of the palpable deficiency which they have not as yet made even an attempt to supply.

Humphrey Chetham himself once procured an investigation of his genealogy, which cost him more money than it yielded him definite and satisfactory knowledge. It seems to have been made pretty clear, however, that he was descended from a cadet of the family of the Chethams of Nuthurst, itself an offshoot of the Chethams of Chetham, whose founder was Geffrey (Galfridus) de Chetham, "a man of great consequence, and several times sheriff of Lancashire, temp. Hen. III." The whole family derived their name from the locality where what was once the little village of Chetham has grown into a populous and important suburb of Manchester. "The said Sir Geffrey," says quaint old Fuller, to be enabled to quote whom is always so pleasant, "falling in troublous times into the King's displeasure, his family (in effect) was ruinated. But it seems his Posterity was unwilling to fly from their old but destroyed Nest, and got themselves a handsome habitation at Crumpsall, hard by." According to another account, it was at a later period that the Chetham family was "ruinated," by siding with Richard Crookback against the victor of Bosworth. In any case, towards the close of the sixteenth century, there resided at Crumpsall, a certain Henry Chetham, a man of some substance. 1 He had several sons, of whom the founder of the Hospital and Library was the fourth. Humphrey Chetham was born in 1580, and on the 10th of July in that year he was baptized, in what was then the collegiate, now the cathedral, church of Manchester. It is a reasonable conjecture that the subsequent founder of

1 The present Crumpsall Hall is, it seems, a quarter of a mile from the site of the quaint half-timbered mansion of the Chethams, which was taken down in 1825.-See Booker's History of Blackley (Manchester, 1854), p. 211.

the Chetham Library received a good education, probably at the Manchester Grammar School. No doubt, too, he was apprenticed to some dealer in Manchester wares, and it is certain that, while the eldest succeeded to the Crumpsall property, whatever it may have been, Humphrey and one or more of the other sons embarked in the Manchester trade, in his case with eminent success.

In comparison with its present extent, Manchester was but a hamlet when, in the first decade or so of the seventeenth century, Humphrey Chetham started in business. In a map of Manchester supposed to have been executed only a few years before his death, and when the town must have been much larger than during his youth, there are fields. from Long Mill-gate to Shudehill, where only a few houses break the expanse of country seen stretching away in every direction. Market street was a lane, with meadows and hedge-rows at its top, while near this stood, in rural seclu sion, a mansion emphasised as "Mr Lever's House," the memory of which still faintly survives in Great Lever street and the like. But Manchester was already the seat of a thriving trade, for which it had been famous since the time of Henry VIII. From Ireland there had been long a resort to it of traffickers, with linen and woollen yarn to be woven into cloth, and in certain descriptions of woollens Manchester was pre-eminent. By a singular coincidence, which has often been remarked, these woollen products of Manchester were called "cottons," a corruption, some suppose, of "coatings," and which certainly had nothing to do practically with the cotton plant of East or West. Long before the textile use of this was known in England, Leland wrote, "Bolton-upon-Moors Market stondeth most by cottons; divers villages in the moores about Bolton do make Cotton may have been imported into England towards the close of the sixteenth century, and undoubtedly

cottons.

it was worked up in Manchester during Humphrey Chetham's lifetime, so early as 1641, in which year was published Lewis Roberts's "Treasure of Traffic" containing the following passage:"The town of Manchester in Lancashire must be also herein remembered, and worthily for their encouragement commended, who buy the yarn of the Irish in great quantity, and weaving it, return the same again into Ireland to sell. Neither doth their industry rest here, for they buy cotton-wool in London that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and at home work the same, and perfect it into fustians, vermillions, dimities, and other such stuffs." But the import was small, and the use made of it in textile fabrics was comparatively insignificant. Camden, speaking of Manchester as it was in 1590, when Humphrey Chetham was a boy of ten, refers to "the glory of its woollen cloths, which they call Manchester cottons." It was these woollen coatings, too, that quaint old Fuller (a contemporary of Humphrey Chetham's, and a friend of one of his friends) had in view when he wrote:-"As for Manchester, the cottons thereof chiefly carry away the credit in our nation, and so they did an hundred and fifty years ago"-long before the fibre of the cotton plant was used in the manufactures of this country. The paragraph that follows this one, in Fuller's "Worthies," is well worth giving, as a brief and quaint synopsis of the prevailing trade of Manchester at the same period, a trade in which flax evidently played a considerable part. "Other commodities" (the orthography and italics are Fuller's own)" made in Manchester are so small in themselves, and various in their kinds, they will fill the shop of an Haberdasher of small wares. Being, therefore, too many for me to reckon up or remember, it will be the safest way to wrap them all together in some Manchester Tickin, and to fasten them with the Pinns (to prevent their falling out and scattering), or tie them with the Tape, and also (because

