CHAPTER I.
AN EXECUTION IN MANCHESTER, AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
More than two hundred and thirty-five years ago, or, to speak with greater precision, in 1605, at the latter end of June, it was rumoured one morning in Manchester that two seminary priests, condemned at the late assizes under the severe penal enactments then in force against the Papists, were about to suffer death on that day.

Attracted by the report, large crowds flocked towards the place of execution, which, in order to give greater solemnity to the spectacle, had been fixed at the southern gate of the old Collegiate Church, where a scaffold was erected.

Near it was a large blood-stained block, the use of which will be readily divined, and adjoining the block, upon a heap of blazing coals, smoked a caldron filled with boiling pitch, intended to receive the quarters of the miserable sufferers.
The place was guarded by a small band of soldiers, fully accoutred in corslets and morions, and armed with swords, half-pikes, and calivers.
Upon the steps of the scaffold stood the executioner,--a square-built, ill-favoured personage, busied in arranging a bundle of straw upon the boards.

He was dressed in a buff jerkin, and had a long-bladed, two-edged knife thrust into his girdle.

Besides these persons, there was a pursuivant,--an officer appointed by the Privy Council to make search throughout the provinces for recusants, Popish priests, and other religious offenders.