[4]. The letter, now amongst the papers of John Bennet Lawes, Esq., the descendant of Sir John Wittewronge, Bart., is too much mutilated to be copied or inserted in the appendix. The Duchess, from the vicinity of Sandridge to Rothamsted Park, was probably early acquainted with the family of Wittewronge. She bought some land from Sir John Wittewronge.—See her Grace’s will.
[5]. A Letter from the Duchess. Private Correspondence of the Duke of Marlborough. Colburn, 1837, vol. ii. p. 112.
[6]. For a more detailed account of the Jennings or Jennyns family, see Appendix I.
[7]. Sandridge is a straggling and by no means picturesque village, in the vicinity of St. Albans. The property once belonging to the Jennings family descended to the favourite grandson of the Duchess, Lord John Spencer, (commonly called “Jack Spencer,”) and was sold by the present Lord Spencer to John Kinder, Esq., who has built a handsome house on the estate.
The manor of Sandridge, at the time of the dissolution, formed part of the possessions of the Abbot of St. Albans, and is thus described in the Domesday Survey. “It answered for ten hides. There is land to thirteen ploughs. The Abbot himself holds Sandridge. Three hides are in the demesne, and there are two ploughs here, and a third may be made. Twenty-six villanes here have ten ploughs Meadow for two ploughs. Pasture for the cattle. Pasturage for three hundred hogs. The whole value is 18l. When received 12l. And the same in King Edward’s time.”—Clutterbuck’s Hist. of Hertfordshire, p. 216.
Upon the dissolution, this manor came to the crown, and was granted by charter, anno 32 Henry VIII., to Ralph Rowlat, whose sister married Ralph Jennings, the grandfather of Richard Jennings.
[8]. With the day of her birth I have been assisted by the kindness of a friend. Coxe mentions merely the year.
[9]. I am enabled, by the kindness and intelligence of the Rev. Henry Nicholson, rector of the Abbey of St. Alban’s, to give the corroborating evidence to this fact. A member of the highly respectable family of a former rector of St. Albans distinctly recollects that it used to be the boast of her aunt, an old lady of eighty, not many years deceased, that she had herself been removed, when ill of the small-pox, to the very room in the house where Sarah Duchess of Marlborough was born. This was a small building since pulled down, and its site is now occupied by a summer-house, between what is called Holywell-street and Sopwell-lane in St. Alban’s, and within the space afterwards occupied by the pleasure-grounds of the great house at Holywell. Holywell is said by tradition to have been so called, because in it was a well, marked in an old map of St. Albans, where the nuns of Sopwell used to dip their crusts, too hard to be eaten without such a process.
[10]. Clutterbuck’s History of Hertfordshire, p. 57.
[11]. Bishop Burnet’s Hist. of His Own Times, vol. v. p. 53.