Page:The History of the Church & Manor of Wigan part 2.djvu/108

Rh On Tuesday the 16th of November, 1624, he held a court baron at the Moot hall, and, as he had heard that his servant William Brown of Marketsted, to whom his deceased wife (the widow of alderman Matthew Markland) had left a shop full of wares, was denied liberty to sell them, he made an appointment with James Pilkington, the mayor, and all the aldermen to meet him in the pendice chamber; where he told them that they had no power to elect burgesses but by his sufferance, and that the true burgesses, to whom the liberties of the town were granted by the charter of 31 Hen. III, were only those burgesses, and their assigns, who held lands of the parson by rent of 1s. yearly p' burgagio, &c., as appears by John Mansel's charter; and that the true burgesses are successive and not elective. He then told them that he had made the said William Brown a burgess by selling to him a burgage house and ground which he had lately bought of Thomas Gerard, of Ince, Esq., next to the church yard in Walgate street, and that he should have and enjoy all the liberties of the town by virtue thereof; to which they assented. They then desired him to do them the favour of choosing his son Orlando an alderman. But he declined, because he thought he was too young, and because he was about to send him to travel in France. In February, 1624-5 the bishop set the painting, wainscotting and seating of the upper or new chancel at Wigan, called the bishop's chancel, together with the painting of the lower or parson's chancel: from which it may be inferred either that the Leigh and Bradshaw chapels had now been partially restored, or else that some temporary screens had been put up to protect the chancel from the open air, for the chapels were certainly not completed at that time. On 16th March, 1624-5, at the request of Robert Banks, churchwarden, and his brother Christopher, who came to him in the name of several of the inhabitants of Scholes, he gave them