Plowland (or Plewland) Hall, in the Parish of Welwick, in Holderness, was doubtless where Christopher Wright first beheld the light of the sun. Plowland Hall, or Great Plowland as it is sometimes called, is situated on the left of, and a little distance from, the high-road, on slightly rising ground, between the ancient town of Patrington and the pretty village of Welwick. When Robert Wright and Ursula, his wife, and their sons, John and Christopher, and their daughters, Ursula and Martha, knew the place, now so historic, Plowland Hall was a fortified dwelling, surrounded by a deep moat and approached by a drawbridge, much after the fashion of Markenfield Hall, in the Parish of Ripon, the ancestral seat of the Markenfields, heroes of Flodden and kinsmen of the Wrights, Wards, Nortons, Mallories, and numberless others amongst the ancient and wealthy Yorkshire gentry. Christopher Wright and his elder brother John were educated, along with Guy Fawkes and Oswald Tesimond, at the Royal Grammar School (as we have already stated) in the Horse Fayre, Gillygate, in the City of York. Their master was the Reverend John Pulleyn, who probably belonged to the ancient and honourable West Riding family of the Pulleyns (or Pulleines), of Killinghall, near Bilton-cum-Harrogate, and of Scotton, in the Parish of Farnham, near Knaresbrough. The two Wrights’ parents were stanch Roman Catholics, and their mother had suffered imprisonment “for the Faith” in York for the “space of fourteen years together,” during the time when Henry Hastings Earl of Huntingdon was Lord President of the North, _i.e._, between the years 1572 and 1599. (Henry third Earl of Huntingdon was one of the few members of the ancient nobility who accepted whole-heartedly the Calvinistic Protestantism then gradually taking root in England.) One of Christopher Wright’s sisters, Ursula, was married to Marmaduke Ward, Gentleman, of Mulwith, in the Parish of Ripon; another, named Martha, was married to Thomas Percy, Gentleman, the Gunpowder conspirator. It is said of John Wright, Christopher Wright’s brother, and of his brother-in-law, Thomas Percy, that they were formerly Protestant, and became Catholic about the time of the rebellion of the Earl of Essex. But it is certain John Wright and Thomas Percy[45] must have been both brought up Roman Catholics in the days of their childhood; although they probably ceased to practise their duties as such until about the year 1600. For it is incredible that the son and son-in-law of Robert Wright and Ursula, his wife, should have been brought up as children and youths anything other than rigid Catholics, whatever else for a season they might, in the days of their early manhood, have become, either from conscientious conviction or reckless negligence, whereof the latter alternative is doubtless the more probable.