Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 12.djvu/275

10 s. xii. SEPT. 18, 1909.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 223 Michaelmas, and that each year bore the date of its commencement. Thus the year beginning Michaelmas, 1561, and ending Michaelmas, 1562, is called 1561 throughout, though the year had really been 1562 since March.

registers cannot fail to be of interest both to the historian and genealogist, for they contain much relating to the Major and Cromwell families that has hitherto been unrecorded in the pedigrees of those families. The baptisms, marriages, and burials are all jumbled together in the earliest volume, the first entry being the baptism of "John ye sonne of John Spicer on the 6th of January, 1599." The earliest pages are in English, but on p. 3 (1601) the entries are written in very illegible Latin. According to the Rev. William Marsh's list of the vicars of Hursley, the parish was served from 1581 to 1616 by William Symmonds, who died in the latter year; but on 17 April, 1609, "Henricus Rowe, clericus," appears among the burials.

Richard Major of Southampton purchased the manor of Merdon (which is Hursley) in 1638. He was son of John Major, otherwise Maior, a shipowner of the port of Southampton, and frequently mentioned in the Court Leet records of that town. John was Sheriff in 1598, Mayor in 1600 and 1615, and M.P. in 3 Charles I. In his will, dated 20 Feb., 1629, he left 200l. for a hospital and workhouse for Southampton.

Richard Major married Anne, daughter of John Kings well of Marvel in the Isle of Wight, and by her was father of Dorothy Major, born in 1626, and of Anne, born in 1631. According to Mr. B. W. Greenfield's pedigree of the Majors, Richard had three sisters, married to Wulfris (Wolf?), Wolgar, and Lavington. Both Wolf and Lavington are well-known Hursley names. There was also another sister, Jane Major, who married John Barton of Southampton, and was mother of Jane Barton, who, by her marriage with Peter Hearnsent (a Walloon merchant of Southampton), was ancestress of the Heathcotes of Hursley Park (see the book on the Heathcote family by Mr. Evelyn D. Heathcote, 1899). But to return to the registers of Hursley, where in December, 1635, is the marriage of a William Woolf to Elizabeth Prince. In a very interesting little volume entitled 'The Customs of the Manor of Merdon,' published in 1708, will