process of time to the widowed Countess, Alicia, daughter of Thomas Chaucer of Ewelme, in Oxfordshire.

The siege of Orleans in Suffolk's hands was a failure, and he was again captured at Jargeux, where his brother, Alexander de la Pole, was killed in cold blood by the Duke of Alençon. We find him, however, assisting in the defence of Paris in 1430, and negotiating a peace some ten years afterwards. In this matter he went beyond his commission in propounding and carrying through the marriage between Henry VI. and Margaret of Anjou.

His marquisate appears to date from 1443. In 1447 he became Duke, but as he went up in rank he went down in popular estimation. His services in France for more than thirty years were set at less than nought. The disastrous ending to the Hundred Years' War was put to his account. But so far as we may judge the man from the last words to which he put pen, he was good and truehearted.

Of the two localities assigned for his embarkation, Camden's (Suffolk) is probably the more correct. His enemies having procured his banishment in 1450, we may suppose that he took sea at Dunwich, the nearest Suffolk port, and trace him in the fair spring weather through Fressingfield, along the 'broad' road, called in all deeds the highroad from Dunwich to Bury St. Edmunds, by Laxfield and Yoxford, and over Westleton Heath to the Roman Sitomagus. How he was caught and beheaded on the side of a boat off Dover is well known. Bloomfield speaks of a defaced monument to him in Wingfield Church remaining to his day, but we can point to no such thing now.

Duke John, a fresh creation after his father's forfeiture, whose noble monument we see on the north side of the altar, seems to have been a dutiful son. The mother lived a good deal at Wingfield. The Paston letters give glimpses of her there in 1452, but more notably in October, 1460. Richard Plantagenet, Duke

of York, the legitimate Sovereign, is now all-powerful in London. Though the Suffolk interest was distinctly Lancastrian, Duke John had married York's daughter, Elizabeth, and the young couple were made wire-pullers by the dowager. So we find from a letter written by the wily Franciscan, Friar Brackley, to John Paston. 'The Lady of Suffolk hath sent up hyr sone and hise wyf to my Lord of York to aske grace for a schireve the next yer, Stapelton, Boleyn, or Tyrel, qui absit. God send zow Ponyng, W. P., W. Rokewode, or Arblaster.' A keen practitioner apparently was Duke John, very unpopular according to Margaret Paston; but we must make allowances for Paston's dislike on account of the Duke's attempt to seize Hellesdon Manor. We find him raising men for Henry VII. in the autumn of 1485. In 1491 he died, leaving his widow presumably living in Wingfield. His eldest son John, created Earl of Lincoln by Edward IV., died before him. He espoused the cause of Lambert Simnel, and fell on the field of Stoke, near Nottingham, in 1487. The dukedom appears to have been restricted to the eldest son, for when in 1491 Edmund de la Pole succeeded his father, it was only as Earl. He married Margaret, daughter of Richard, Lord Scrope, head of a well-known Yorkshire house. In the year of his succession he accompanied his sovereign to the siege of Boulogne; in 1495 he lent his aid to the overthrow of the Cornish rebels under Lord Audley and Thomas Flammock on Blackheath. He was no model of self-restraint or discretion, but whatever he might have been, it was not in his power to purge himself of the taint of royal blood. He escaped from England on July 1, 1499, whereupon letters were issued by Henry VII., not only to arrest his abettors, but also 'any suspect person nyghe unto the see costes which shall seme . . . to be of the same affynyte.' The unfortunate man remained in exile fourteen years, and venturing to return to England some little time after the death of his merciless Sovereign in 1509, was finally executed by Henry VIII. in 1513,

'being a man of turbulent spirit, and too nearly allied to the crown.' Truly, the tender mercies of the Tudors were cruel! Last in our mournful record comes Richard de la Pole, another son of Duke John and Elizabeth Plantagenet. He was evidently awake to the fact that, ' turbulent' or not turbulent, he was 'too nearly allied to the crown.' Accordingly he remained on the Continent, a soldier of fortune, and wielded his sword for Francis I. of France, in whose service he was slain at the disastrous battle before Pavia in 1525.

With him ends the grim family chronicle. Cardinal Pole's father was a Welsh Ap Hoel, and had no claim to an origin from the vicinity of the big pond from which the Earls of Suffolk took their name.

Matthew Poole, M.A., of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the learned author of the 'Synopsis Criticorum,' evidently was thought to be of this family, from the arms engraved with his portrait in the first volume of his 'Annotations.' He was a Yorkshireman, but I am unable to throw any light on his pedigree.

THE

HE annals of the second family which held the earldom of Suffolk have carried us some distance down-stream, and we must go back to the middle of the fourteenth century. One remarkable feature at this time was the foundation of Colleges of Priests. We have already seen one in existence at Bury St. Edmunds at an earlier period, and there appears to have been another at Glemsford; but now they are to be viewed as the rising institutions of the day. Immunity from episcopal authority had brought many evils in its train. The Benedictines were too grand and lazy. The mendicant Orders had left their first love and lost their pristine influence. Dominican fulminations had become mere noise, and Franciscan wiles were at once odious and ineffective. Yet the time had not come for the abandonment of all forms of the conventual system. Learning and piety still sought the cloister, and no constitution seemed better than that of a College of Priests, generally subject to the Bishop of the Diocese, bound by the statutes of their founder, whose name the College often bore, whose bread they had eaten. Suffolk, however, did not boast of many Colleges. Maud of Lancaster, in 1347, founded one at Campsey Ash, which in seven years she removed to Bruisyard. The College Farm at Wingfield still preserves the name of the posthumous founda

tion of Sir John Wingfield, and the fine misereres in the chancel of that church were the seats of the priests, who had a side-chamber with hagioscope slits in the wall, whence the altar light might be watched. The date is 1362. Next, Simon Sudbury, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, but at that time Bishop of London, made St. Gregory's Church, Sudbury, collegiate, in 1375. Another posthumous foundation was Mettingham, to which castle, in 1382, the executors of the great ViceAdmiral, Sir John de Norwich, spoken of in the last chapter, removed the priests from Raveningham in Norfolk, his original foundation. Stoke-by-Clare, converted from a Benedictine house, and Denerdiston, or Denston, belong to the fifteenth century. Wolsey's Ipswich College will be noticed when we come to his life. Of those mentioned, the Wingfield and Mettingham foundations are the most interesting. Here were the local boarding-schools, where, for a moderate charge (it was £2 a year at Mettingham) 'boys were boarded, clothed, booked, washed,' etc., to quote from Squeers's prospectus. They would begin their work about five in the morning, so that the imagination may picture, without much fear of going wrong, the handful of fourteen promising boys with rather blue noses and pinched fingers, even the juniors with their heads shaven in the first tonsure, the seniors able to perform the functions of an acolyte, all learning to read, write, and cast accompt, to copy and illuminate manuscripts, and to master pricksong on the four-line staff, the ancient tonic sol-fa method, both in theory and practice. When they went home for their holidays they would run the gauntlet from the unlettered churls of their native villages, who, like another critic of the period, would say:

'For methinks it serveth to no thyng,

All such pevish, prykeryd song.'

The list of incumbents of Norfolk and Suffolk parishes would doubtless include many a village lad who had