Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/274

 246 (now disused) across the river, and is known as Rocester Lane. Needless to say, the natives have no explanation why Rocester is thus advertised to the exclusion of many nearer centres of population. There is no possible relationship between the two places, either administrative or economic; they lie some dozen miles apart, connected by an indirect and indifferent road. The strong probability is that if you asked the way to Rocester of a Waterfall man he would not be able to tell you: certainly he would not direct you down "Rocester Lane," which is practically a cul de sac, ending at the disused ford.

In the survival of this name there is the only link with the pre-Reformation status of Waterfall Church as an appendage of Rocester Abbey. Along this road the parishioners in successive harvest seasons laboriously transported their tithes in kind. Or, the imagination may not unreasonably picture a constant procession of black-cowled priests to and from the Abbey. For the Austin Canons set parochial ministration among their "appropriated" congregations in the forefront of their religious activities. Waterfall has not now, and had not in those days, easy access to the outer world. Leek has now superseded Rocester as the ultimate horizon of travel. With the snapping of monastic ties the artificial geographical relationship of Waterfall and Rocester vanished. It is good, therefore, to note this place-name, for it represents three hundred years of English history; it is a vivid and accurate piece of historical evidence revealing as it does the powerful influence a distant monastic house could exercise on parochial life.

V. My last example is perhaps the most striking of all, but it comes rather at second hand. It is taken from Hinchcliffe's History of Barthomley, a somewhat rare book, written about 1850 by the rector of the parish, which is situated partly in Staffordshire but mainly in Cheshire. The period of the incident in question is of the Civil War. Cheshire was in the main Royalist, but there was