One of the oldest of these Roman Catholic families was that of Dancastle or Dancaster. They had been lords of the Manor of Binfield since the time of Elizabeth; and a member of the family, John Dancaster, had been rector of Binfield as far back as 1435. The gravestone in the chancel is to the memory of another member, also John Dancaster, who died in 1680, aged eighty-four. And from the coat-of-arms at the head of it: Az., a ball of wild fire Or., impaling, Sa., three lions passant in bend Arg., between two double cottises of the last, we are able to identify him as the "John Doncastle of Welhouse" in Ashmole's "Pedigrees of Berks," who married Mary, daughter of the Hon. John Browne, younger brother of Anthony, second Viscount Montague. About five years before his death, he and his neighbour, Mr. Gabriel Yonge, with his wife Elizabeth, whose gravestone comes next, were excommunicated by the then rector of Binfield, most probably for the non-payment of tithes or other ecclesiastical dues.
In an "Alphabetical List of the Recusants in the County of Berks," who entered the annual value of their estates for the purpose of being double taxed, pursuant to an Act passed in 1715, John Dancastle, probably the son of the above John Dancastle, is assessed at £234 10s., and his son, Francis Dancastle, at £1 17s. per annum. While to the south wall of Binfield Church is affixed a tablet which records the final extinction of the race. It was erected in memory of yet another John Dancastle, "the last of a respectable and ancient family, who after patiently enduring the most excruciating pains of the Gout, without intermission for upwards of sixteen years, obtained a happy release, and passed to a country where grief, sorrow, and pain are no more, Jany 29th, 1780. Aged 53 years. R.I.P."
The chief interest in the Dancastle family for us lies in the fact that it was owing to them that the poet, Alexander Pope, came to live at Binfield. About the year 1700, the representatives of this family at Binfield were two brothers, named Thomas and John. Very little is known about them except what may be gathered incidentally from the correspondence of Pope. It is believed that they lived at the Manor House at Binfield, and that it was owing to the friendship between Alexander Pope the elder and John Dancastle that the former was induced to settle at Binfield in 1700, when his son, the future poet, was just twelve years of age. After the migration to Binfield, the similarity of their tastes, for both were passionately fond of gardening, no doubt increased the intimacy; and we find that John Dancastle was the first witness to the elder Pope's will.
Scarcely anything is known for certain of the family history of the Popes before the settlement at Binfield, except that Pope's grandfather was a clergyman of the Church of England, and that he placed his son, the poet's father, with a merchant at Lisbon, where he became a convert to the Church of Rome. On his return to England, he seems to have been unsuccessful in his business affairs. Hearne, the antiquary, speaks of him (Diary, July 18th, 1729) as a "poor ignorant man, a tanner;" and elsewhere as "a sort of broken merchant," who had been "said to be a mechanic, a hatter, a farmer, nay, a bankrupt." But these were probably the false libels which were levelled against the son in after years in revenge for his keen and bitter satire.
It is now generally agreed that Mr. Pope, senior, was a linen draper in London at the time his son was born; and whatever may have been his success or want of success in that business, we know that, in 1700, he bought a small estate and house at Binfield, where he resided for the next sixteen years. He had an income, so Hearne tells us, of between three and four hundred a year.
The house can now hardly be said to exist. Pope himself described it as:—
"My paternal cell,
A little house with trees a-row,
And like its master very low;"
where the retired merchant employed his time chiefly in the cultivation of his garden, and as his son said;—
"Plants cauliflowers, and boasts to rear
The earliest melons of the year."