Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

The Records of Early English Drama (REED) series aims to establish the context for the great drama of Britain's past by examining material related to drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until the mid-seventeenth century. This latest volume in the series is a collection of documentary evidence for dramatic performance, minstrelsy, and civic ceremony in Cheshire to 1642. Editors Elizabeth Baldwin and David Mills have provided introductions detailing the historical background and significance of the documents presented, as well as a full apparatus of document descriptions, explanatory and textual notes and glossaries. Cheshire completes the series of REED volumes on the West of England, and incorporates an updated version of the early Chester volume, as well as providing extensive new material on the county of Cheshire as a whole, making it an essential addition to this much-admired series.

The extraordinary story of the two early collieries at Neston, in west Cheshire, has been largely overlooked by historians. Yet, for a time the main coal mine, Ness Colliery, was more successful than most of its contemporaries in nearby south-west Lancashire and North Wales. It was the first large industrial site in west Cheshire and introduced the area’s earliest steam engine.

This collection of essays in English urban history covers a period which has been called 'the Dark Ages in English Economic History', on which it directs a revealing light. The essays range from a discussion of the role of ceremony in the civic life of Coventry at teh end of the Middle Ages to the influence of war on London Merchant class at the end of the seventeenth century. This book was first published in 1972.