Page:The History of the Church & Manor of Wigan part 2.djvu/84

Rh year. "For this purpose," writes the bishop, "I spoke to the owners of the flag-delfes in Holland to buy their flag stone, but some evil disposed people, intending to hinder so good a work, wrought with those owners to let me have no stone for the church, whereupon I was fain to get them out of Billinge quarries and as for sand to lay the said stones in, I gave the said churchwardens leave to fetch it all out of the ditch of my middle maynes. In May this summer we began the flagging of the church, and first I flagged the place which was the chauncel, wherein I was wont to sit and all my predecessors, for the new chauncel which I am now building was never yet built up, and because the old chauncel was ever heretofore the place where the Altar and Rood loft stood in old time (which many yet living do remember, and appears by the suit between Low and Gidlow), and hath been anciently seated round about with goodly fair Quire-seats, wherein my predecessors and their chaplains only did sit (as divers yet alive do testify), of which said Quire-seats some have been of late years taken away and other beggarly and rude forms or seats set in their rooms, therefore I caused some of them to be cast out, and placed the Quire-seats on the south side thereof as before they stood, and other of those Quires[eats] which stood on the west end of the old chauncel, parting it from the church beneath, I removed to the east end, between that old chauncel and the new, and I purpose to uniform the north side also, where Alexander Rigby now sits and the Lowes, with such Quireseats likewise, for such it had until parson Fleetwood removed them and gave leave to John Lowe to set those plain rude seats which yet are there : Now because this old chauncel is the parson's of Wigan, and I and my predecessors have always time of mind set at the west end thereof, and my wife, &c. at the east end, and my servants all along the south side, and the minister's box hath stood on the north side, where the clarks also have usually sitten, with Mr. Rigby behind them of late times; and the communion table stood in the middest of the