A recent writer, in an account of Adlington, says that Sir John Stanley “was himself an ecclesiastic and warden of Manchester;” that his claim “was espoused by the Bishop of Ely, his father;” and that “the battle seems in reality to have been fought between the powerful Bishop of Ely on the one hand, and the yet more powerful Cardinal on the other.” These statements are entirely erroneous. Sir John, in early life, had embraced the profession of arms; as a soldier he had earned his knighthood by bravery on the field; and, being married, he would by the canons of the Church be disqualified from holding an ecclesiastical preferment, while, as a fact, his father, the Bishop of Ely, had been in his grave eight or nine years when the dispute respecting the Prestbury tithes arose. George Legh died on the 12th June, 1529, at the early age of thirty-two. His will was only made on the day preceding his decease, and the broad lands of Adlington were transmitted to his only son, Thomas Legh, then an infant two years of age. His wife survived him, and was remarried to George Paulet, brother of the Marquis of Winchester, and she with her second husband appear to have resided at Adlington during the minority of the heir, for in a return of the clergy serving at the various chapels of ease within the parish of Prestbury there occurs the name of Sir James Hurst, a stipendiary priest, paid by George Pollet (Paulet), and apparently serving in the chapel at Adlington. By an unaccountable error Thomas Legh, of Adlington, has been confounded with another personage of the same name, who, as one of the commissioners under Sir Thomas Cromwell, took an active part in the suppression of the religious houses. The mistake will be apparent when it is remembered that at the time (1536) that worthy was denouncing monachism and despoiling the monks of their lands and houses Thomas Legh, of Adlington, was only in his ninth year, and before he had attained to manhood the great and lesser monasteries had been swept away.