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The anomalies of the low estimate of £600 and young Gilbert’s role still await an explanation and a few other anomalies need also to be taken into account.
How does the following clause in Myles’s will fit in with his son having been awarded £600 a year earlier?
I have given to my son Josias Standish upon his marriage one young horse five sheep and two heiffers which I must upon that contract of marriage make forty pounds yett not knowing whether the estate will bear it att present. (Clause 4, Myles's will, 7 March 1656.)
If there was any danger of the fine in 1655 not being paid, why did he not mention this in his will, along with his complaint about the “surreptitious detention” of the lands based on Ormskirk?
Why did Farrer put two and two together in the way he did? His total text in the section on Duxbury referring to the first case is:
His [Richard’s] will, made in 1657 (codicil 1662) and proved at York, recites the settlement of Duxbury and his other manors in favour of his eldest son Richard, &c. The fine of 1655 probably relates to this settlement; Pal. of Lanc. Feet of F. bdle. 155, m. 165. (Farrer, VCH, vol. 6, p. 210, note 9.),
which seems a reasonable conclusion, and I concur, but as Farrer wrote about the 1655 case under Duxbury and the 1657 case under Heath Charnock, he seems not to have connected the two. He also assumed all along that Colonel Richard was a younger son of Thomas the M.P. (the Richard who was buried at Chorley in 1628), which makes nonsense of Gilbert’s claim against Richard in 1657.