The Pashells, or Pashleys, were descended from Sir Edmund de Passelege, a Baron of the Exchequer, who purchased a manor in Smeeth in 1319; he died 1327. The family resided at Iden, Sussex; and the house there, and the manor in Smeeth, devolved on the Scots, Anne Pympe being her father’s only child. It is true that John Gower, the poet, does not mention any children in his extant will, but he was probably seventy-eight when he died; and, what is more to the purpose, his published will was probably only his testament, the will or declaration of uses of the land being commonly at that time a separate instrument. Th. Gower, of Clapham, given above as the father of Lowys, was probably the son or grandson of John Gower (see Sir Harris Nicolas in The Retrosp. Rev., 2 Ser., ii, 103-17). Also Gower the poet is known to have had property in Southwark; and Th. Gower, of Clapham, refers in his will (1458) to his tenement called The Falcon, in Southwark, near the hospital; and in Manning and Bray’s Surrey, iii, 623, there is noticed a deed of conveyance dated 22nd November 1506, of part of the site of St. Thomas’s Hospital, in Southwark, made by John Scot, of Iden, and Anne his wife, daughter and heir of John Pashley, who was cousin and heir of John Gower. It may be added as curious that Sir Robert Gower, who is believed to have been uncle to the poet, was buried in Brabourne church in 1349; his monument, now destroyed, being noticed in Weever.
On p. 500, Scot speaks of “his kinseman M. Deering”, Edw. Dering the divine, a writer on theological subjects and chaplain to her Majesty; but in what way they were kin I have been unable to discover.[*]
[*] My mother being a Dering, a daughter of the Thomas that was drowned in the West Indies, when trying to reach his vessel H.M.S. Circe, induces me to add, through the courtesy of Sir Edw. C. Dering, that a portrait of this worthy is still to be seen at Surrenden Dering, and that a family tradition has it, that preaching before her Majesty, he had the boldness to tell her, “that she had no more controul over her passions than an untamed heifer.” He was speedily unfrocked, and is said to have emigrated to America, where an Edw. Dering is at this moment the head of that branch, and a large landowner in Maine.
Returning now to Reginald’s father, Richard, the youngest of the three sons of that Sir John who died in 1533, we find that he married Mary, daughter of Geo. Whetenall, whose father was sheriff of Kent in 1527, and whose family had lived for three centuries at Hextall’s Place, near Maidstone. She survived her husband; and being remarried to Fulke Onslow, Clerk of the Parliaments, died before him, 8th October 1582, and was buried, as he afterwards was, in Hatfield church, Herts, where a brass to their memory is fixed in the north wall of the chancel. Of Richard himself nothing more is known. He probably died young, and certainly before December 1554, his death being mentioned in the will of his brother Sir Reginald, who died on the 16th of that month. In this will, failing his own issue—a lapse which did not occur—he left his real estate “unto Rainolde Scotte, son and heire of my brother Richard Scotte, decd”, and Rainolde’s issue failing, it was devised to a more distant branch. Hence, contrary to the table given on [page xi], from “The Memorials”, “Rainolde” was either the only son of Richard, or the only son then living. The same conclusion follows from the Inquis. post mortem of Lady Wynifred Rainsfoord, taken the 20th March 1575/6, where Sir Thomas Scot and his brothers are said to be co-heirs with Reynold of the lands held by her in gavelkind, the sons having one moiety, and Reynold the other.
This Inquisition also gives Reynold’s then age as thirty-eight or more, the words “et amplius” being, as was, usually at least, done in these documents, attached to all the other ages mentioned. Hence he was born in or before 1538 (not in 1541), and as, according to Wood, he entered Hart Hall, Oxford, when about seventeen, he entered it circa 1555; the intention that he should do so having been probably entertained by Sir Reginald, his uncle, who died 16th December 1554, and his expenses borne by his cousin, Sir Thomas. I say probably, because we have seen that, failing his own issue, he was named by Sir Reginald as the next heir to the estate, and also because we know nothing of the circumstances in which his widowed mother was left, nor as yet of the date at which she was re-married to Onslow.
On the 11th of October he married Jane—not, as stated in “The Memorials”, Alice—Cobbe, the daughter of an old yeoman family long resident at Cobbe’s Place, in the adjoining parish of Aldington. The entry in the Registers of Brabourne is—
“M[*] Reignold Scott and Jane Cobbe were
maryed the xith of October 1658.”