The severest damage to this once glorious building was not done, as commonly supposed, temp. Henry VIII., nor yet during the reign of his eldest daughter, when so great a panic seized the Protestant possessors of the abolished abbeys, and the mischief in general was so cruel. "For now," says quaint old Fuller (meaning temp. Mary), "the edifices of abbeys which were still entire looked lovingly again on their ancient owners; in prevention whereof, such as for the present possessed them, plucked out their eyes by levelling them to the ground, and shaving from them as much as they could of abbey characters." Whatever the time of the chief destruction wrought at Furness, that of Whalley did not take place till the beginning of the reign of Charles II. Third in order of rank and territorial possessions among the old Lancashire religious houses came Cokersand Abbey, founded in 1190 on a bit of seaside sandy wilderness about five miles south of Lancaster, near the estuary of the streamlet called the Coker. There is no reason to believe that the edifice was in any degree remarkable, in point either of extent or of architectural merit. Nothing now remains of it but the Chapter-house, an octagonal building thirty feet in diameter, the roof supported upon a solitary Anglo-Norman shaft, which leads up to the pointed arches of a groined ceiling. The oaken canopies of the stalls, when the building was dismantled, were removed, very properly, to the parish church of Lancaster. Burscough Priory, two miles and a half north-east of Ormskirk, founded temp. Richard I., and for a long time the burial-place of the Earls of Derby, has suffered even more heavily than Cokersand Abbey. Nothing remains but a portion of the centre archway of the church. Burscough has interest, nevertheless, for the antiquary and the artist; the former of whom, though not the latter, finds pleasure also in the extant morsel of the ancient priory of Cartmel--a solitary gateway, standing almost due west of the church, close to the little river Ea, and containing some of the original windows, the trefoil mouldings of which appear to indicate the early part of the fourteenth century. The foundation of the edifice, as a whole, is referred to the year 1188, the name then given being "The Priory of the Blessed Mary of Kartmell." The demolition took place very shortly after the fatal 1535, when the church, much older, was also doomed, but spared as being the parochial one. Contemplating old Cartmel, one scarcely thinks of Shakspere, but it was to the "William Mareshall, Earl of Pembroke," in _King John_, that the Priory owed its birth.