was the representative of a family who owned lands at Bradley, in Appleton. William D'Anyers, who, in 1291, purchased lands in Daresbury from Henry de Norreys, married Agnes, daughter of Agnes, heir of Richard de Legh, of High Legh, by the first of her three husbands, Richard, younger son of Hugh de Limme, who took the name of Legh after his marriage. By him she had, in addition to a son, William D'Anyers, of Daresbury, Thomas D'Anyers, of Bradley, in Appleton, who, by his first wife, Margaret, daughter of Adam de Tabley, was the father of Sir Thomas D'Anyers, the hero of Crescy, and also of John D'Anyers, of Gropenhall, a soldier who for his services, likewise received a grant from the Crown. Sir Thomas D'Anyers, who must have been early initiated in the exercise of arms, was twice married; by his first wife, Matilda, he had no surviving issue, and at her death he married Isabel, the daughter and heir of Sir William de Baguley and his wife, Clemence, daughter and co-heir of Sir Roger Chedle, alias Sir Roger Dutton, of Chedle in Cheshire, who survived him, and by whom he had an only daughter, Margaret, who became his heir. After the battle of Crescy he appears to have retired to his house at Bradley, but the laurels he had won in his campaigns abroad had helped to shorten his days, and in 1354, while yet comparatively young, he was carried to the grave, having predeceased his father. An inquisition was taken after his death of the lands he held, and the jury found that his daughter, whose name they did not know, was his next heir. His estate, which was never at any time large, had not improved during his absences in the wars, and Margaret D'Anyers, who at the time of his death could only have been very young, succeeded to an inheritance that had become considerably attenuated, for in an extent of the manor the jurors found that "the messuage (Bradley Hall), with its enclosures, which had belonged to Sir Thomas, in Bradley, with the gardens there, was not worth anything; that the dove-house was not worth anything, being destroyed by a weasel; that the fishery in the moat round the house was not worth anything, being destroyed by an otter; but that there were two carucates of land there containing sixty acres, worth sixpence an acre."

Margaret D'Anyers, who was doubly an heiress, having inherited Clifton, Gropenhall, and a moiety of Chedle from her mother, was three times wooed and won. Shortly after her father's death she was taken from her mother by John de Radcliffe, who had obtained a grant of her marriage, and eventually married her himself. There was no issue of the union, and their married life must have been short, for before the month of April, 1382, he had died, and she had again bestowed her hand, her second husband being Sir John Savage, of Clifton. By him she had a son, John Savage, to whom, in 1415, she granted the heraldic coat of D'Anyers, without any difference, together with the white unicorn's head, the crest of her father—a coat he might well be proud of, though it was in reality that which his ancestress, Agnes de Legh, had inherited from her father, Richard de Limme, with the tinctures changed—and this coat continued to be borne by the Savages down to the reign of Elizabeth.[52] Sir John Savage died about the year 1387, and in the following year negotiations were set on foot for a marriage between his widow and Piers, younger son of Robert de Legh, of Adlington, by his second wife, Maud, daughter and heiress of Sir Adam de Norley. As they were within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, Piers de Legh being descended from Agnes de Legh, by her third husband, William Venables, and his intended bride from the same Agnes, by her first husband, Richard de Limme, a dispensation for the marriage was deemed necessary. This instrument, which bears date November 26th, 1388, was "given in the house of the Carmelite brethren at London," and within a few days of its being granted Margaret D'Anyers, successively the widow of Sir John Radcliffe and Sir John Savage, had become the wife of her kinsman, Piers Legh. Piers Legh was then twenty-seven years of age, and his wife, if not fat, fair, and forty, had at all events reached her thirty-ninth year. They became—he on the paternal, she on the maternal side—the founders of the house of Legh, of Lyme. Piers Legh's mother, as already stated, was the heiress of Sir Adam de Norley, the owner of the manor of that name in Lancashire, and she in her husband's lifetime had executed a deed conveying all her estates in trust for the benefit of her son upon his coming of age, and, in accordance with the custom of the time, Piers Legh on succeeding to his mother's inheritance relinquished his paternal coat and assumed that of Norley—gules, a cross engrailed argent, which has ever since been borne by the Leghs of Lyme, with the addition since Elizabeth's reign of the escutcheon of pretence, which old Flower, the herald, gave them.

