Greatness with a modest eye Verye of all this I am afraid is now to be found. Thirty years ago the upper part of the stone was still lying in the chapel liten on the ground on the north side of the ruins, the lower part, according to a pamphlet written in 1820, was used as a threshold to a farmhouse near. Though the Cufaudes had been 500 years at Cufaude, the pedigree only goes back to Edward IV. There is something striking and interesting in the inscriptions, partly, perhaps, arising from the obscurity of these unheard of Cufaudes contrasting with the illustrious and pathetic family history of the poor princess who found or was constrained to make her home in that "moated grange" buried deep in the woodlands. She was put aside and forgotten so entirely that this tombstone is the only record of her existence. The Countess of Salisbury and Sir Richard Pole had four sons and one daughter. She was born 1468 or 1469; she married about 1490. She was made Countess of Salisbury 1513. Her father was murdered 1477. Her brother, the Earl of Warwick, was beheaded 1499. Her eldest son, Henry Lord Montague, was beheaded 1539, and she herself, 1541. Her second son, Geoffrey, of Lordington, in Sussex, had two sons and five daughters. One of them married Sir Anthony Fortescue. This Geoffrey was the only son of the family who deserved to have his head cut off, for he saved his own neck by turning king's evidence, and thereby caused the death of his brother and that of the father-in-law of his daughter, Sir Adrienne Fortescue; but he himself, after passing some months in the Tower, was let out again for a time. His sons, Arthur and Edmund, are by Dixon and others spoken of as the sons of Lord Montague; but as Edmund was not born until 1541, and Lord Montague was executed in 1539; it is impossible he should have been father to him, and therefore to Arthur, as no one disputes Edmund and Arthur being brothers. It is not difficult to perceive how the marriage between Marie and William Cufaude, the younger son of an obscure country squire of very moderate means, was brought about. Lord Sandys was high in Henry's favour, and his wife was a relative of the Poles, being a cousin of the Countess of Salisbury. In their charge Marie might have been placed when her father was put into the Tower and her uncle executed, and might have been sent by them to the seclusion of the Vyne. Lord Sandys might have been even ordered by the jealous king to find for her a husband of too little rank and consequence to be stirred by ambition to claim the crown for his wife, and found in the younger of the two sons of his neighbour just what he had wanted. Perhaps Marie had the choice as to whether it should be the elder or the younger of the brothers, but probably, bon gré mal gré, she had to take one. She chose William, and Simeon, the elder, appears never to have married-perhaps he was bound over not to do so. I have called the Cufaudes a family of moderate means, and, unless they had estates elsewhere than at Sherborne St. John they must have been. Had they possessed any large amount of property, their name would hardly so entirely have passed away. Like the old family of the A'Bears, in Berkshire, who have left in Bearwood and Bear Ash, Bear Hatch and Bear Hill, Bear Place and Billing Bear, manifold traces of their former importance, I think we should have found something more than one meadow still called "Cuffords" to tell us how rich and great they once had been. The William Cufaude who married Marie Pole was the second son of William Cufaude and Anne, daughter and heir of William Wood, and grandson of another William Cufaude and Ellen, daughter of Richard Kingsmill of Sidmonton, a family of greater antiquity even than his own, and still extant. It is difficult to fix any date for Marie's marriage, but I think it might have been about 1541 or 1542, when the imprisonment of her father, the execution of her uncle, Lord Montague, and that of her poor old grandmother, must have rendered some refuge for her necessary. Perhaps the unimportance and powerlessness of her husband, and the obscurity of her home, enabled her to feel her own head pretty safe on her shoulders, and reconciled her to her banishment from her own royal relatives. Twice, however, it is almost certain she must have come across them. When Queen Mary and Philip stopped a night at Basing House, on their way from Southampton, the Cufaudes must have been summoned to meet them, and both king and queen would be sure to be gracious to the niece of their good friend and very dear cousin, Cardinal Pole. Probably it was at Marie's instance that the said Cardinal, her uncle, was induced to present and enforce a petition from the people of Basingstoke for the re-establishment of the Guild of the Holy Ghost, and the restoration of its property, which had been seized by the Crown-to which petition the king and queen agreed, "considering that the Holy Ghost Chapel and its cemetery are places in which the bodies