FRONTISPIECE TO “A TRUE RELATION OF AN APPARITION,”
ETC., BY JAMES OXENHAM
“Another proof that Howell’s letter must have been written from memory is, that most of the Christian names are erroneous. The pamphlet adds, that those of the family who had been sick and recovered never saw the apparition.” The pamphlet to which the brothers Lysons refer is entitled: “A True Relation of an Apparition in the likeness of a Bird with a white brest that appeared hovering over the Death-Beds of some of the children of Mr. James Oxenham, of Sale Monachorum, Devon, Gent. Confirmed by sundry witnesses as followeth in the ensuing Treatise. London, printed by I. O. for Richard Clutterbuck, and are to be sold at the signe of the Gun, in Little Britain, neere St. Botolph’s Church, 1641.”
Now in the first place it is well to observe that the name of the place is wrong. The Oxenhams did not live at Zeal Monachorum, but at South Zeal in South Tawton. No Oxenham entries are to be found in the registers of Zeal Monachorum, no monuments of the family are in the church. The brothers Lysons examined the registers there, and certified to this. The Devon volume of the Magna Britannia was published in 1822. Since that date a portion of the page in the Burial Register, containing the entries of burials in 1635, has been cut out by some person who has by this means destroyed the evidence that no such Oxenhams were buried at Zeal Monachorum. Now the pamphlet states that John, son of James Oxenham, aged twenty-two, died on 5 September, 1635. The register of South Tawton informs us that John Oxenham was buried on 20 May, 1635, i.e. four months, two weeks, and two days before he died, according to the tract. He was born in 1613 and baptized 17 October in that year. His father, James Oxenham, was married to Elizabeth Hellier in 1608. In 1614, a John Oxenham and his wife Mary had a son John as well. Others reported to have had the white-breasted bird appear on their deaths in the same year, were Thomasine, wife of James Oxenham the younger, Thomasine, their babe, and Rebecca Oxenham, aged eight years.
There is no entry in the register of the baptism of either Thomasine or Rebecca, nor of the burial of Thomasine the elder, Thomasine the babe, or of Rebecca.
The second John Oxenham, son of John and Mary, was buried 31 July, 1636, at least we presume it was he; the registers do not state in either case whose son each of the Johns was.
There is no trace of the younger James to be found in the register, nor of any of the Oxenhams in North Tawton registers at or about the time of the supposed apparition.
The witnesses to the vision were, in the case of John Oxenham, Robert Woodley and Humphry King. Robert Woodley does occur in the register under date 1664. Mary Stephens was witness to the visions when Rebecca and Thomasine the babe died, and Mary Stephens does occur in the register under the date 1667, but none of the other witnesses, Humphry King, Elizabeth Frost, Joan Tooker, and Elizabeth Averie, widow. Consequently there is negative evidence that Thomasine, elder and younger, and Rebecca never existed save in the imagination of the author of the catch-penny tract.
We come now to James Howell’s account, in his Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ; or Familiar Letters. The first edition of the first series of these letters was published in the year 1645, four years after the tract had appeared. About the year 1642 he had been committed to the Fleet, and there confined for eight years. He states in his Letter IX, in Sect. 6, in a letter to Mr. E. D.:—