Cheshire, which plumes itself on being "the seedplot of nobility," and of possessing a greater number of old county families than any other English shire, boasts no worthier or more ancient stock than the Leghs; their history is closely interwoven with the history of the palatinate, and they claim a high antiquity, tracing their descent in this country back to the time of the Conquest, when an ancestor came over in the retinue of Duke William, the Norman invader. The Leghs of Adlington, of which house was Piers Legh, the founder of the house of Lyme, were descended from Gilbert or le Galliard, the younger son of Eudo or Eules, the second of that name, Earl of Blois, Byre, and Chartres, and the ancestor of Stephen, Earl of Blois, who, on the death of Henry I., usurped the English crown. This Gilbert, who from the patronymic he adopted, Venables (_venator abilis_), we may assume to have been a mighty hunter, was in the retinue of William of Normandy, and for his bravery at Hastings was knighted by the Conqueror upon the battle-field. Afterwards, he had considerable estates bestowed upon him out of the newly-conquered country in requital of his services against Edgar Atheling and the Welsh, and when that singular compound of sensuality and ferocity, Hugh D'Avranches, more generally known as Hugh Lupus, the Conqueror's nephew, was made Earl Palatine of Chester, he conferred upon Gilbert Venables the barony of Kinderton. Sir William Venables, the sixth in descent from this Gilbert, had a younger son, also named William, to whom he gave the manor of Bradwell, near Sandbach. William Venables, the younger, was twice married, his second wife being Agnes, the daughter and heir of Richard de Legh, of the West Hall, in High Legh, and the widow of Richard de Limme or Lymm, the common ancestress of the Leghs of Adlington and the D'Anyers of Bradley. Their son, John de Venables, adopted the name of Legh, the maiden name of his mother, as well as of the place where he was born. He married Ellen de Corona, the great-aunt of Thomas de Corona, the last of the family of that name, who owned the extensive manor of Adlington, and about the year 1299 he purchased the estate of Norbury Booths, near Knutsford, where he fixed his residence. Thomas de Corona does not appear ever to have married; certainly he had no issue, and before his death he settled his estates, when, by an agreement made at Chester, October 7th, 1315, and another dated at "le Bouthes" in the following year, he granted all his lands at Adlington, after his death, to his grand-niece Ellen and her husband, John Legh, for their lives, with remainder to their son, Robert de Legh. Thomas de Corona died about the year 1323, and John Legh must have pre-deceased him, for at the time Ellen de Corona was a widow, and obtained the grant of a pardon from Isabella, queen of Edward II., who styled herself "Lady of Macclesfield," and who had claimed Adlington that it was held of her as of her manor of Macclesfield, and had been alienated without licence.

Ellen Legh survived her husband for the long period of twenty-seven years, and continued in the enjoyment of the manor of Adlington, which had been re-granted to her on the purchase of the pardon before referred to, until her death in 1350, when her son, Robert de Legh, succeeded, in accordance with Thomas de Corona's settlement, and became the ancestor of a family whose direct male heirs held the manor of Adlington for the long period of four hundred years. Robert de Legh was twice married, his first wife being Sybil, daughter of Henry de Honford, of Handforth, and after her death he espoused Matilda, the daughter and heiress of Sir Adam de Norley, of Norley or Northleigh, in Lancashire, who, according to an old MS. pedigree, was his second cousin and very much his junior. The eldest of the two sons of this second marriage was Piers Legh, who, as previously stated, in 1388 became the third husband of his kinswoman, Margaret, daughter and heir of Sir Thomas D'Anyers, the hero of Crescy, and the widow successively of Sir John Radcliffe and Sir John Savage, and from them descended the Leghs of Lyme and the Leghs of Ridge, near Macclesfield.

Concerning the mother of Piers Leigh, an incident is recorded which puts her character in an unfavourable light. Robert de Leigh, her husband, before his death settled certain of his lands in Broome, near Lymm (not Lyme, as is sometimes supposed,), upon two of his sons by his first marriage. He died about the year 1370, and five years afterwards his widow was indicted for having, in conjunction with one Thomas Le Par, forged a settlement in the name of Adam de Kingsley, the trustee, in fraud of her two stepsons and in favour of her own son, Piers Leigh, and his two younger brothers.

