The early “historians” of Manchester were, however, not content with such history as this, and loved to tell a tale of the marvellous: how their city originated with a giant, Sir Tarquin, among whose peculiarities was that of having a little child every morning for breakfast, just as a modern might take anchovy, on toast. At last he was slain by Sir Lancelot de Lake, one of King Arthur’s knights, whereupon the population, relieved of this check upon it, began to increase, and here we have now, after the passing of sixteen or seventeen centuries, an assemblage, including Salford, of about three quarters of a million souls. An ancient carved wooden boss in the ceiling of the committee-room of Chetham’s Hospital alludes to this legend, and displays a giant head devouring an infant. [Sidenote: _THE MANOR_] And so we pass on to the Norman period, and to the time when the family of Greslet, or Gresley, acquired the manor of Manchester from that great personage, Roger of Poictou, to whom a manor more or less, in all the great tract of the country that was his between the Ribble and the Mersey, was a small matter. For centuries the Gresleys retained their holding, which passed from them at last by the marriage of Joan Gresley to one of the West family. Thenceforward, the Wests, ennobled as Barons de la Warre, owned the manorial rights of Manchester, until 1579, when they sold them for £3,000 to one John Lacy, who in his turn, in 1596, sold to Nicholas Mosley, alderman of London, at a mere £500 profit. After holding the manor for two hundred and forty-five years, the Mosley family, in the person of Sir Oswald Mosley, sold it to the newly created Corporation of Manchester for £200,000. It was a huge sum, but Sir Oswald was scarcely wise in his generation. Strange though it may seem in a place to outward appearance so modern as Manchester, the old manor-house of the Gresleys and the De la Warres still survives in the very centre of the great city. It is, indeed, identical with none other than the range of buildings long past occupied as Chetham’s Hospital and Library adjoining the Cathedral, and here is the later story of it. The last of the Manchester De la Warres was a man with an enthusiasm for the religious life. In 1373 he became rector of Manchester, and in 1422 refounded the parish church that is now the Cathedral, making it collegiate, and giving his baronial hall, hard by, for the purposes of his College of priests. That establishment was disestablished and disendowed in the time of Edward the Sixth, and the College buildings granted to the Earl of Derby, who used this ancient manorial residence as his town house. His successor, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, re-endowed the College, which was again suppressed in the dawn of the Commonwealth era, when the church became a Presbyterian meeting-house.