Page:The History of the Church & Manor of Wigan part 2.djvu/72

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History of the Church and Manor of Wigan.
251

tolls upon the Monday markets all this year, £1 5s. ; Item, for actions at courts Mr. Walton his steward paid him 3s. 4d.; Easter book of Wigan per William Wakefield, £23 11s. 4d.; Easter book of Holland which Wm. Turner recd £13 2s. 4d.; Small tithes, of pigs, geese, lamb, wool, hemp, flax, £2; Item, for mortuaryes, of Hugh Crosse in Holland 5s. 4d., Richard Prescot of Dalton 10s., Oliver Brigs of Holland 6s. 5d., of Bayly sonne 10s., of Holland of Holland 10s., of Jo. Berry of Dalton 10s. (in all £2 12s. 0d.) He held the maynes in hand this year, but it would have yielded about £80. The tithes were not all collected that year, but the entire profits from the parsonage of Wigan for this year amounted to £624 15s. 2d.[1]

There were several others not mentioned in the foregoing list of tenants at will who were found, at sundry Courts Baron held in this and the following year, to be holding freshly occupied land on the lord's wastes, and who agreed to pay certain annual rents as tenants at will, among whom were Thomas Birchall, cook, who paid 4d. yearly for an oven and part of a shippon in Whelley Lane at the upper end of Scholes, for which a yearly acknowledgment of 2d. had formerly been paid to the town, "whiles they chalenged the mannor to be theirs;"[2] William Ascroft, alias Ormshaw, of Wigan, tanner, who paid 2s. yearly for a piece of ground upon the waste or little common by the corn mill bridge in Scholes, a little above the said bridge by the river Douglas as one goes to the school[3]; Mary Pilkington, widow, who acknowledged herself tenant at will to the parson, on 21st April, 1620, for three shops on the Marketsteed built up within man's memory upon the waste, and found by the jury to belong to the parson; of which three shops James Pilkington, then mayor of Wigan, occupied the uppermost, Robert Mason occupied the middlemost, and Thomas Leigh, flaxman, occupied the third; "these three shops stand near the sign of the Eagle near before the doors of Roger Scot and Gilbert Orrell" ; and the said Mary Pilkington agreed

  1. Family evidences.
  2. Wigan Leger, fol. 33.
  3. Ibid. fol. 41.