Piers Leigh was a person of considerable importance, and held many offices of trust and responsibility. Shortly after his coming of age, in 1382, he was, with his brother John, appointed by Joan, Princess of Wales, once the "Fair Maid of Kent," and the widow of Edward the Black Prince, bailiff of her Manor of Macclesfield, and steward of all her courts within the hundred and forest, an office his father held previously. In the following year he obtained a lease of the herbage of Hanley within the forest, and was entrusted by the Princess with the conduct of her affairs with other of her tenants within the manor and forest. In the following year he had a lease of the herbage of the forest of Macclesfield, and about the same time, the Princess Joan being then dead, he and his brother John were appointed attorneys to serve for the surveyor of the forest of Macclesfield.

In 1387, Richard II., who had then been ten years upon the throne, attained his majority. A self-willed youth, impatient of the restraint which had been imposed upon him while under the guardianship of his three uncles, the Dukes of Lancaster (John o' Gaunt), York, and Gloucester, he determined to free himself from their control. With a view of ingratiating himself with his Cheshire subjects, between whom and the sovereign, from the time when a king's son was first created palatine earl, there had been a close relationship, he made a progress into the county and remained some time at Chester, where he received many marks of popular favour. He confirmed many of the Cheshire men in the offices and emoluments previously conferred upon them by his uncle, John o' Gaunt, who was Constable of Chester and Lord of Halton, and amongst other things confirmed to Piers Leigh the annuity of Cs, which had been made to him by John o' Gaunt's son-in-law, John de Holland. In the following year, however, Piers Legh had the misfortune to fall under the King's displeasure. In that year the real struggle between Richard and his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, began. Under the pretence of removing the King's favourites, and especially Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, whom he had created Duke of Ireland—one of the five obnoxious members who had met at Nottingham, and all of whom had been accused of treason before the King at Westminster—he assembled an army at Highgate, whereupon De Vere fled into the north, and on the authority of the Royal letters summoned the Cheshire forces, and with them, and some auxiliaries from Lancashire, numbering in all about 5,000 men, set out to meet him. The two armies encountered each other at Radcot Bridge, in Oxfordshire, on the 20th of December, and a battle was fought in which the soldiers of the Duke of Ireland were completely routed. The Duke himself only escaped by swimming the Isis, and fled to the north, whence he sought refuge in the Low Countries. Piers Legh would seem either to have shared in the general indignation against De Vere, or to have been brought under the influence of the Duke of Gloucester, for he immediately seized the whole of the Duke of Ireland's movables in Cheshire and lodged them in Chester Castle. Angered at this treatment of his fallen favourite, the humiliated King issued his warrant, dated January 21st, 1388, commanding Piers Legh, under a penalty of £1,000, to surrender and restore the goods he had taken. Whether the mandate was obeyed and the goods and chattels restored is not stated, but probably the difficulty was removed by the death of De Vere, which occurred shortly afterwards.

While these events were transpiring negotiations were set on foot for a marriage, for which a dispensation was obtained, the contracting parties being, as stated, related in the fourth as well as the third degree of consanguinity, and before the year had closed Piers Legh had taken to himself a wife in the person of his kinswoman, Margaret D'Anyers, the widow of Sir John Savage.

By this time, or shortly after, he must have regained the King's favour, for in August, 1390, a commission was issued directing him and others therein named to hear and determine all felonies committed within the borough of Macclesfield, and a second commission empowered him to determine in like manner all felonies, misdemeanours, and breaches of the peace committed within the forest and hundred of Macclesfield. At that time the forest comprised about one-third of the entire hundred, and included within its limits the larger portion of the great parish of Prestbury. It had belonged to the Earls of Chester until the extinction of the local earldom in 1237, when it passed to the Crown, and was thereafter reserved for the Royal hunting and made subject to the forest laws, which were very severe against any who should presume to make free with the King's venison—the killing of a deer being accounted an offence as serious as the killing of a man, and punishable with equal severity.

