cheshire (continued)
• Chapter XIV. Local Government—Court Leets—Cheshire County Council
• Chapter XV. The House of Dunham—The Foundation of the Family
• Chapter XVI. Lord Delamere’s Eventful Life — The Stewart Period Reviewed
• Chapter XVII. Lord Delamere’s Efforts in the Revolution
• Chapter XVIII. Plague, Pestilence, and Famine—Sandbach Crosses
• Chapter XIX. Lord Chancellor Egerton and other Notable Cheshire Men
• Chapter XX. Cheshire Characteristics, Proverbs, and Sayings
• Chapter XXI. Ballads, Traditions, and legends of Cheshire
• Chapter XXII. King and Parliament
• Chapter XXIII. Early History of the Provincial Grand Lodge
• Chapter XXIV. Cheshire and the Grand Lodge of England
• Chapter XXV. Provincial Grand Lodge History (continued)
• Chapter XXVI. Installation of Hon. Alan de Tatton Egerton, M.P.
• Appendix Cheshire Magistrates—Cheshire County Council—Population of the County
• Index