• 10 PARISH CHURCH OF WEAVERHAM

i G34. Payde for dynners and drink for parishioners loading flagged for die church £1 2s. od. Payde to masons for flagges and workmanship £3 '9^s- fid.

Payde to a workman for six days work to helpe the masons to carrie the flagges and carrie earth out of the church 5s. od.

Payde for lyme and for carriage of the same from Chester, and for Thomas Saddler for his workmen to whiten the church 13s. 3d.

1634. Scats first put into die church at a cost of£i6 is. 8d.* ■

1635. Spent at some several meetings of the parishioners

to agree about improvinge die scats of the church is. 6d.

Payde for dressing the pulpitt and font in cullor 2s. 2d.

1636. Payde to - for repairing the roofe of the

church £\ 2s. 5d.

Payde to the joyner for making the pulpitt stears and for a pillar for the same and for nayles and 3d. spent about the same 8s. 2d.

1639. Payde for a load of lyme at Chester for pointing the church and steeple 4s. 2d.

Payde at Chester buying the same 3d.

Payde to workmen for poyntinge the church and steeple £1 os. 1 id.

Payde to John Mort for his wages for poynting the church and steeple and odier work £1 is. 6d.

These items together with Isaac Johnson's testimony are I think pretty conclusive evidence of the truth of my contention that the church as we see it to-day is

* These seals would appear to be extra to the pews of the gentry, since a document of 1652 just published (1940) by the Record Soc. of L. & C. (Vol. 94, p. 159) refers to "pews and other seats." This is a petition to the Justices in Quarter Sessions at Knutsford on 20th Jan., 1651 /2, wherein Robert Warburton, the patron, and the Churchwardens complain that having been at great cost in the erection of a schoolhouse at Weaverham " not long before the beginning of these late distractions in this Nation," (i.e., in 1638) they suffered loss at the hands of the Cavaliers who defaced the schoolhouse and broke down both windows and doors and destroyed the seats so that the school could no longer be kept there. In consequence the school had for a long time been kept in the church, with the result that much damage had been done, " the windows thereof being broken, pewes pulled down, and other seats much wronged." They were authorized to make a lay for repairing the church and the schoolhouse. An earlier document cited in the same volume (p. 95) shows that the schoolhouse was first erected in 1638.