The family have been seated here some four hundred years, and are kin of that Sir Walter Blount who was slain at Shrewsbury fight, in 1403; cut down by Douglas, who mistook him for King Henry. “A gallant knight he was,” says Hotspur, pointing out to Douglas his mistake, “his name was Blunt, semblably furnished like the King himself.”
As popish recusants, and as Royalists in the civil war, the Blounts have suffered sequestration, and have seen hostile soldiers quartered in their old house, and the Sir Charles Blount of that time was slain in the service of the King at Oxford in 1644.
A literary association illuminates their annals at a later period, the spinster Martha Blount, having been Pope’s “Stella” or “Patty,” a constant friend and correspondent, and the recipient at the poet’s death of his books, his plate, and £1,000. That Pope was not in sympathy with the rural surroundings of Mapledurham seems evident from his lines upon Miss Martha on one occasion returning hither
“To plain work, to purling brooks,
Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks.”
But then, that was the approved eighteenth-century way!
MAPLEDURHAM HOUSE.