of the inhabitants of the said town have some time been buried." Perhaps Marie dreamt also that something would be done to ennoble her husband and her two boys. But Mary's reign was short. Four years after Elizabeth's accession, Arthur and Edmund Pole (or de la Pole, as Dixon writes it) raised some troops to put the Queen of Scots on the throne in the event of her death, which some foolish prediction led them to anticipate, intending Edmund should marry Mary, and make Arthur, Duke of Clarence. The plot was discovered, the two young men taken just as they were escaping to Flanders, and both were tried and condemned to death. But Elizabeth contented herself with committing them and their father to the Beauchamp Tower and keeping them there for the rest of their lives. They all three cut inscriptions on their prison-walls, still legible. One of Edmund's is the earliest, and dated 1562. Arthur, when they had. been in the tower six years, wrote a second, to wit: "A passage perillous maketh a porte pleasant. A.D. 1568, Arthur Poole, Æ. 37." The two brothers died in their prison, and were buried in St. Peter's Church. If ever Marie, their sister, had grieved over the homeliness and obscurity of her lot, their fate must have taught her to be thankful for her own. The Tudor jealousy of the Plantagenets was so strong that even the ladies of the race were regarded with suspicion, and her brother's issue failing, Marie Cufaude's royal claims might have excited uneasiness. I think, therefore, when Elizabeth visited the second Lord Sandys at the Vyne it is most probable her cousins on the other side of the road kept themselves out of her sight. Or did Marie, like Queen Esther, say, "If I perish, I perish," and, taking her life in her hand, kneel at her feet and plead for her poor old father and her two brothers; and was it in compliance with such prayers that they were suffered to live on together and the sentence of death left unexecuted? Our woodland princess and William Cufaude had two sons, of whom the youngest, Anthony, married "the daughter and coheir of William Spencer, Yorkshire," and left a son William, of which William there is no further trace. Perhaps he settled on his moiety of the Spencer property. The eldest son, Alexander, married "Jane, daughter of Richard Walle, and coheir of them of Lancashire." He was the father of Simeon, "the man of exemplar virtue and patience in grievous crosses," and survived him several years. To this Alexander and his wife there is no monument extant, neither is there to Marie Pole and her husband. Probably such monuments were within the chapel, and were more or less destroyed when it was unroofed and otherwise mutilated by the Roundheads. Simeon left five sons, one of whom, Major Edward Cufaude, was killed at the taking of Basing House. To the second, John, is the only other tombstone which yet remains : Here rests The body of John Cufaude of Cufaude descended from the Ancient Familie of the Cufaudes of Cufaude in the County of Southampton Esq. who married Anne Hunt one of the coheiresses To Roger Hunt of Chawson in the County of Bedford Esq. Hee dyed the 23d of Nov. 1701 Cujus animæ miseratur Deus This Monument was dedicated to his memory by his loving wife. This John must have died at a great age, and could not have been much less than ninety. He was born in the reign of James I. and died the year before Queen Anne came to the throne. He saw the Vyne pass from the hands of their old neighbours, the Lord Sandys, into those of Chaloner Chute, Speaker to the House of Commons, a Parliament man and a Protestant, with whom he could have had no sympathy. Did he foresee that his own estates would follow, and his own name become extinct? Probably he survived his brothers, and had no children; and perhaps it was at the death of his wife that the property was sold. Their arms were: Argent, barry of five, gules; in dexter chief a canton of the second. As far as Hampshire is concerned, I believe there are no descendants in the male line of this ancient family, but there may possibly be elsewhere from the William the son of Anthony, who married the coheir of William Spencer. Does any one know what became of the other daughters of Geoffrey Pole? One married Fortescue and one Cufaude, and perhaps one was the original of the beforementioned portrait of a nun; but that leaves two unaccounted for. Also, who was Geoffrey Pole's wife? But I have a third question to ask, more important than these two, and that is, Is it absolutely certain who the Sir Richard Pole was to whom the Countess of Salisbury was married? Sir have inherited accounts for the extreme jealousy with which the Tudors regarded them. The obvious meaning of the words of the inscription is that Richard Pole himself was cousin to the king. It was, however, the fashion to impute to Henry his wife's descent; and the meaning may be, that Sir Richard Pole was his cousin german, because he had married the Countess of Salisbury, who was cousin