Before we enter the church or view the hall, it may be well to glance briefly at the earlier history of the place. Gawsworth, though now an independent parish, was formerly included within the limits of the great parish of Prestbury; and even at the present day the whole of the townships which surround it—Macclesfield, Sutton, Bosley, North Rode, Marton, Siddington, and Henbury—all owe ecclesiastical allegiance to the mother church of that widespread parish. The original name, as we learn from the Domesday survey, was _Gouersurde_. After the Conquest it formed part of the possessions of the Norman Earls of Chester; one of whom, Randle de Meschines, in the twelfth century, gave it to his trusty follower, Hugh, son of Bigod, with the right of holding his own courts, without pleading before the prefects at Macclesfield, in consideration of his rendering to the earl annually a caparisoned horse; and this Hugh, in accordance with the fashion of the age, adopted the name of Gawsworth. Subsequently the manor seems to have passed to Richard Aldford, whose daughter, Lucy, brought it in marriage to the Orrebies, who held it free from all service save furnishing one man in time of war to assist in the defence of Aldford Castle. They retained possession until the reign of Edward I., when Richard, son of Thomas de Orreby, dying without male issue, his only sister, Isabel, who succeeded to the inheritance, and who had previously married in succession Roger de Macclesfeld and Sir John de Grindon, Knight, both of whom she survived, conveyed it on her marriage in 1316-17 to her third husband, Thomas Fytton, a younger son of Edmund Fytton, of Bolyn (Wilmslow); and thus Gawsworth became closely associated with a family noted for their chivalrous exploits, and famous in the annals of the county. Of the early history of this distinguished family—“Knights of a long-continued Race and of great worth,” as Webb styles them—who for so many generations held sway and practised a splendid hospitality in Gawsworth, but few memorials have been preserved beyond the dry details embodied in their _Inquisitiones post mortem_ in the Public Record Office, and the inscriptions which still remain upon the sumptuous monuments erected to their memory in the church which their pious munificence reared.