Legh of Lyme Muniments

Date range: 12th-19th centuries

Medium: Archive

Extensive family papers of the Legh family of Lyme Park near Stockport, Cheshire. These comprise muniments of title (including large numbers of medieval deeds and charters), 17th- and 18th-century manorial court records, original architect’s plans of Lyme Hall by Giacomo Leoni, surveys, wills, abstracts of title, estate correspondence, accounts and other papers.

The muniments relate to:

• the Lancashire estates (the manors of Newton and Golborne, and property in Newton-le-Willows, Golborne, Lowton, Haydock, Ashton-in-Makerfield, Ince-in-Makerfield, Warrington, Burtonwood, Poulton and Fearnhead, Bold, Pemberton and Dalton);
• the Cheshire estates (property in Lyme Handley, Disley, Pott Shrigley, Macclesfield, Grappenhall, Norbury, Marple, and Broomedge and Heatley in Lymm).

There is an extensive and important selection of personal correspondence, dating from the 16th century onwards, including correspondence with members of the Gerard, Egerton and Chicheley families. Particularly significant are a number of 17th-century letters written by or to women. The correspondence is also relevant to studies of 18th-century Northern politics.

Other archives of the Legh family are held at the Greater Manchester County Record Office and at Stockport Archive Service.

Further information:

• Partially listed: a 19th-century handwritten catalogue of deeds and a typescript list of correspondence are available via the Special Collections reading rooms.
• See also Catherine Danter, ‘The eighteenth-century rebuilding of Lyme Park, Cheshire, and the Leoni Collection at the John Rylands University Library of Manchester’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, vol. 82, no. 1 (2000), pp. 49–80.

Location:

• The John Rylands Library, Deansgate  [Map]
• Find out how to use the reading rooms in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library