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They appear, however, to have been both put up at the same date, 26th Henry VIII. A.D. M.CCCCC. XXXIV.

David ap Edmund, father of Edward, the other party to the deed, ranks among the classic Welsh poets, and several of his compositions are extant. I have not seen them, and I believe they are not printed; but they are to be found among the valuable collection of Welsh MSS. formerly at Hengwrt, and now, by bequest from Sir Robert Vaughan, belonging to my friend Mr. Wynne of Peniarth. I observe that he is among the verbal authorities quoted in the Welsh dictionary of the learned Dr. Richards. His house and land were by the mere-side at Hanmer; he is said by some to have been a member of the family, and the position of his abode rather warrants this idea. There is a legend that being an owner of a portion of the water, all the rights in which were bought up by Richard Hanmer of Hanmer and his son Sir Thomas, he sold what belonged to him to the former, for a noble, but I am sorry I cannot trace him, as I could desire.

Outside the wall of the south aisle, and nearly about its centre, there is an oblong stone tomb, with the hat of some ecclesiastic dignitary yet faintly visible upon it, and this tradition ascribes to the architect of the church, but his name has passed away. It is always good to pause before tradition; unless we stop to listen, we cannot hear the whispers of the wind. I here accordingly pause over these gleanings of local antiquity, to collect which was first and frequently suggested to me by the late Bishop of St. Asaph. He was long our diocesan, and grew into one of our oldest friends, and he

has not only torn his household coat, but all fragments of his name, I cannot identify. John of Bettisfield, however, whose daughter and heiress Joan married Mr. Fowler of St. Thomas, was living at that period.

rarely came to Bettisfield without endeavouring to persuade me to attempt something of the kind. I will only say that I have not done so in the spirit of those who have no other friends than their ancestors; rather, I hope, that my pages may conduce to some not impartial recollections of me, within the locality they relate to, in future time.

1 "De tous les siens n'aimer que ses aïeux."-DE Beranger.

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BEGIN this portion of local notes with the trees, old and young, of which the more I plant, the more I find oak and beech and fir the best suited to our soil and climate; the

lime also grows very well, shooting up quickly, sweet with its delicate flowers; it might be fancied likely to be shortlived, yet it seems to last as long as any of them: I have seen one near Nuremberg to which tradition assigns the date of a thousand years. Standing in ancient woods, or in groups about our dwellings, trees are among the simplest and the most beautiful of our connections with the past; the

hands of those we reckon from have planted, their eyes have gazed upon them; they have seen the stars in winter through their leafless boughs, and have heard the murmuring and the singing of the birds when summer clothed the branches; good tidings and the reverse have been heard beneath their shade; their stems typify the firmness with which we should meet either fortune. They will even endure ill-treatment at our hands and recover from it, a thing most arduous and rare in human nature.

We have not now many old trees; nevertheless the oaks which were long growing in park and hedgerow here have left their memory behind them, and I have heard that they were what first caught the eye of a very fair lady, whose date here marks the eighteenth century, with which we are now beginning, I mean the former Duchess of Grafton, when she came to Bettisfield, upon her marriage with Sir Thomas Hanmer. But there were legends of their size and number of a much later date, for they lasted into this century, and even into my life, though I do not remember them; until in the course of the great French war they went the way of all timber, leaving us some younger ones for futurity, to which I may claim to have added my proportion, including the oak avenue towards Hanmer and the Mere, and we have yet some large trees too aged for the axe, whose hollow trunks and branches rear and shelter many generations of owls. "Out sterte the owl with Benedicite," says Chaucer in his "Court of Love;" but a few years ago there was a lively battle between some bees and owls for possession of a tree, in which the bees came off the victors, and the owls, who were not the assailants, had to muffle up their feathers and come out like any Irish Churchmen. Honey was one

of the accounted profits of woods in feudal times, and I have seen a bright comb hanging from the smooth bough of a young oak by the park side, as well as those which habitually are built in the interstices of the great old ones in the flower garden. The lady of whom tradition tells that she was pleased with the sight of these ancient trees was Isabella, daughter of Lord Arlington, King Charles the Second's minister, and widow of the son of that king, first called Lord Harry,' and afterwards Duke of Grafton. She had been married to him for her inheritance, still the main property of the Fitzroys, almost as a child. At her second marriage she was a woman of great beauty, as her picture by Lely in the library at Bettisfield shows. Swift, however, who could not speak well of any one, except he expected to get something by it, cavils in one of his coarse vain letters at her personal appearance, as he saw her towards the end of Queen Anne's reign, particularly alluding to a towering headdress that she wore; and, as to that article of apparel, he may have been right enough, but the great painter has drawn her far otherwise. Euston belonged to her, and afterwards to her descendants the Fitzroy family;

In King James the Second's Memoirs, written by himself and printed by Macpherson, there is a note, July 15th, 1672: "Buckingham proposed to the King if he would break off the marriage with Lord Harry and Arlington's daughter, and so get Lady Piercy for Lord Harry; but the King answered it was too late, the other being concluded." In 1692 some one persuaded the Duchess, then a widow, to ask for a patent to coin two and three-penny pieces of "coarse silver," like Dutch stivers, which was refused; the lowering of the value of money by one-fourth since the reign of King Henry VIII., so that one shilling of his time was equal to four of King William's, is mentioned in reply by the Secretary of the Treasury. See Calendar of State Papers.

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