PALLISERS

The author's "Palliser" forebears sat at their looms for at least two hundred and fifty years, mostly in a North Riding village called South Kilvington, near Thirsk. They were smallholders too, of course, and had their vegetable garden and a cow or two to improve their lives, but they were proud of their trade and always called themselves weavers, first and foremost. The Pallisers wove linen, rather than wool, and the earliest generations of those presented here were also "Papist recusants". After exploring six generations of weavers, an appendix to this book tracks three more generations up to the marriage of the author's great-grandparents in 1864. The story opens with a Roman Catholic martyr, a cousin from a nearby village, who was executed for his faith in 1600.