The next visitation was in 1567, when Elizabeth had been nearly ten years on the throne, and the Roman Catholics and Puritans in this county had become specially marked for persecution (see Chapter IX.); notwithstanding this, 129 families entered their pedigrees, and most of them claimed the right to bear arms. The marked increase between 1533 and 1567 bears evidence to the growing wealth and importance of Lancashire. Arising from a desire to add "field to field" and found county families, a custom had obtained a footing in Lancashire at this time to marry children when of tender age. Many examples might be quoted to illustrate this, but one will suffice. In 1562 two sisters, Elizabeth and Anne, co-heiresses of Ralph Belfield, of Clegg Hall, were married, at Middleton Church, respectively to Alexander Barlow of Barlow and Richard Leigh of Highleigh; twenty-two years afterwards both the couples applied for divorce, Barlow testifying that he did not remember any marriage having taken place, and Anne Leigh, _née_ Belfield, declaring that at the time of her marriage she was only seven years old, and that after it was celebrated she went to live with her grandmother, whilst her youthful husband was sent to Shrewsbury School, and whilst he was there she sent him a "gilt book," and he sent her a knife, which she wore at her girdle: both marriages were dissolved.[123] There were, however, many other instances where divorce was neither obtained nor applied for. The close of the Tudor age found Lancashire in a very different state to that which marked its advent. Commerce with other countries across the seas was beginning to show effects, and the wool and other products of the county found a ready market. The population had greatly increased, yet still there was no large town in the modern sense of the word, and the manufactures of the day were mostly carried on in the houses of the manufacturers, and the new fabrics composed of silk and wool, introduced by the Flemish exiles at Norwich, had not yet been added to any great extent to the trade of this district. The social position was everywhere improved: a better class of domestic architecture had supplanted the old order, and now the people lived in fairly comfortable houses, built frequently of stone or brick, which, though internally not furnished with the luxurious appliances of a nineteenth-century villa, were yet princely palaces compared with the wretched dwelling-places which had preceded them. The glorious literature which distinguished the reign of the Virgin Queen, and which embraced alike history, poetry, and the drama, must have had some effect upon the Lancashire people, although as yet we find no printing-press in any of her towns. [Illustration] [Footnote 104: Vol. xxxvii.] [Footnote 105: _To fettle_ is an old Lancashire word.] [Footnote 106: Harl. MSS., Cod. 3526. See Harland's "Ballads and Songs of Lancashire."]