german to the queen. The absence of the prefix de la from the name is of no consequence, as it is evident from the Paston Letters they were often omitted, and that it was written simply Pole. I may mention also, as proof of a close connection with the Suffolks, that Margaret's youngest child, the Cardinal, was born at Stourton Castle, Lady Stourton being daughter to the Duke of Suffolk. He was born two years before Sir Richard effected his escape abroad, and his mother had no child afterwards, though still a young woman of thirty-one or thirty-two. To Marie Cufaude there is no monument, and though it is, as I have before said, probable that the people of Basingstoke owe to her intercession with her uncle the Cardinal the restoration of their school and its property, no care has been even taken to preserve her memory or that of her husband's family. The stone of Simeon Cufaude of the many crosses, though still lying in the liten, is, I have been recently told, no longer visible. F. C. L. It is commonly said he was merely the follower and protégé of Henry VII. But in a note appended to that statement in the pamphlet from which this account is taken, it says the Sir Richard Pole she married was the youngest son of John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, and Elizabeth Plantagenet, sister of Edward IV. John, Earl of Lincoln, the The Domesday of Colchester. eldest son, died 1487. Edmund, the second Earl of Suffolk, was beheaded 1513. Richard, more fortunate, had escaped abroad 1502, and was killed at the battle of Pavia. If Margaret's husband were this Richard, he was her first cousin, and she was probably married to him by Richard III., with whom the De la Poles were in favour, as is shown by his making them his heirs. Thus he was indeed "cozen german to King Henry VII." (that is, to his wife), as the Cufaude monument states; and the double Plantagenet descent his and Margaret's children would HE peculiar value of the Domesday Survey, as a solitary beacon shining brightly far above the lands of ordinary documentary history, never be too much insisted upon. Rightly does Ellis speak of it as can A mine of information which has not yet been sufficiently wrought, containing illustrations of the most important and certain kind upon our ancient of which cannot be exhausted by the perseverance of institutions, services, and tenures of land, the metal any single labourer. But the very fact of its inexhaustible character should teach us the method to be employed if we would extract from the priceless record the whole of the information it can yield. We must concentrate our efforts. An attempt to analyze the entire survey, or even that portion in which a whole county is comprised, can only lead to necessarily imperfect, and often erroneous, conclusions. The thorough analysis of a small area must always possess a greater value than the partial examination of a large one. In accordance with this principle, I now propose to investigate those portions of the Survey which relate to Colchester, as possessing a special interest. In the first place the information is in itself considerable. In the second, it is capable of exceptional elucidation from the existence of surviving evidences which research will enable us to detect. Lastly, it possesses a peculiar value, as relating to the earliest, and perhaps the most famous, of the Roman Colonia in Britain. If, as Dr. Guest believed -a belief which Mr. Freeman has quoted with respect*—" of all the towns of England there was none more likely than Colchester to have been continuously inhabited through British, Roman, British, and English days,' it is invested with importance as a test-case in that controversy which has so long raged over the origin of the English town, and which is being brought again into some prominence, the extreme views of the "Old English" school having provoked a not unnatural reaction. Mr. Freeman, speaking at Colchester in 1876, called attention to the rich field presented by this Survey, and touched briefly upon some of its most noticeable points. It is to be regretted that he could not at the time enter more fully into the subject, but we are fortunate in possessing such a guide for our labours as the invaluable Norman Conquest, perhaps the noblest monument of modern historical literature. I shall hope, with its assistance, to illustrate the statements of the record, so as to enable a qualified observer to draw his conclusions from the facts. We have first to consider the area with which we are dealing. Now we find three *Arch. Journ., xxxiv. 57. terms used in the Survey of Colchester-viz., hundret, civitas, and burgus. What is their meaning here, and how are they mutually related? The heading Hundret de Colecestra is of course equivalent to saying Colchestra defendit se pro uno hundret, that is, for official and administrative purposes, Colchester was classed as a hundred.