It has been remarked that the dissolution of the monasteries amounted to an infinite series of adjustments. This could hardly be more true than it is in the case of what happened to the lands of the dissolved abbey of St. Werburgh in Chester—a city about one hundred and seventy miles northwest of London, situated in a section of the country that was, at least compared with much of the south, uncouth and backward. Here the process of adjustment was so protracted, and in the end productive of so much acrimony, that the intervention of the highest authority in the land—that of the queen herself—was directly necessary for its successful completion, and, even with that intervention, a final concord was scarcely achieved before the 16th century gave way to the seventeenth. In Cheshire, the upheaval caused by the sudden disappearance of the regular Church was long in settling down. Settlement there was, eventually, but it was so slow in coming that one might consider amending the definition of the dissolution mentioned above to read: an infinite series of adjustments, almost infinitely prolonged.

What happened in Cheshire can be seen from at least two viewpoints. It can be viewed as providing spectacular evidence as to who benefited the most from Henry VIII's attack upon the ecclesiastical institution; or it can be cited as a case study of just how the central government exercised its control over local affairs during the latter sixteenth century. Here I am concerned with both.