“My father was a yeoman and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled as much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king a harness with himself and his horse. I remember that I buckled on his harness when he went to Blackheath field. He kept me to school or else I had not been able to have preached before the king’s majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds or twenty nobles each, having brought them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours and some alms he gave to the poor, and all this he did of the said farm.”—Latimer’s Sermons, p. 101.
Note I, [P. 93].—The Abbey Church.
Add this sentence accidentally omitted from the text:—
“There, in that desecrated spot, reposed the ashes of the mighty dead; there, if tradition may be believed, rested the hero king Arthur, the defender of the land against the English invasion, the hero of a hundred fights, the subject of a thousand myths; there rested the holy bones of him who had afforded his Saviour the shelter of a tomb, but whose own resting place was thus defiled; there lay S. Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland; there, S. David, the patron Saint of Wales; there, S. Dunstan, whose bones were said to have been brought hither, after the sack of Canterbury by the Danes in 1012.[59] So highly had this spot been reverenced, that Kings, Queens, Archbishops and Bishops, had given large donations to the Abbey, that they might secure a resting place amongst the hallowed dead. Here lay the mournful historian, Gildas; here the venerated remains of the Venerable Bede; here lay King Edmund, the victim of the assassination at Pucklechurch; here King Edgar, the magnificent; hither, amidst a nation’s tears, they bore the heroic Ironside to his rest—and now! ’twas enough to make an angel weep—and a mortal wonder whether the nation had ceased to reverence its ancient greatness; or indeed to believe in Him Who is the God to Whom all live, whether men call them dead or not; and Who has taught us to reverence the sleeping dust, wherein His Spirit once moved and energized.”
Note J, [P. 117].—The Gubbings.
The Gubbings were a kind of gipsy race who infested Dartmoor, and who were united in a confederation under one whom the people called the “King of the Gubbings.” Old Fuller (p. 398) writes:—
“They are a peculiar of their own making, exempt from Bishop, Archdeacon, and all authority, either ecclesiastical or civil. They live in cotes (rather holes than houses) like swine, having all in common, multiplied, without marriage, into many hundreds. During our civil wars no soldiers were quartered upon them, for fear of being quartered amongst them. Their wealth consisteth in other men’s goods; they live by stealing the sheep on the moors, and vain it is for any to search their houses, being a work beneath the pains of any sheriff, and above the power of any constable. Such is their fleetness, they will outrun many horses; vivaciousness, they outlive most men, living in ignorance of luxury, the extinguisher of life. They hold together like bees; offend one, and all will avenge his quarrel.”
Note K, [P. 135].—The Black Assize.
“Among the memorable events of these times, in which innocent Catholics were everywhere made to suffer, is that which took place in the city and university of Oxford. One Rowland Jenks (a bookseller), was arraigned as a Catholic (for the publication of some unlicensed books against the changes in religion), found guilty, and being but one of the common people, was condemned to lose both his ears. But the judge had hardly delivered the sentence, when a deadly disease suddenly attacked the whole court; no other part of the city, and no persons, not in the court, were touched. The disease laid hold, in a moment, of all the judges, the high sheriff, and the twelve men of the jury. The jurymen died immediately, the judges, the lawyers, and the high sheriff died, some of them within a few hours, others of them within a few days, but all of them died. Not less than five hundred persons who caught the same disease at the same time and place, died soon after, in different places outside the city.”—Rushton’s Continuation of Sanders, Book iv., Cap ix.