There are other names associated with the annals of Rivington of equal historic interest with those of the former lords of Shaw Place, and foremost among them must be ranked that of the worthy prelate, who in the golden days of the maiden Queen, when he had risen to be Bishop of Durham, and out of the love he bore to his native county founded the free school at Rivington for the "bringing up, teaching, and instructing children and youth in grammar and other good learning, to continue for ever." In good Bishop Pilkington's early days the opportunities of learning were few; the well-born might get admission to the house of some great territorial lord and there receive a scholastic training, but to those of lowlier birth the monasteries were almost the only available sources, and the youths there educated were usually trained for the priesthood. The heaviest reproach that Shakespeare's Jack Cade could heap upon Lord Say was "that he had most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school." Little progress had, however, been made in "corrupting the youth" of Lancashire, for at the time of the Reformation there were only three such schools in the county--Farnworth, Manchester, and Warrington--and they had then been only recently founded; hence the common people, as may be supposed, were rude and uncultured, and, though the merriest of Englishmen, were as illiterate as they were merry; even the thrifty manufacturers were in very little better case, for in only very few instances did they know how to write their names.[17] The Pilkingtons derived their patronymic from the manor of that name in Prestwich parish, where they were located shortly after the Conquest, though Fuller in his "Worthies of England" assigns, but without any apparent authority, a much earlier date, and tells us that one of them fought under Harold at the battle of Hastings, and, being pressed, put on the dress of a thatcher and so escaped; whence the family crest and the allusive motto, "_Now thus, now thus_." But in this the pleasant old chronicler is clearly at fault, for the crest of the Pilkingtons is not a thresher but a mower, and the motto imputed to the family belongs to the Traffords. Fuller says he had the story from his "good friend, Master William Riley, Norroy King of Arms," a Lancashire man. Whatever its origin--and tradition, if never wholly accurate, is seldom entirely destitute of foundation--it is a singular coincidence that the same, or nearly the same, story is applied to the Traffords, the Levers, and the Bridgeman family.