A further evidence of the renewed confidence of the King is found in the fact that on the 6th April, 1391, Piers Legh was appointed by the Queen Consort—"the good Queen Anne," as she was called by the people—steward of her lands in the Macclesfield Hundred. In the month of August following, he was commanded to arrest all malefactors and disturbers of the peace within the hundred, and made one of the King's justices for the same, with directions to hold three courts itinerant or in eyre, the proceedings at which were of the nature of those at a court of assize, the penalty for non-attendance when summoned thereto being outlawry, with forfeiture of goods. In January, 1395, he was named equitator or rider of the forest, his special duties being to attend the King in person whenever he should hunt in the forest; and this office he had subsequently conferred upon him for life, and also, in conjunction with his brother, that of keeper of the park of Macclesfield.

The struggle for supremacy between Richard and his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, was now approaching a crisis, and, by a proceeding which resembled very much what is known in modern times as a coup d'état, he resolved to break the power of the turbulent Gloucester and his cabal of nobles. The Duke was surprised in his castle at Plashy, in Essex, hurried on board ship, and conveyed to Calais; at the same time the Earl of Warwick, while enjoying the royal hospitality, was seized and sent to Tintagel Castle, in Cornwall, and, simultaneously, and with equal duplicity, the Earl of Arundel was summoned to a conference, and, while there, arrested and lodged in Carisbrook Castle. A Parliament was immediately summoned to meet at Westminster, at which the fate of the three captive nobles—one a prince of the blood—was to be determined. Great were the preparations made, and a wooden building of large extent was erected near Westminster Hall for the reception of the numerous assembly. On the 17th September, 1397, the Parliament met; the assembly was surrounded by the King's troops, and the Sovereign himself had a body guard, consisting mainly of his Cheshire archers, all of whom wore his cognizance of the White Hart lodged—the badge of his mother, Joan of Kent, which he had adopted—and there is every reason to believe that Piers Legh held a command among the feudal retainers—the archers of the Crown, as they were called—who rendered personal service on that memorable occasion; memorable as the time when the chief objects of the King's displeasure were condemned for high treason and a despotic power established under the sanction of Parliamentary forms. It is worthy of note that in this short-lived Parliament Cheshire was raised to the dignity of a principality, the King adding to his titles that of Prince of Chester; but the honour was not long enjoyed, the Act under which it was created being repealed in the first year of Henry the Fourth's reign.

In the following year Piers Legh had an annuity of Cs granted him by the King, probably as a reward for his services on the occasion just referred to, and about the same time the annuity of forty marks (£26 13s. 4d.) which had been granted to Sir Thomas D'Anyers was exchanged for the lands in Lyme Hanley—an exchange that may be said to have been the foundation of the fortunes of the House of Lyme.

In the succeeding year Richard had again occasion for the services of his trusty Cheshire Archers. To avenge the death of Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, the presumptive heir to his crown, he determined on bringing the kingdom of Ireland to a more perfect subjection. With this view, and for the purpose of increasing the strength of his Cheshire guard, he had a levy made of the archers within the several hundreds of the palatinate qualified to serve, and with these he set sail from Milford Haven on the 4th June, 1399. While he was leading his forces into the Irish bogs and thickets to chastise the presumption of the native chiefs, Henry Bolingbroke, the son of the old Lancastrian duke, John o' Gaunt, who had been banished the kingdom, landed with a force at Ravenspur, in Yorkshire, and marched southwards; castles and towns surrendered to him, and in an incredibly short space of time he had made himself master of half the kingdom. Rebellion had stalked unchecked through the land for weeks before the absent monarch could receive intelligence of Bolingbroke's designs, and ere he could reach the English coast on his return the revolution was accomplished. On the 9th August, little more than a couple of months from the time of his departure, he landed in Wales; a number of his faithful Cheshire men met him on his arrival, though Piers Legh was not of the number, being at the time in command at Chester, and this may have been the occasion when, as the old chronicler says, the Cheshire men exclaimed—"Dycon, slep secury quile we wake, and drede nought quile we lyve sefton; for giff thou hadst wedded Perkyn, daughter of Lye, thou may well holde alone day with any man in Cheshire schire, i' faith." Piers Legh's daughter Margaret was then only in her infancy, but that must have been a matter of small consequence in the days when children were accounted as of marriageable age. The unhappy monarch, with a few followers, wandered from castle to castle, and at length found a resting-place at Conway. Meanwhile the victorious Henry was advancing by rapid marches through Gloucester and Herefordshire towards Shrewsbury, with the intention of occupying Chester, crying, "Havoc and destruction on Cheshire and the Cheshire men." On the 9th August, the day that Richard landed from Ireland, he entered the city and promised peace to the people, a promise, however, that was to be quickly violated, for on the next day he gave orders for the seizure of the King's loving and loyal subject, Sir Piers Legh, who must have been actively defending the interests of his master. Probably he had the command of the castle, though he is said to have been at the time Chief Justice of Chester.[53] Whatever his office his motto was loyal à la mort, and, like Old Adam in "As You Like It," he might have exclaimed—

