At Warrington, probably towards the end of the thirteenth century, a
friary of the Augustine or Hermit friars was established, but the name
of its founder and the exact date of its foundation are alike unknown;
it was not on a very extensive scale, and was dissolved with the other
lesser houses in 1535. The third house established in Lancashire by
the Austin canons was the priory of Burscough, which was founded in
honour of St. Nicholas, by Robert Fitz-Henry, Lord of Lathom, in about
1124. To this priory was granted a charter in 1286 to hold a weekly
market and a five days' fair in their manor of Ormskirk; amongst its
endowments were the advowsons of the churches of Ormskirk, Huyton and
Flixton, and lands in many parts of West Derby. At the time of the
dissolution (about the year 1536) it contained a Prior, five monks, and
forty dependents, and its temporalities were then worth about £1,000 a
year, according to the present value of money. There was here a priory
church with several altars, a chapter-house, and a hospital, into
which Henry de Lacy, Constable of Chester, agreed with the Prior for a
perpetual right to send one of his tenants. Very little of this ancient
priory has been left by the destroying hand of Time.[188]
A small Benedictine priory, dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury, was
founded at Upholland, near Wigan, by Sir Robert Holland, in 1318, and
to it were impropriated the churches of Childwall in Lancashire and
Whitwick in Leicestershire.
In the great hundred of Salford, the Domesday Book only names two
churches, both of which were in Manchester, and dedicated to St.
Michael and St. Mary, and it is somewhat remarkable that even the
sites of these buildings are now only a matter of conjecture. The
probability is that one stood in Aldport and the other in Acres Field,
near to the end of the present St. Mary's Gate. When or why these
churches were pulled down history does not tell us, but for centuries
after the Conquest Manchester was a rural deanery, and probably was
the ecclesiastical centre of the ten parishes comprised in the county
division. Baines says (and others have repeated) that the church at
Bury was named in the Great Survey; this is not the case, but before
the end of the twelfth century there were churches not only at Bury,
but at Ashton-under-Lyne, Prestwich, Middleton and Flixton, and a
little later saw the rise of the churches of Radcliffe, Bolton and
Eccles. Rochdale Church was certainly built before 1194, and was almost
certainly a Saxon foundation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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