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It has been partly rebuilt, but there are two chapels, one the property of the Marquis of Cholmondeley, which was built by Thomas Savage, Archbishop of York, whose heart was buried there in 1508. The other belongs to the Leghs of Lyme. A brass plate shows that the estate of Lyme was bestowed upon an ancestor for recovering a standard at the battle of Cressy.
At Lyme Hall, Cheshire, the ancient seat of the Leghs, high up in the wall of the hall is a sombre portrait which by ingenious mechanism swings out of its frame, a fixture, and gives admittance to a room on the first floor, or rather affords a means of looking down into the hall.
Farther inland, beyond the manufacturing town of Stockport, is a house of the Leghs, an immense building, more imposing than lovely in its exterior, but one of the most individual and pleasant houses in its interior as well as in its human associations. It has been altered at various times, and bears traces, like a corrected map, of each new phase of architecture for several hundred years.
At Lyme, in Cheshire, the ancient home of the Leghs, which owes its present magnificence to Leone, the Georgian architect, by whom Chatsworth was renovated, other pictures of a similar kind abound.
He was afterwards beheaded at Chester as a supporter of Richard II. Another ancestor, Sir Piers Legh, fell fighting at the battle of Agincourt. We do not know what manner of men the Leghs of Lyme of the present generation are, but certainly pride is pardonable in a family with an ancestry which took part in deeds not only recorded by history, but immortalized by Shakspeare.
At Lyme Park, the splendid old seat of the Leghs in Cheshire, "a very remarkable custom," says Lysons, "of driving the red deer, which has not been practiced in any other park, either in England or abroad, was established about a century ago by an old park-keeper, who occupied that position for seventy years, dying at over one hundred years of age.
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