To remove an obstacle to the accomplishment of his ambitious designs Bolingbroke hurried him away to execution. His policy, so our greatest dramatist tells us, was to—

And the "absent King" had no greater favourite or more faithful follower than Piers Legh.

The Rev. John Wall, the translator of the French Metrical History of the Deposition of Richard II.[54] in referring to his tragic end, says the King was at the time at Conway; and Daniel, in his "Civil Wars between York and Lancaster," thus alludes to the event:—

By the order of Bolingbroke, the head of Sir Piers was placed on the highest gate of the city, and there it remained for a time, when it was removed by the Carmelite Monks and buried with his body within their own church. Afterwards it was conveyed to Macclesfield, where, on the south side of the Lyme chancel of the old church, the following epitaph, once cut in stone, but now graven in brass, may still be seen:—

To which, as we have previously stated, after old Flower's grant of an heraldic augmentation, Sir Peter Legh in Elizabeth's reign added the apocryphal inscription regarding his doings at Crescy.

For loyally serving his fallen master and King, and while yet a young man, for he was only thirty-eight years of age, thus perished the first of the Lords of Lyme.

The distance between the throne and the grave of a deposed monarch is but short. Bolingbroke, finding himself everywhere enthusiastically received, resolved upon wresting the sceptre from the feeble grasp of his vacillating cousin, and within a few short months of the decapitation of Piers Legh, Richard of Bordeaux had lost both his crown and his life. When the revolution had seated the house of Lancaster upon the throne, Richard, on relinquishing his sovereignty, expressed the hope that his cousin would be "good lord to him," but the hope was delusive. He was deposed in September, and ere the snows of winter had melted his end had been accomplished, either by the pole-axe of the assassin, or the more protracted misery of famine.

Of a verity, those were stirring times, and whatever tenure men might have of their lands they had but little of their heads. Henry gained the throne almost without a struggle, but his daring act of usurpation was but the sowing of the seed which ripened and bore fruit in that "purple testimony of bleeding war," the fierce struggle of the Red and White Roses—a contest which, after having for well nigh half a century filled the country with commotion and drenched it in civil slaughter, left it in a state of exhaustion, with the flower of its nobility destroyed.

Piers Legh had not completed more than ten years of his married life when the unrelenting Bolingbroke caused his head to be placed on the highest pinnacle of the east gate of Chester. His widow, Margaret D'Anyers, survived him nearly thirty years, her death occurring June 24, 1428. The issue of the marriage was, in addition to a daughter, Margaret, who became the wife of Sir John de Ashton, two sons—Peter, who succeeded as heir, and John, who married Alice, daughter and heiress of John Alcock, of Ridge, an estate in the township of Sutton, near Macclesfield, and from them sprang the Leghs of Ridge, Rushall, Stoneleigh, and Stockwell; the last representative of the parent line, Edward Legh, up to the time of his death, which occurred only a few years ago, residing at the Limes, Lewisham, near London.