sure bind, sure find) to bind them about with Points and Laces, all made in the same place."

"1

This was the industrial Manchester in which Humphrey Chetham did business during the first half of the seventeenth century. We fancy him a grave, solid, rather "canny" young man, decidedly Puritanical in his creed, and of the strictest walk and conversation, keeping one eye firmly fixed on the main chance and the other on the Kingdom of Heaven. He throve apace, by transactions, considerable in those days, in Manchester and Lancashire commodities, great part of which he sent up to London, where one of his brothers seems to have been settled. It is pleasant to hear that he was noted for his integrity and fair-dealing, as well as for his success. He trafficked largely in fustians, into the manufacture of which, if Fuller is to be relied on, cotton does really seem then to have entered. The Lancashire people, Fuller says, "buying the Cotton-Wool or Yarne, coming

1 Worthies, ii. 538. When the varied and enormous manufacturing and other industry of modern Lancashire is considered, it is curious to find Fuller laying stress on its production of-horn! In the introduction to his account of the Worthies of Lancashire he says, under the head of "Oxen : "—"The fairest in England are bred (or if you will, made) in this county, the tips of whose horns are sometimes distanced five foot asunder. Horns are a commodity not to be slighted, since I cannot call to mind any other substance so hard that it will not break, so solid that it will hold liquor within it, and yet so clear that light will pass through it. No mechanick trade but hath some utensil made thereof, and even now I recruit my pen with ink from a vessel of the same, Yea, it is useful cap-à-pie, from combs to shoeing-horns. What shall I speak of the many Gardens made of Horns to garnish houses? I mean artificial flowers of all colours. And besides what is spent in England, many thousand weight are shaven down into leaves for Lanthorns, and sent over daily into France. In a word the very shavings of Horns are profitable, sold by the sack, and sent many miles from London for the manuring of ground. The best Horns in all England. and freest to work without flaws, are what are brought out of this County to London, the Shop-General of English Industry."

from beyond the sea, make it here into Fustians to the good imployment of the poor and great improvement of the Rich therein, serving mean people for their ouisides, and their betters for the lineings of their garments. Bolton is the staple-place for this commodity, being brought thither from all parts of the country." It is in connection with Bolton and its fustian trade that worthy and careful Dr Aikin was .enabled, on what authority he does not state, to bear the following testimony to Humphrey Chetham's superior commercial morality. "Fustians," quoth the Doctor, "were manufactured about Bolton, Leigh, and the places adjacent; but Bolton was the principal market for them, where they were bought in the grey by the Manchester chapmen, who finished and sold them in the country. The fustians were made as early as the middle of the last century, when Mr Chetham, who founded the Blue-coat Hospital, was the principal buyer at Bolton. When he had made his markets, the remainder was purchased by Mr Cooke, a much less honourable dealer, who took the advantage of calling the pieces what length he pleased, and giving his own price," whereby the Bolton people no doubt arrived at the conclusion that Chetham, not Cooke, was their friend. Thus, by honourable dealing, Humphrey Chetham came to enjoy a high character for integrity, while by skill and enterprise he pretty rapidly amassed a fortune, in which achievement he seems to have been aided by judicious investments in loans on mortgage, and otherwise. If, in the intervals of business, he was frequent in his attendance at church, consorting much with pious preachers, and reading diligently in books of Puritan theology, no one, probably, ventured to accuse him of hypocrisy, and he grew steadily in the estimation of serious and respectable Lancashire. It was a county in which the middle and trading class was deeply tinged with Puritanism of the Presbyterian type.