Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/394

 386

NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. v. MAY 12, 1900.

was admitted loco Weld, discharged by the Common Council 27 October, 1642, for, as he complained to the king in 1660, sympathizing with Charles I. Weld was, however, admitted de novo 21 September, 1660, and died pro- bably in October, 1666. W. I. R. V.

FILLIOL FAMILY (9 fch S. v. 287). I have no doubt that the volume of Sir Richard St. George's collections referred to by Morant is the volume now marked as Rawlinson, B 103, in the Bodleian Library, but unfortunately the leaf numbered 158 is wanting. In my description of this volume in the catalogue of this portion of the Rawlinson MSS., published in 1862, 1 have mentioned that folios 1, 2, 80, 112, 153, 155, 157, and 158 are wanting; they have all evidently been cut out. I hope, for the sake of Morant's credit, that they are not all cited by him. W. D. MACRAY.

WALTON AND LAYER FAMILIES (9 th S. v. 289). Col. Valentine Walton married (1) the Protector Oliver's sister Margaret, (2) a widow named Austin. He was taken prisoner by the Royal army, confined at Oxford, and exchanged for Col. Sir Thos. Lemsford. His name occurs in almost every public and private sitting of the Commissioners of the High Court of Justice appointed for trying the king, and his hand is also to the warrant for Charles's execution. He was of the Council of State in the years 1650, 1651, and 1652, and was appointed Governor of King's Lynn and Croyland with all the level of Ely, Holland, and Marshland. The close of his life was spent in the greatest privacy in Flanders under a borrowed name, and in the disguise of a gardener. He died in 1661. He gener- ally wrote his name Wauton; it is spelt so in the commission empowering the High Court of Justice, and is the signature appended to the death warrant of the king. See Mark Noble's 'Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell,' vol. ii., second edition, 1787; also 'Lives of the English Regicides and other Commissioners of the Pretended High Court of Justice appointed to sit in Judgment upon their Sovereign King Charles I.,' by the same author, vol. ii., 1798. F. E. MANLEY.

JOHN WILKES (9 th S. v. 315). If MR. MASON means the prebendal estate at Aylesbury which came to Wilkes by his marriage with Miss Mead, and upon which he resided, some account of its history and transmission will be found in Gibbs's ' History of Aylesbury ' if he means the rectory manor of tnat town, which Wilkes owned for a time, he will find the boundaries set out on p. 319 of the same work. Mr. Gibbs had access to about

seventy letters written by Wilkes to a friend of his at Aylesbury, many of which he has printed in the volume referred to, small quarto, viii-688 pp., 1885.

RICHARD WELFORD.

MEN WEARING EARRINGS (9 th S. v. 88, 191, 321). There is a portrait here of Thomas Dutton (nat. 1507, ob. 1582), the founder of the Sherborne branch of the Duttoris of

heshire. He is represented in the prime of life, and wearing a remarkably fine pearl in his left ear. The right ear is not shown, but presumably he wore a corresponding Barring in it. SHERBORNE.

Sherborne House, Northleach.

NOTES ON BOOKS, &c. English Dioceses. By the Rev. Geoffrey Hill.

(Stock.)

MR. HILL has been fortunate in finding a. subject comparatively fresh and unworked. An historical account of the origin and development of the dioceses of England from the earliest times to the present day is a vast undertaking, not lightly to be taken in hand. To carry through his investigation to any fruitful result the writer must familiarize himself with an array of old chroniclers, eccle- siastical historians, and constitutional authorities that might daunt the spirit of any but a resolute student. This, however, Mr. Hill has done with conscientious industry, and we can felicitate him on a really learned and exhaustive treatise. The notes of his volume everywhere bear witness to the keenness and accuracy of his researches. He was able, of course, to take his stand on the exist- ing works of such masters as Haddan and Stubbs, Green, Bright, Freeman, Phillimore, and Skene, but he exercises an independent judgment in accepting or discarding their conclusions, and generally gives satisfactory reasons for doing so.

The formation of the dioceses or, as they were at first called, parcechice was largely due to Arch- bishop Theodore of Tarsus. The ambiguity of the Latin word in after times caused him to be regarded as the founder of the parochial system in England, which was really of later introduction. On enter- ing upon his office in 668 he found only seven sees in existence. During his primacy these were increased to seventeen, but three of these new creations had already ceased at his death. This was the period of the greatest expansion of the English episcopate, and few material changes were made in it until the reign of Henry VIII. As the parish was originally commensurate with the manor, BO the diocese, as a rule, corresponded to the petty kingdom, or shire, or group of shires. Similarly St. Patrick appears to have appointed a bishop in Ireland for each separate tuath or tribe. Accord- ingly the oldest episcopal sees are found to follow the boundaries of the ancient English principalities. The kingdom of Kent became the diocese of Can- terbury, as Mr. Green noted, and the kingdom of Northumbria became the diocese of York.

None of these unwieldy and unmanageable sees fulfilled the ideal of Bede, that the bishop should