Peter, the eldest son of Piers Legh, could only have been a youth of some eight summers when his father met his untimely end. If—

it was well for him that he had a prudent counsellor in the person of his widowed mother. In 1403 she gave him her moiety of Gropenhall, which had been acquired by one of the D'Anyers in marriage with the heiress of Boydell, of Gropenhall and had come to her through failure of male issue in her father's family; and he, thereupon, quartered the arms of Boydell with his paternal coat, an augmentation that has ever since been retained. About the same time he added largely to his possessions by his marriage with Joanna, the daughter and heiress of Sir Gilbert de Haydock, of Haydock, near Newton-le-Willows, a wealthy Lancashire Knight; by this alliance he ultimately acquired the extensive estates of the Haydocks, viz.: Haydock, Bradley, Burtonwood, Warrington, Overford, Sonkey, Bold, Newton, Lowton, Golborne, and Walton-le-Dale, an acquisition that explains the close connection of the Leghs of Lyme with Lancashire. His mother was yet in possession of Lyme, and he therefore fixed his abode at Bradley, in Burtonwood, which became the principal residence of the family and so continued until about the year 1569, when the erection of the present mansion of Lyme was begun. Leyland, the antiquary, writing in the time of Henry VIII., says:—"Syr Perse de Lee hath his place at Bradley in a park two miles from Newton." The old house has long since disappeared, but the picturesque ruins of the arched and buttressed gate tower, which formed the principal approach, with a portion of the bastille above for the detention of offenders and doubtful visitors, still remain, a memorial of its ancient stateliness. The manor continued in possession of the family until after the death of Thomas Peter Legh, of Lyme, when it passed by settlement to his son, the Rev. Peter Legh, incumbent of St. Peter's, Newton, who sold it to the late Samuel Brooks, Esq., of Manchester.

Though Peter Legh was old enough to take to himself a wife it was fortunate for him that he was as yet too young to take part in the stirring scenes that marked the opening years of the usurper's reign, when

called for retribution, and the realm was filled with turbulence and disquiet, else he might have shared the fate which befel so many other Cheshire men, who, unable to forget the misfortunes of their former master, met at Sandiway, in Delamere Forest, and joined the valiant Hotspur, renowned in song and story,

and Glendower, the Welsh chieftain, in their insurrection, when at the market cross of Shrewsbury, after the bloody strife on Hately field, where Falstaff "fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock," and his ragamuffins got well peppered, the Baron of Kinderton and Sir Richard Vernon, the Baron of Shipbrooke, with the Earl of Worcester, paid the penalty of their revolt with the same horrible barbarities that a hundred years before had been inflicted upon David, Prince of Wales, the brother of Llewellynn.

Henry, Prince of Wales, the whilom roysterer and tavern brawler—Hotspur's "nimble-footed, madcap Harry"—was also Earl of Chester, and passed much of his time within his palatinate. Anxious, as it would seem, to make some amends for the wrongs his

he took the youthful Peter Legh into his favour. By a deed, dated 26 July, 12 Henry IV. (1411), he granted him certain lands in Macclesfield Forest, near to his domain of Lyme, called Heghlegh, together with the office of forester, which had been held by the Hegleghs and Savages successively, designing his gift apparently as a peace-offering and a token of his royal favour, and with a view probably to services that might be rendered him in the future.

On the 20th of March, 1413, the troubled reign of Henry the Fourth drew to a close. The throne of the usurper had proved but a bed of thorns, for no sovereign ever was more harassed by plots and insurrections. The violent animosities and contentions that prevailed during his reign reduced his frame to premature decay, and at the early age of forty-six he breathed his last in the abbot's lodgings at Westminster.

His son and successor, Henry the Fifth, was not slow in observing the dying injunctions of his royal father not to allow the kingdom to remain long at peace lest it should breed intestine commotion. Wise in his generation, he believed that a foreign war might divert the attention of his subjects from a too close examination of the justness of his own pretensions to the crown, and the excuse for such an enterprise was not far to seek. France was at the time in a state of deplorable disorder; and as the victories of Crescy and Poictiers were yet fresh in the memories of the English people and the favourite theme of song and story, France seemed to furnish the opportunity which the new King so greatly desired. Anxious to quarter its lilies with the lions of England, Henry, shortly after his coronation, resolved upon asserting the claim to the crown of that kingdom which his great grandfather, Edward the Third, had urged with so much confidence and success—a crown to which, it must be admitted, he had about as much right as Rob Roy had to the cattle he "lifted," or to the spoils of the raids and forays he engaged in. Parliament made him a liberal grant in aid of the expedition; free gifts were received from the clergy; he borrowed from all who could be prevailed upon to lend, and to procure money pawned his plate, jewels, and even his crown. With much diligence he collected men, arms, provisions, ships, and, in short, everything necessary to enforce his demands and aggrandise himself at the expense of his distracted neighbours.

