LIVERPOOL
Ireland is one of the last large inhabited islands in the world without a tunnel or bridge connection to a continent. In ancient times it was known by the various names of Ierna, Juverna, Hibernia, Ogygia, and Inisfail or the Isle of Destiny. It was also called Banba and Erin, and lastly Scotia, or the country of the Scots. Beginning with the time of Abraham, several successive waves of colonization rolled westward to its shores. First came Parthalon with 1000 followers; after which came the Nemedians, the Firbolgs, and the Tuatha-de-Danann. The Milesians came from Scythia; and from that country to Egypt, from Egypt to Spain, from Spain to Ireland. Some of the Firbolgs, it is said, crossed the seas to the Isles of Arran, where they built the fort of Dun Engus but the Dananns, arrived the builders of those prehistoric sepulchral mounds by the Boyne, at Dowth, Knowth, and Newgrange. In 1065, the yeare of St. Edward's death, things were no better in England than on the Continent of Europe. Thus understood, England (taken at the same time as including the Principality of Wales) is all that part of the Island of Great Britain (Scotland) which lies south of the Solway Firth, the River Liddell, the Cheviot Hills, and the River Tweed.
The Middle Ages; a term commonly used to designate that period of European history between the Fall of the Roman Empire and about the middle of the fifteenth century. The precise dates of the beginning, culmination, and end of the Middle Ages are more or less arbitrarily assumed according to the point of view adopted. The period is usually considered to open with those migrations of the German Tribes which led to the destruction of the Roman Empire in the West in 375, when the Huns fell upon the Gothic tribes north of the Black Sea and forced the Visigoths over the boundaries of the Roman Empire on the lower Danube. The close of the Middle Ages is also variously fixed; some make it coincide with the rise of Humanism and the Renaissance in Italy, in the fourteenth century; with the Fall of Constantinople, in 1453; with the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492; or, again, with the great religious schism of the sixteenth century. Originally Lancashire belonged to the Kingdom of Northumbria and the Diocese of York, but in 642 Southern Lancashire became part of Mercia and of the Diocese of Lichfield. Henry VIII, in 1542, made Chester, including South Lancashire, into a separate diocese. In Queen Elizabeth's time it is the Protestant Bishop of Chester who complains that there is a confederacy of Lancashire Papists, and that "from Warrington all along the sea-coast of Lancashire, the gentlemen were of that faction and withdraw themselves from religion" (i.e., from attending the Protestant service). For this crime fifty Lancashire Catholic gentlemen were arrested in one night, and in 1587 six hundred Catholic recusants were prosecuted.
At Rossall, in North Lancashire, was born Cardinal Allen, the founder of the Seminary of Douai, which in five years sent a hundred priests to face the martyr's death in England. Amongst the Lancashire martyrs were the Ven. George Haydock, b. 1556 at Cottam Hall, Preston, and martyred in 1589 at the age of 28 at Tyborne; Ven. John Thulis, b. at Upholland, near Wigan, and martyred at Lancaster in 1616, Ven. Edmund Arrowsmith, b. at Haydock, near St. Helens in 1585, and in 1628, at the age of 43, martyred at Lancaster. His "holy hand" is still devoutly kept in the church of Ashton-in-Makerfield. The town of Douai, in the department of Nord, France, is on the River Scarpe, some twenty miles south of Lille. It contains about 30,000 inhabitants and was formerly the seate of a university. It was strongly fortified, and the old ramparts have only been removed in recent years. The town flourished in the Middle Ages, and the church of Notre-Dame dates from the twelfth century. To English Catholics, the name Douai will always be bound up with the college founded by Cardinal Allen during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, where the majority of the clergy were educated in penal times, and to which the preservation of the Catholic religion in England was largely due.
In addition to the Isle of Man it contains all North Lancashire (Amounderness and Lonsdale Hundreds), and the western portion of South Lancashire (West Derby and Leyland Hundreds), whilst the eastern portion of South Lancashire (Salford and Blackburn Hundreds), constitutes the Diocese of Salford. King John's Charter of 1207 created the Borough of Liverpool and by the middle of the 16th century the population was still only around 500. In the 17th century there was slow progress in trade and population growth. A number of battles for the town were waged during the English Civil War, including an eighteen-day siege in 1644.