* The consequences of this position we shall see below. But the terms civitas and burgus, as here employed, require special explanation. The burgus, as we shall find, is of course the Saxon "burh," the walled enclosure.† But what was its relation to the civitas? The term civitas, unlike hundret, had no official connotation. It implied neither recognized burdens, nor a recognized system of administration. Those burdens, that system, could only be determined when the civitas had been expressed in terms of the hundred. It seems to have * I think we may safely assume that the three variants which occur had all the same meaning. Thus the formula "Hundret de Colecestra" (ii. 104) would be equivalent to that of "Burgus de Grentebridge pro uno hundredo se defendit” (i. 187), and to that of "Civitas (Sciropesberie) T. R. E. geldabat pro Chidis" (i. 252). So, too, "Dimidium hundret de Gepeswiz" (ii. 290) would be equivalent to "Bedeford T. R. E. pro dimidio hundret se defendebat" (i. 209), and to "Civitas de Cestre T. R. E. geldabat pro L hidis" (i. 262). The hundret is clearly the standard throughout. Thus the 'burh' of Colchester-that is, the walled town-occurs in the English Chronicle, 921, when it was stormed by the English levies. then, as Mr. Eyton well But Ellis has an unmeaning remark (Introd. i. 471) on Norwich-"So great was the consequence of Norwich at that period that it was rated by itself as for a whole hundred." Instead of a high rating, this would be a very low one as compared with much smaller boroughs which were rated at the same. then, as Mr. Eyton well expressed it (Dorset Domesday, p. 71), "the hidage which, in King Edward's time, was the measure of a borough's geldability was no index whatever of the territory contained within its liberty. A low geldability would result from prescriptive privilege; a high assessment would indicate material wealth." To this I would add that, land being then the standard of wealth, the "assessed value" (as we now say) would be territorial in expression instead of pecuniary. Also, that I consider five hides to have been the unit of value, the assessments being made in multiples of five. Thus Bridport was rated at five hides, Dorchester at ten, Worcester at fifteen, Shaftesbury at twenty, &c. This has an important bearing on the territorial military service, five hides being there also the unit (Domesday, i. 56; Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 192), and should be compared with the five-hide qualification of the Thegn. been rashly assumed that civitas, where it occurs in the Survey, should always be translated "city," but until we modify this crude conception we shall be depriving ourselves of most important evidence on the development of the English town. It is a valuable feature of the Colchester Survey that we are enabled by its language to get a clear insight into the true meaning of the term. We there find that the King held some 340 acres "in Colchester;"* that Hugh, the Bishop's under-tenant, held over two hides "in Col with an area vastly greater than that within the walls. Reckoning the hide at 120 acres and this would seem to be now the generally accepted measurement,*-we find some 3,600 acres actually entered in the record. But when we remember that, on an average, half the land is unaccounted for in Domesday, * I cannot here discuss the various opinions which have been held on the Domesday hide, but there appears to be a clear preponderance in favour of the above view. On the other hand, the whole subject was recently investigated by Mr. Eyton, with his chester," and that the whole Greenstead estate was "in the same Colchester." Now the "Colchester" here spoken of was obviously not the burgus-of which the area was of course constant at 108 acres-but the civitas of which we are in search. If further proof were needed, it would be found in the feminine gender.§ But the Survey itself bears witness on the face of it that it deals "Dominium regis in Colecestrâ." "In eâdem tenet Hugo de Episcopo." § "In eâdem" (civitate), as opposed to "in codem" (burgo). So "in Colecestrâ " is equivalent to "in civitate Scirospesberie" (i. 252). usual exhaustive industry, in his admirable monograph on the Domesday of Dorset (Key to Domes day, passim). If I understand his views aright, he concluded that the hidage of Domesday was purely subjective, expressing, that is, not the acreage of the land, but its "geldability.' He believed, however, "that the Domesday ploughland, or terra ad unam carucam, normally contained 120 statute acres" (p. 71). But here it must be observed that there was clearly a geld-carucate as well as an acre-carucate, as we see in the case of Nottingham (i. 280), where "VI. carucatæ ad geldum regis" contrast with "VI. carucatæ ad arandum." So, too, on the same page, we find the expression 'XII. carucatæ terræ ad geldum, quas VIII. caruca possunt arare." This passage appears to me to decide the question. See also, for the hide, ANTIQUARY, v. 77.; Pearson, History of England, i. 654; Coote, Romans of Britain, 47, 263267. |