Cockersand;[1] and at the dissolution of monasteries it became the property of Henry VIII., who in 1543 granted it to William Eccleston, of Eccleston, gentleman.[2] The Grange descended to Thomas, the son, and afterwards to Adam, the grandson, of William Eccleston. Adam Eccleston died sometime a little later than 1597. The estate after his decease passed through several hands in rapid succession, and in 1614 was sold by William Ireland, gent., to William Leigh, B.D., clerk in holy orders and rector of Standish. Theophilus Leigh, the eldest son of that gentleman, resided at Singleton Grange, and married Clare, daughter of Thomas Brooke, of Norton, Cheshire, by whom he had one son, named William. William Leigh succeeded to the Grange on the death of his father in 1658, and espoused Margaret, daughter of Edward Chisenhall, of Chisenhall, Lancashire, and had issue, Charles and Edward.
Charles Leigh, the elder of the two sons, became celebrated as a physician and student of natural history and antiquities. He was born at the Grange in 1662, and at the age of 21 graduated as B.A. at the University of Oxford; afterwards he removed to Cambridge to study medicine, and in 1690 obtained the degree of M.D. In 1685 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He married Dorothy, daughter of Edward Shuttleworth, of Larbrick, and practised as a physician both in London and in the neighbourhood of his birthplace, on one occasion, according to his own version, performing a wonderful cure on Alexander Rigby, of Layton Hall. His published works were—Physiologia Lancastriensis, in 1691, and the Natural History of Lancashire, Cheshire, and the Peak of Derbyshire, with an account of the British, Phœnician, Armenian, Greek, and Roman Antiquities in those parts, in 1700, of which latter Dr. Whittaker remarks:—"Had this doctor filled his whole book, as he has done nearly one-half of it, with medical cases, it might have been of some use; but how, with all possible allowances for the blindness and self-partiality of human nature, a man should have thought himself qualified to write and to publish critical remarks on a subject of which he understood not the elementary principles, it is really difficult to conceive."[3]
