Noake's Worcestershire Page 125

DROITWICH. 125

which has been placed in the piscina. Encaustic tiles and old gloss, too, may be seen. Hard by the church is St. Peter's Hall, a singularly interesting half-timbered mansion. This was the original seat of the Nash family. Dr. Nash's daughter marrying Lord Somers, the property went to that family. The old house was sold by the present Earl Somers to Mr. T. Wilson, who is restoring it in the old style. St. Peter's parish is very curiously constituted; it consists of the tailt of several farms, the farm-houses being all, with one exception, in other parishes. This exceptional case is Egg Hill, close to Hampton Lovett church. The principal landowners are Sir John Pakington, Mr. Galton, Mr. T. Wilson, and Mr. J. Wilson. Some of the cottages of the poor in the town are in an exceedingly bad state, and the occupants more or less demoralized. Their chief occupations are salt-making, labouring, boating, tanning, pan-smithing, and artisanship.

Among the other institutions of Drottwich is the Coventry Charity, a hospital or almshouse for old men and women, and for educating, clothing, and apprenticing boys and girls, and the charity appears to be in excellent order. Talbot Bafker left i'20 a year for a, school, but it is paid to the National School, and twenty boys are educated free for it. Dissent is represented in Droitwich by a Wesleyan chapel and a room for Plymouth Brethren. The former was erected in I860, in the Early English style I The Wesleyans first commenced operations at Droitwich in 1797. Quakerism seems to have died a natural death here, but this sect made considerable noise in the seventeenth century. John Roberts and John Tombs, we read in the county records, were imprisoned and excommunicated for exercising their trade at Droitwich on a Sunday, refusing to go to church and to have their children baptised; and Fox, in his journal, tells us that "W. Cartwright, at a friend's house, being moved of the Lord to speak a few words before he sat to supper, there came an informer, and stood hearkening under the