The armies of the Kings of England in those days were made up of contingents, brought into the field by adventurous spirits, who entered into indenture with the Sovereign to serve in person with a certain number of followers for a fixed period, and on such terms as were agreed upon—men of strong limbs and daring spirit, who were influenced less by the abstract justice of the cause for which they were to fight than the consciousness that they would receive their due share of the gaines de guerre. Copies of many such indentures or contracts between the King and the persons who undertook to provide a stated number of men at arms and archers, as well as with those who agreed to procure carpenters, masons, waggons, bows, arrows, &c., are printed in Rymer's Fœdera, and these documents furnish much interesting information on the military arrangements of the age. Among the persons who entered into such a covenant was Peter Legh, of Bradley and Lyme, and in the muster roll printed in Sir N. Harris Nicolas's "Battle of Agincourt" we find him thus entered:—

Monsr. Piers de Legh, ov sa retenu,
Robert Orell
Hugh de Orell
Thomas Sutton
John Pygott
George de Asheley.

Those who formed his retinue, were probably archers; the two first named men, apparently Lancashire men, hailing from Orell, near Wigan, and the others, judging by their patronymic, were Cheshire men. Indeed, from the liberal contingents sent up, the two counties seem to have furnished a very large proportion of the eight thousand fighting men who mustered at Southampton. As the rhyming chronicler has it—

Great was the bustle and preparation, and exciting were the scenes then witnessed. Michael Drayton, writing three centuries ago, thus describes the separation between those comprising the invading force and their relatives and friends:—

Many of those engaged in the expedition entered into arrangements for their wives and families that they might have some safe retreat during their absence; in the case of Peter Legh's wife, however, the probabilities are that she would take up her abode with her widowed mother-in-law, Dame Margaret Legh. On the 7th of August (1415) the Royal standard was unfurled, the trumpets flared, and with all the pomp and circumstance of war, the King and his suite embarked on board the Trinity Royal. The ships cast off their moorings, and Peter Legh, with Fluellen and Williams, and Nym—who was hanged for stealing a "pyx"—a very motley force indeed, drifted slowly down Southampton Water upon their venturous quest. Fifteen hundred vessels were comprised in the fleet, and fifteen hundred sails were set; but more than a week elapsed before the voyage, which can now be made in a few hours, was accomplished, and the vessels had cast anchor in the Seine off Kidecaws (i.e., Chef de Caux), about three miles from Harfleur, a place not unknown in Cheshire annals, for it was a knight of that country who bestowed honours upon the Du Guesclin, when he succeeded in capturing the great Cheshire hero, Sir Hugh Calveley.

After a siege of thirty-six days, Harfleur surrendered to the English King, whose triumph the poet sings:—

The victory, however, was dearly bought, for while the siege was proceeding, dysentery broke out in the English camp from the overflowing marshes, and raged with such severity that about five thousand fell victims, among them being Peter Legh's kinsman, Sir Robert de Legh, of Adlington, who died five days after the city surrendered. On the 22nd September, the governor of Harfleur, having failed to obtain succours, opened the gates, exclaiming—

The Earl of Dorset was put in possession of the town and garrison, and, after a short rest, Henry moved forward with the remnant of his army towards Calais, intending to ford the Somme at Blanchetaque, where Edward III. had crossed before the battle of Crescy, but on arriving at Maisoncelle, on the evening of the 24th of October, he found an army of fifty thousand men prepared to dispute his further progress, their position being between the woods of Agincourt and Tramecourt. When the day dawned on the morrow, St. Crispin's Day, the two armies were face to face, but for some hours neither made any movement, when at last old Sir Thomas Erpingham, an English knight, grown grey with age and honour, flung his truncheon into the air, and called "Nestrocque" (now strike), and dismounted, and every man advanced shouting the national "Hurrah." The first discharge of the cloth-yard shafts by the Lancashire and Cheshire bowmen threw the enemy's men-at-arms into confusion, their horses became unmanageable, and the fight raged with uncommon fury; the English archers when they had discharged all their arrows, threw away their bows and fought with their swords and bills; the contest becoming more a slaughter than a battle. In three hours the struggle was ended, and more than ten thousand Frenchmen had been made to bite the dust.

