very considerable skirmishing up and down the county, of which one Burghall, the Puritan vicar of Acton, who owed his living to the Parliamentary victory, has left a detailed account in diary form. It forms circumstantial reading, though somewhat offensively unctuous in tone. The diary was first published at Chester in 1778 and has since been re-published by the Cheetham Society.
Burghall records under 1643 that "the enemy [i.e. the Royalists] on Saturday came to Barthomley, giving an alarm to the garrison of Crewe Hall: as they marched they set upon the church which had in it about twenty neighbours that had gone in for safety: but the Lord Byrom's troop & Connought, a major to Colonel Sneyd, set upon them and won the church, but the enemy burning the forms, rushes, mats, etc. made such a smoke that being almost stifled they called for quarter which was granted by Connought: but when they had them in their power they stripped them all naked and most cruelly murdered twelve of them contrary to the laws of arms, nature and nations. Counonght cut the throat of Mr. John Fowler, a hopeful young man and a minor."[1]
This reads like an episode of August, 1914, in Belgium, and one feels and hopes with Mr. Hinchcliffe that perhaps Burghall has been carried away by his extreme Puritan bias and is not a credible historian. Tradition here most opportunely throws light upon what really happened. There lived in the parish one Daniel Stringer, who was born in 1743, and was living in 1839, in which year (being then 97 years of age) he informed Mr. Hinchcliffe that his grandfather was one of the few who escaped from the massacre. So his father had told him. He declared that the trouble arose because the son of the rector fired from the steeple upon the troops marching past and killed one. This so irritated the soldiers that they revenged their comrade's death by butchering many within the church.
- ↑ My italics.
