Ancient Manchester centred about the parish church, afterwards collegiate, now the Cathedral, and about the manor-house that is now Chetham’s Hospital. It is still, although its pavements are crowded, and although it is neighboured by the great Exchange and Victoria railway stations, a place of narrow streets whose singular names would themselves be sufficient evidence of antiquity, even though every house in them were rebuilt. No modern authority would entitle a thoroughfare “Hanging Ditch” or “Smithy Door,” but such are the names here, together with Long Millgate, Hunt’s Bank, and Withy Grove. Rural names, most of them, and you would quest in vain for the olden watermill in Millgate, and withies grow no more in Withy Grove than hazels in the Hazel Grove of which you already know.

This spot where Cathedral and Hospital stand, and where the narrow streets with odd names plunge up and down and twist round unexpected corners, is indeed of a very high antiquity. One thousand eight hundred and thirty years ago, according to generally received opinion—that is to say, in A.D. 78—the Romans, in the reign of Agricola, came to this site, where now the tide of modern Manchester flows most strongly. They found a red, rocky bluff where is now Hunt’s Bank, overlooking the confluent rivers, and all around were forests and swamps, and doubtless the hoary ancestors of those withies after which Withy Grove was in later mediÆval times named. The sole representative nowadays near Manchester of those ancient abounding swamps is Chat Moss, now a very negligible bog indeed, but even so recently as early railway days a formidable phenomenon to be reckoned with. But the rocky ledge overlooking Irk and Irwell was not unoccupied. A tribe of Britons had established themselves there; very securely, no doubt, against foes of their own calibre, but when the Romans came and found the situation desirable, their day was done.

No account survives of the taking of that palisaded camp of the Britons. We know nothing of what happened to the aborigines, and it is so remote a speculation that I am quite sure no one in modern Manchester has ever given the matter a moment’s thought. Nor did any Roman historian narrate how many of the Empire’s tall soldiers sank under the weight of their armour and perished in the morasses at the taking of what is said to have been styled by the British Maencenion. The Romans, in their usual way, Latinised the native name for the place, and thus, from what they called Mancunium, springs, after many intermediate changes, “Manchester.”

We know nothing of all these doings, but the building of Mancunium is strikingly pictured in the first of the series of beautiful and interesting frescoes by Ford Madox Brown in the Manchester Town Hall, and with as certain and matter-of-fact a touch as though it had been drawn from personal observation. It was the Pre-Raphaelite way. In the picture you see the toiling slaves, working on the massive walls enclosing the Roman city; a helmeted centurion on the topmost windy height directing their operations. I do not know which impress me most, the cast-iron folds of his wind-blown cloak or the gigantic muscles of his bare legs, standing out like penny rolls. They were a great people, the Romans, and their muscular calf-development was apparently astounding.

The early “historians” of Manchester were, however, not content with such history as this, and loved to tell a tale of the marvellous: how their city originated with a giant, Sir Tarquin, among whose peculiarities was that of having a little child every morning for breakfast, just as a modern might take anchovy, on toast. At last he was slain by Sir Lancelot de Lake, one of King Arthur’s knights, whereupon the population, relieved of this check upon it, began to increase, and here we have now, after the passing of sixteen or seventeen centuries, an assemblage, including Salford, of about three quarters of a million souls. An ancient carved wooden boss in the ceiling of the committee-room of Chetham’s Hospital alludes to this legend, and displays a giant head devouring an infant.

And so we pass on to the Norman period, and to the time when the family of Greslet, or Gresley, acquired the manor of Manchester from that great personage, Roger of Poictou, to whom a manor more or less, in all the great tract of the country that was his between the Ribble and the Mersey, was a small matter. For centuries the Gresleys retained their holding, which passed from them at last by the marriage of Joan Gresley to one of the West family. Thenceforward, the Wests, ennobled as Barons de la Warre, owned the manorial rights of Manchester, until 1579, when they sold them for £3,000 to one John Lacy, who in his turn, in 1596, sold to Nicholas Mosley, alderman of London, at a mere £500 profit. After holding the manor for two hundred and forty-five years, the Mosley family, in the person of Sir Oswald Mosley, sold it to the newly created Corporation of Manchester for £200,000. It was a huge sum, but Sir Oswald was scarcely wise in his generation.

