The Battle of Bosworth Field proved as fatal to the fortunes of the parent stock of the Pilkingtons as to the power of their royal master, Richard III. They were devoted adherents of the house of York, and bore a part in the bloody contest which ended the struggle between the Red and White Roses, and alike terminated the power of the feudal barons, the line of the Plantagenet kings, and the political system under which England had been governed by them for more than three centuries. For his adherence to the fortunes of the fallen monarch Sir Thomas Pilkington's estates were forfeited to the victorious Richmond, and by him bestowed upon his crafty stepfather, Thomas, Lord Stanley, first Earl of Derby, the only noble who survived the wars of the Roses with added power and splendour, he having given to him almost all the lands forfeited in the north; the originally great possessions of his house being swollen by enormous grants of the estates of Sir Thomas Broughton, of Broughton; of Sir James Harrington, of Hornby; of Francis, Viscount Lovel; of Sir Thomas Pilkington, and what Sir Thomas had inherited by descent from the heiress of Chetham--in fact, from these forfeited possessions of the Pilkingtons came all the lands which the Stanleys obtained in the Salford Hundred. If there is any foundation for the story of a Pilkington having disguised himself to escape his pursuers, it must have been after the fatal fight at Bosworth, and not at Hastings, as Fuller affirms. There is a common belief that Sir Thomas Pilkington was captured on the occasion of Richard's overthrow, sent prisoner to Leicester, and there put to death; but the statement is incorrect, for this devoted servant of the fallen king was afterwards in arms against Henry VII., and took part in the action at Stoke Field, near Newark, where he lost his life, June 6, 1487, the occasion being that on which Lambert Simnel, the pretended Edward Plantagenet, was taken prisoner. Though Robert Pilkington, of Rivington, also fought on the side of the Yorkists at Bosworth, his lands appear to have escaped the general wreck, and his descendants continued in the occupation of the ancestral home for several generations. Richard Pilkington, a son or grandson of this Robert, was born in 1480, and had to wife Alice, daughter of Lawrence Asshawe, of Hall-on-the-Hill, in Heath-Charnock, a township adjoining Rivington, which would appear to have come into the possession of the Asshawes by marriage with a heiress of the Harringtons of Westby. The Asshawes at a later date also owned lands in Flixton, where they had a residence, Asshawe Hall, which still exists. Round this family Mr. M'Dougall has thrown the halo of romance, and under the title of "The Ladye of Asshawe" has enshrined in verse a lingering tradition that possibly possesses some faint glimmerings of truth, with, however, much that is undoubtedly apocryphal.