Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 2.djvu/67

 ii s. vm. JULY 26, 1913.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

61

LONDON, SATURDAY, JULY X, 1913.

CONTENTS. No. 187.

NOTES : Duke's Place, Aldgate, 61 Webster's ' Appius and Virginia,' 63 Hugh Peters Note - Taking Tarred Roads John Adams's Epitaph Riot at Covent Garden, 65 Sir John Moore's Brother Bishop Hooper's Por- trait, 66.

QUERIES : Emeline de Reddesford, 66" Tradesman " Morris Pawlett : Smith Finger Board, 68 Eighteenth- Century Anonymous Works " Old Mother Damnable" Authors of Quotations Wanted Barnard Family Sand- Pictures, 69" All Sir Garnet " Waures of Warwick and Stafford Sir C. Saxton London to Budapest Thomas Greene, 70.

REPLIES : Nathaniel Eaton, 70 -Johnson Bibliography Myless, Essex Ralph Wallis, 71 Sanctity of Royalty C. Dillon Guido delle Colonne in England First Duke of Northumberland Verses on Surnames, 72 Richard Parkes Bonington Ely Chapel Bruce of Airth, 73 Gilbert Fleming Andrew Melly Gundrada de Warenne, 74' The Reader ' on Johnson's Dictionary " Off rs." Thatch Fires, 75 St. John of Bletsoe "Jem the Penman," 76 " Oxendoles " Food Offering to the Dead " Raising Feast," 77 Chanteys " Nut "Cana- dian Pacific Railway, 78.

NOTES ON BOOKS: 'New English Dictionary' 1 Edinburgh Review.'

Booksellers' Catalogues. Notices to Correspondents.

DUKE'S PLACE, ALDGATE :

ST. KATHERINE CREE.

(See 11 S. i. 477.)

I VENTURE to send you a letter received from Mrs. Bell Doughty containing some most important information with regard to the problem of when the monks of Bury St. Edmunds took possession of their town house in Aldgate, Stow leading one to think they came as late as the fifteenth century. I feel sure the information con- tained in Mrs. Bell Doughty's letter will prove of keen interest to many of your readers. F. A. LINDSAY- SMITH.

27, Westbourne Gardens, Monday night, June 30th, 1913. DEAR MR. LINDSAY-SMITH,

Some time ago you quoted to me a passage from Stow's ' Survey of London ' relating to the Town House of the Abbots of Bury, in what is now called Bevis Marks, which ran :

" Next is one great house, large of rooms, fair courts, and garden plots : sometime[s] pertaining to the Bassets, since that to the Abbots of Bury

in Suffolk, and therefore called Buries Markes> corruptly Bevis Marks, and since the dissolution of the Abbey of Bury to Thomas Heneage the father and to Sir Thomas his son. Next unto it is the before-spoken Priory of the Holy Trinity" and you asked me if I knew anything of it, or could fix the date at which it passed from the Bassets to the Abbots of Bury.

I have consulted the expert authorities on St. Edmundsbury, namely, Sir Ernest Clarke and Dr. Montague James, the Provost of King's College, Cambridge. Sir Ernest Clarke, who is the editor of Jocelin's Chronicle of the Abbey and of the ' Bury Chronicles of the Thirteenth Century,' has given me some most valuable information, bxit confessed, in his own words, to having " long been puzzled as to the Town House of the Abbot of St. Edmundsbury," who, as a mitred abbot, was a member of the King's Council, and had frequently to reside in London. He kne\y nothing about the Bassets in connexion with this house, except so far as Stow mentions them. The Provost of King's said definitely; " There is no talk of Bassets " in the Abbey Registers ; and Dr. Sharpe of the Guildhall, the editor of the Letter-Books of the City of Lon- don, told me that " the Index of Deeds enrolled in the Court of Husting has no reference " to this property passing from the Bassets to the Abbots of Bury.

As far as the Bassets are concerned, there was such a family in the immediate neighbourhood, for one of them, Robert Basset, was Alderman of Aldgate in the time of Edward IV. ; and when the Bastard Falconbridge invaded the City in 1471, he, with the men of the ward, drove Falcon- bridge's followers out as far as St. Botolph's, Aid- gate, where he was reinforced by the Constable of the Tower, and they chased the rebels as far as Mile End and Stratford. The MS. recording Basset's adventures is preserved in the Public Library at Ghent (!). It is interesting to note that, while Alderman Basset was driving out Falconbridge's men at this end of the City, our old friend Alder- man Sir John Crosby of Crosby Hall was, with the Lord Mayor, driving them out at the London Bridge end but this by the way.

It is curious, too, that the first mention of the ancestor of the Heneage to whom this Town House of the Abbot of Bury at Bevis Marks was given at the Dissolution (Heneage Lane is, of course, called after him) was a Sir Robert Heneage, who was one of the witnesses of a grant of land in Lincolnshire by Nicholas Basset to the monks of Brucria (? Brigg) in the time of William Rufus. And the Priory of the Holy Trinity, which " marched," as we say, with the Abbot of Bury's house and ground, ultimately fell into the hands of a Basset heiress, who married Lord Henry Howard, grandson of Thomas, Duke of Norfolk (after whom Duke Street is called), and Margaret, only daughter and heiress of the Thomas, Lord Audley of Walden, to whom the Priory of the Holy Trinity was given at the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII.

So much for the Bassets ! But no word, as you see, of any house of theirs passing to the Abbots of Bury.

I have obtained, however, from the Provost of King's College, Cambridge, some most interesting, valuable, and apparently before unnoted informa- tion, which shows that this Abbots of Bury's