Strange though it may seem in a place to outward appearance so modern as Manchester, the old manor-house of the Gresleys and the De la Warres still survives in the very centre of the great city. It is, indeed, identical with none other than the range of buildings long past occupied as Chetham’s Hospital and Library adjoining the Cathedral, and here is the later story of it.

The last of the Manchester De la Warres was a man with an enthusiasm for the religious life. In 1373 he became rector of Manchester, and in 1422 refounded the parish church that is now the Cathedral, making it collegiate, and giving his baronial hall, hard by, for the purposes of his College of priests. That establishment was disestablished and disendowed in the time of Edward the Sixth, and the College buildings granted to the Earl of Derby, who used this ancient manorial residence as his town house. His successor, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, re-endowed the College, which was again suppressed in the dawn of the Commonwealth era, when the church became a Presbyterian meeting-house.

Then it was that Humphrey Chetham, Manchester’s most famous benefactor, already planning the establishment of a free school, saw the College buildings, standing empty and forlorn, ready to his hand. He died in 1653, and so did not live to see the beginning of his school; but by his will of 1650 had appointed trustees for the purchase of the College, and at last, in 1658, his school of “Chetham’s Hospital” was opened. He directed that, “Ye boys shall be taught ye reading, ye writing, ye summes, and all kinds of ye ingenuitie,” and his will continues to be observed on the same spot, and in the identical buildings, to this day; the Chetham scholars even wearing the self-same picturesque but neat costume they wore when the institution was founded: dark-blue cloth jacket and knee-breeches, with silver buttons, and a queer little muffin-shaped cap.

The Hospital and Library buildings suffer shockingly as to their exterior by the sooty atmosphere, but the various interiors are wonderfully interesting, intrinsically, and additionally from their situation amid such circumstances as those of a gigantic commercial city wherein cloistered buildings, reasonably to be expected at Oxford or Cambridge, are not looked for. The group of buildings has survived three uses: as manor-house of the baronial period; as the home of a religious fraternity; and for two hundred and fifty years as a school. The old hospitium, or guest-house, is the boys’ dormitory, where a hundred neat little cots are to be seen in long perspectives: the ancient kitchen that furnished curious, and often nasty, dinners to the ancient lords of the place and supplied the priests of the College with their not too cloistral meals—save for very shame their abstinent Friday fare of fish—is still in use, and sends forth the most appetising scents about midday; and the refectory is now partly the Governor’s quarters; while the Baronial Hall, where De la Warres held their very considerable state, is now the dining-hall. It is a noble apartment, this ancient hall, with its walls of thick masonry, its Gothic windows, and timbered roof. A bust of Chetham is placed on the wall over what was once a fireplace replacing the more ancient central hearth or brazier in the middle of the Hall. Electric lighting replaces older methods of illumination, and everywhere reveals with fine effect ancient panelling, painted devices and pictures. Over the cloister walks, in what was in the period of the collegiate establishment the priests’ dormitory, Chetham’s Library is housed in ancient presses greatly resembling those in the Bodleian at Oxford and the University Library at Cambridge. What was once the Warden’s room of the priestly establishment is now the Reading Room. To read scholarly books, to engage in the pursuit of curious knowledge in the Reading Room of Chetham’s Library is surely a wonderful privilege, for in this exquisite room, richly panelled in oak, with striped black-and-white plaster and timbered roof, and with gorgeously coloured and gilt wall paintings, the notorious Dr. Dee, Warden of the College in Elizabethan times, entertained among others Sir Walter Raleigh; and no doubt gazed into his mystic crystal globe here, on his guest’s behalf, to see what the future held in store for that courtier, warrior, explorer, and adventurer. Did it reveal nothing of that grim cell in the Tower where that unfortunate man was to spend years of captivity? Did no inimical shadows wax and wane in that crystal, to warn him that Tower Hill and the headman’s axe would cut his thread?

