freeholders were the patrons. They presented a Royalist to the living in 1648. A few years later, under Cromwell, Peak Forest Chapel was built, and was dedicated to King Charles the Martyr,—one out of only four such dedications in England. Such was the state of popular feeling in the Peak at the eve of the Restoration.
Anxious to find out something of the circumstances of Castleton parish itself at the time, I paid a visit to the place last summer. It is a little, old, decayed market town, overlooked by the ruins of the famous Castle of the Peak. The lines of a rampart that surrounded the town and connected it with the fortifications of the castle may still be traced. The houses are built close together,—on the waste of the manor, I was told,—without gardens. They line rectangular streets that remind one of Winchelsea, and suggest definite “town-planning.”[1] The place is situated on level ground at the farther end of one of the highest dales of the Peak, at the spot where the valley becomes a pass. Two miles below it, at the mouth of the dale, is Hope, a village of which the local proverb says,—“There’s many a one lives in Hope as never saw Castleton,” so little ‘through traffic’ is there in the valley. The present vicar, the Rev. J. H. Brooksbank, received me with the utmost kindness. He is deeply interested in the local history, and from the parish registers and other data in his possession I obtained the information I wanted.
Through all the ups and downs of the period the Reverend Samuel Cryer was vicar of Castleton. Appointed in 1644[2] by I know not whom, (the patronage was in the hands of the Bishops of Chester), the Parliamentary Commissioners found him there in 1650, and left him in possession. He was re-instituted on the eve of “Black Bartholomew” in 1662, and died vicar under William and Mary, in 1697, after fifty-three years’ unbroken ministry. Such a length of time could hardly help leaving some
