[Footnote 114: Hollingworth, _Mancuniensis_, Willis’s Edition (1839), p. 28. In the introduction to this edition the following facts are given of the author:--Richard Hollingworth was a Fellow of Christ College, Manchester, and died on 11th November 1656, in Manchester, after being imprisoned and deprived of the income arising from his fellowship in consequence of the breaking up of the collegiate body by Colonel Thomas Birch of Birch Hall, near Manchester, acting under the command of the Committee of Sequestration. In the Chetham Library there are two manuscript copies, and in both the date is given as 1120, but in one it is corrected “a mistake for 1520 about 12 H. 8,” a correction which is obviously justified.] [Footnote 115: 33 Henry VIII., c. xv., quoted by Baines, _ibid._, pp. 92-93.] In 1577 some clothiers of Lancashire presented a petition praying that a statute passed in the reign of Edward VI.,[116] which imposed restrictions on middlemen buying and selling wool, should not be enforced. Under the terms of the statute, wool-growers were only allowed to sell their product either to a merchant of the staple or to persons actually engaged in its manufacture. This arrangement was unsuitable to the petitioners as they were “poore cotegers whose habylitye wyll not stretche neyther to buye any substance of woolles to mayntayne worke and labor, nor yet to fetche the same (the growyth of wolles being foure or fyve score myles at the leaste distant)” and they feared that if the statute were enforced “the trade will be driven into a fewe riche men’s hands, so that the poore shall not be paid for their worke, but as it pleaseth the riche.”[117] [Footnote 116: 5 and 6 Edward VI., c. 7.] [Footnote 117: _S.P.D. Eliz._, vol. cxvii. 38, quoted _Economic Journal_, x., p. 23.] Judging from this reference, it would appear that the conditions described as existing in Manchester more than thirty years before were still typical of Lancashire. Possibly this may have been the case in some parts of the county, but it is clear that, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and in the early years of the next century, there were many men of means resident in the Manchester district engaged in the cloth industry.