If historic associations sufficed to bring eloquent writing into being, then what is now the Reading Room should be the parent of much literature; but the student resorting hither will have the place very much to himself, save for occasional parties of gaping visitors shown round by a Chetham’s schoolboy, for Chetham’s Library is rich rather in black-letter tomes, and in works that research feeds fat upon, than in current literature. One would not wish this cloistral seclusion amended. To find in Manchester, whose every byway seethes with life, a corner not already occupied, a spot where you can hear the ticking of a clock, is too delightful to be forgone. There is, indeed, only one other spot in Manchester where something the same conditions prevail, and that is the great palatial building of Ryland’s Library, where inestimably rare books, manuscripts, and bindings are to be found.

Manchester Cathedral adjoins Chetham’s Hospital. Cathedral though it be now, by virtue of the creation of the modern Bishopric of Manchester, the building is but a glorified parish church, and not any of the many additions made to it of recent years suffice to render it anything else. It remains, as it were, an incidental and not essential feature of the great city.

I suppose—the intense rivalry between Manchester and Liverpool being a thing to reckon with in so many directions—Manchester will not long remain content with this condition of affairs, especially since it has become known that the new Liverpool Cathedral, rising now from its foundations, is to outrange all others for size. The stranger to Manchester would certainly never imagine that the church he perceives, immediately outside the Exchange station, was of Cathedral rank; and indeed it is so only by reason of modern ecclesiastical arrangements, made expedient by the growth of great modern industrial communities.

Manchester was in the diocese of Lichfield until 1541, when it was transferred to Chester; but since 1847 it has been an independent see. Manchester people have had amply sufficient time to realise this added dignity, but the stranger fails altogether to assimilate the idea, and although he perceives the Bishop to be full-fledged—except that he is a “Lord” Bishop only by election—cannot help observing that his Cathedral is but a suffragan. It would be an imposing building in a smaller place, but here it is dwarfed by the neighbouring railway stations and the towering piles of warehouses. It looks, as already remarked, nothing more than a parish church, and a very black parish church, too. It is chiefly of Perpendicular Gothic, but little of the exterior is really old, the tower having been rebuilt in 1868, and many features added since. The beauty of the church is chiefly within. It is a dark interior, but the nave, with its tall slender columns of red sandstone, is particularly graceful. This is no place for an architectural history of the structure, but at least the ancient carved miserere seats may be mentioned, particularly as they are among the finest in the country, for craftsmanship and fertility of invention. Like—yet how unlike!—the pictorial advertisements of a patent medicine which here shall be nameless, “every picture tells a story,” and much entertainment may be derived from these quaintly humorous designs. The three legs of Man, shown upon one, allude to the connection of the Stanleys, Earls of Derby (who were Kings of Man), with the “old church,” as Manchester men still affectionately style the Cathedral. An elephant with a castle on his back is seen on another, but the elephant’s legs are jointed like those of a horse, and obviously the designer knew little of the structure of elephants. Another subject is that of the fox walking off with a goose. Two others display the twin sports of bull-and bear-baiting. A very humorous example displays a pedlar, fallen asleep by the way, robbed by monkeys, who are taking the trinkets and clothing out of his pack, and trying them on, while one other is busily searching in his hair for the usual game that monkeys in the Zoological Gardens may any day be observed seeking. Another very elaborate carving represents a sow playing the bagpipes, and a group of little pigs dancing to the music. A pilgrim engaged in drinking and accidentally letting fall the jug, is a scene unfortunately mutilated. A game of backgammon in an inn; the execution of the fox by owls and rooks; the hare’s revenge, where the hare is seen to be roasting the hunter on a spit; and a stag-hunting scene complete the set. In this last, the hunt is represented as at an end, or “done”; and probably is intended as a pun upon the name of the first Warden of the College, Huntingdon.