Our great dramatist represents Henry as exclaiming just before he entered upon the fight:—

Peter Legh was one of the "band of brothers;" he was in the thick of the fight, shed his blood, and for services was knighted and made a banneret upon the field. As an old ballad expresses it:

It is very commonly asserted that he died in Paris of the wounds he had received at Agincourt, but the statement can hardly be correct, for six years after the battle was fought his name occurs as party to a marriage settlement, and his death did not take place until 1422.

The wound he received at Agincourt did not incapacitate him from taking part a few years later in a foray that arose out of some quarrel between Sir Peter Dutton of Dutton, in Cheshire, and Sir William Atherton of Atherton, in Lancashire, knight, the two having made inroads on each other's possessions. The circumstance is related by Sir Peter Leycester, who says that—

Great contention fell between Sir Peter Dutton and Sir William Athurton, of Athurton, in Lancashire, insomuch that they made inroads and invasions one upon the other; and the said Sir Piers Dutton and his adherents, to wit, Sir Rafe Bostock of Bostock, Richard Warburton of Budworth, Thomas Warburton of Halton, John Done of Utkinton, junior, John Manley of Manley, Hugh Dutton of Halton, the elder, William Leycester, of Nether-Tabley, Sir Peter Legh of Clifton,[55] and John Carington of Carington, were all sued by Sir William Athurton, for taking away forty of his oxen and forty cows, out of his closes at Athurton, and for beating of his servants. But the variance was composed between them by the award of John Duke of Bedford, Earl of Richmond and Kendal, constable of England, and regent of the kingdom in the absence of Henry the Fifth, dated 9 Aprilis 7 Hen. V. 1419, restitution being awarded on both sides: the horses and saddles taken by Sir William to be restored to Sir Piers Dutton, and the cattel taken by Sir Piers to be restored to the said Sir William.

Our ancestors, it is to be feared, were of a quarrelsome disposition, and, much as we may boast of "the good old times," it must be confessed that they lose much of their charm when from our modern standpoint we begin to examine closely the lives and habits of those who figured in them. There is no reason to suppose that Sir Peter Legh was more disorderly than his neighbours, similar outrages to those committed on Sir William Atherton's lands being then of common occurrence.

Sir Peter Legh was not the man to find happiness in repose. When, in the summer of 1417, the King embarked on his second expedition to France, he again unsheathed his sword and served under the standard of his Sovereign. He had returned to England in 1421, though his stay could only have been very short, for in the following year he was again with the army of the King, and took part in the protracted siege of Meaux, when Henry lost so many of his soldiers by epidemic sickness. The fortress held out for seven months, the garrison only yielding when starved out. In the attack, Sir Peter would seem to have received a wound which eventually proved fatal, his death occurring in Paris on the 22nd June, 1422, a few days after the festivities with which the public entry into that city was celebrated. His body was brought over to England, and buried in the church of Macclesfield, in the rebuilding of which he had in his lifetime been a liberal contributor, as evidenced by the prominent position assigned to his armorial shield on the west front of the tower. Thus the second of the house of Lyme died from the wounds he had received while fighting under the banner of the son and successor of the Lancastrian usurper who had condemned his father to the block for his loyalty to his lawful sovereign and the house of York.

Sir Peter Legh could have been little more than thirty years of age when he died of the honourable wounds he had received while serving under the standard of his king. Among those who had fought by his side at Agincourt was Sir Richard Molineux, of Sefton, a Lancashire knight of considerable wealth and influence.

Sir Richard was himself a widower at the time, and naturally felt compassion for his comrade's widow in her bereavement. His compassion, however, ripened into a warmer feeling; the feeling was mutual, and when the days of mourning were accomplished Sir Peter Legh's youthful relict bestowed her hand upon him, and thus became ancestress of the Earls of Sefton as well as of the Leghs of Lyme. She survived her second husband several years, her death occurring at Croxteth on the 31st of January, 1439. She was buried at Sefton Church, where a stately stone altar-tomb was erected over her remains, which may still be seen with a long Latin inscription upon it, now in part obliterated, but interesting as showing the extent of the possessions which she, as heiress of the house of Haydock, added to the patrimonial lands of the Leghs.