Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 3.djvu/502

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

[12 S. Hi. DKC.,1917.

The above four MSS., together with a single parchment leaf of a fifteenth -century MS. contained in the Bodleian MS. Laud 526, comprising a small fragment of the version (Heuser, ' Die Kildare-Gedichte,' p. 61, ap. " Bonner Beitrage zur Anglistik," Heft xiv., 1904), constitute the first group. The second comprises one MS. :

5. London, Lambeth 623, ff. 6-60, six- teenth century, the so-called ' Book of Howth.' A version of the ' Expugnatio,' not founded on the preceding, more modernized in language, and expanded by large additions from other sources. It has been printed l>y Brewer (op. cit., pp. 36-117).

With regard to James Yonge's translation of the ' Secreta Secretorum ' alluded to above, it may be well to point out that in addition to the Bodleian MS. reproduced by Steele (op. cit., pp. 121-248), and the Dublin fragment signalled above, we possess a complete copy in Lambeth 633, ff. 1-84. No future editor should neglect it.

M. ESPOSITO.

THE ARMS AT WINCHESTER COLLEGE OF JOHN, LORD DINHAM.

ONE of the bosses in the vaulted ceiling of Thurbern's Chantry at Winchester College is carved with an untinctured shield of four fusils conjoined in fesse, impaling a fesse between two chevrons. There is no tradi- tion at Winchester as to the ownership of this shield, and no mention of the shield occurs, so far as I am aware, in any of the printed histories of the College. There is, indeed, a sketch of the shield on that old parchment sheet of arms, of Warden Nicholas's time, to which I have already alluded in these columns (ante, p. 151). but the sketch is not accompanied by any explanatory note. Charles Blackstone, in his manuscript book of ' Benefactions ' (1784), had to be content with the con- jecture (p. 150) that the arms belonged to an " unknown benefactor."

To explain the shield, it is necessary first to ascertain the date or period at which it was carved. It appears from the College Account-rolls that the building of Thur- bern's Chantry, with the Belfry Tower over the western half of it, was begun by Warden Baker in 1473-4, that being the year in which one first meets with the special head- ing of expenditure, " Liberatio ad novam constructionem capelle mri. R. Thurbern." This heading is turned in 1477-8 into
 * ' Liberatio ad novam constructionem turns

pro campanis pulsandis," and the main constructional work was finished either in 1479-80 or in 1480-1. For the latter of these years, as also for 1478-9, 1483-4, 1485-6, 1486-7, and 1488-9, the Accounts are now missing. The ceiling of the Chantry was probably inserted in 1484-5, when the following item occurs under "Custus Capelle" :

" Et in solutis pro constructions le vawte cum lxv. vid. solutis pro le botresse in exteriore parte nove capelle hoc anno, xxiiii. xixs, xid. ob."

The bosses now in the ceiling are the original bosses, which were. preserved and replaced when the Chantry and the Tower were rebuilt on better foundations in 1862-3. The Chantry altar was consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester's Suffragan on Aug. 20, 1488. Dr. Michael Cleve was then warden, Dr. John Baker having died earlier in that year, and both of these wardens are com- memorated in the Chantry ceiling by bosses which bear their monograms. For reasons which could be elaborated on another occasion, it seems to me to be tolerably certain that we have in the ceiling the work of a carver who displayed his skill also in the Diyinity School vault at Oxford, which Sir W. H. St. John Hope has fully de- scribed in The Archceological Journal for 1914 (vol. Ixxi. pp. 217-45). In both places are to be seen the ape holding a man's head and the owl being teased by smaller birds.

With the foregoing materials to hand, and with one other fact which will be stated later, I ha.ve no hesitation in saying that the above-mentioned arms stand for Dinham (Gules, four fusils in fesse er- mine), impaling Fitz-Walter (Or, a fesse between two chevrons gules), and that they are the arms of Sir John. Dinham, Lord Dinham, K.G., of Hartland, &c., Devon, who in 1486 became Lord Treasurer of England. His earlier wife, whom he married in 1467, was Elizabeth, widow of John Radcliffe (sometimes styled Lord Fitz- Walter), daughter and heiress of Sir Walter, Lord Fitz-Walter.

For such information as I have about Lord Dinham, a man whose services seem to have been as acceptable to Henry VII. as they had previously been to the House of York, I am indebted largely to Mr. G. W. Watson's article on the Barony of Dinham or Dinaunt in Mr. Vicary Gibbs's edition (now in progress) of the ' Complete Peerage,' vol. iv. (1916), pp. 369-82. A claim which was made to the barony on behalf of Viscount Gage was considered and rejected by the