Other halls constructed wholly or in part of timber, and once occupied by the yeomen class--the charterers or freeholders named on old manor court-rolls--whose estates have been swallowed up in the larger properties, were usually defended by deeply-dug, rectangular moats, indicative of an unsettled and dangerous state of life in former times. At Huxley Old Hall, at Harden, at Moreton, and elsewhere, moats and drawbridges still exist; but some moated enclosures have been turned into orchards, and a farmhouse has been built outside, as at Mickley in Wrenbury parish, and at Stapeley in Wybunbury parish. Formerly Cheshire people frequently married with neighbouring families of like station in life, according to their common proverb, “It is better to marry over the mixen than over the moor;” and even yet there is a saying: “If you are going into Cheshire, remember they are all cousins.” The long-established peasant families must not be passed over in silence. Suspicious of strangers, they understand “the law of the land” very differently from the inhabitants of crowded cities and manufacturing towns. Country people still speak with confidence and respect of “our squire,” just as the landlords talk of “our people”; although it must be admitted that the mutual social influences of old English life are now fast waning. A former manifestation of goodwill and good understanding among the tenantry of a large estate may here be mentioned. On the death of the Rev. Sir Thomas Broughton, Bart., in July 1813, the coffin containing his remains was borne to burial on the shoulders of relays of farmers by road from Doddington Hall to Broughton Church, a distance of no less than twelve miles! The numerous townships into which Cheshire is divided are almost entirely rural in their situation; and in few parts of the county, Wirral being the chief exception, are the dwellings sufficiently near each other to constitute what is generally known as a village. I have heard a countryman express this peculiarity in these words: “The common people live in the lanes, but the quality (that is, the well-to-do farmers) live up in the fields.” With regard to Cheshire families in the dim past, Camden the antiquary of the sixteenth century wrote:[49] “Cheshire is the great nursing-mother of the gentry; for there is no other English county that formerly supplied the King’s army with more nobility, or that could number more knightly families.” [49] The original words in the _Britannia_ read: “Cestria eximia nobilitatis altrix; nec enim alia est in Anglia provincia, quæ plures nobiles in aciem eduxerit, et plures equestres familias numerarit.”