LEDBURY, a market town in the Ross parliamentary division of Herefordshire, England, 14½ m. E. of Hereford by the Great Western railway, pleasantly situated on the south-western slope of the Malvern Hills. Pop. of urban district (1901) 3259. Cider and agricultural produce are the chief articles of trade, and there are limestone quarries in the neighbouring hills. The town contains many picturesque examples of timbered houses, characteristic of the district, the principal being the Market House (1633) elevated on massive pillars of oak. The fine church of St Michael exhibits all the Gothic styles, the most noteworthy features being the Norman chancel and west door, and the remarkable series of ornate Decorated windows on the north side. Among several charities is the hospital of St Catherine, founded by Foliot, bishop of Hereford, in 1232. Hope End, 2 m. N.E. of Ledbury, was the residence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning during her early life. A clock-tower in the town commemorates her.
Wall Hills Camp, supposed to be of British origin, is the earliest evidence of a settlement near Ledbury (Liedeburge, Lidebury). The manor was given to the see of Hereford in the 11th century; but in 1561-1562 became crown property. As early as 1170-1171 an episcopal castle existed in Ledbury. The town was not incorporated, but was early called a borough; and in 1295 and 1304-1305 returned two members to parliament. A fair on the day of the decollation of John the Baptist was granted to the bishop in 1249. Of fairs which survived in 1792 those of the days of St Philip and St James and St Barnabas were granted in 1584-1585; those held on the Monday before Easter and St Thomas’s day were reputed ancient, but not those of the 12th of May, the 22nd of June, the 2nd of October and the 21st of December. Existing fairs are on the second Tuesday in every month and in October. A weekly market, granted to the bishop by Stephen, John and Henry III., was obsolete in 1584-1585, when the present market of Tuesday was authorized. The wool trade was considerable in the 14th century; later Ledbury was inhabited by glovers and clothiers. The town was deeply involved in the operations of the Civil Wars, being occupied both by the royalist leader Prince Rupert and by the Parliamentarian Colonel Birch.
LEDGER (from the English dialect forms liggen or leggen, to lie or lay; in sense adapted from the Dutch substantive legger), properly a book remaining regularly in one place, and so used of the copies of the Scriptures and service books kept in a church. The New English Dictionary quotes from Charles Wriothesley’s Chronicle, 1538 (ed. Camden Soc., 1875, by W. D. Hamilton), “the curates should provide a booke of the bible in Englishe, of the largest volume, to be a lidger in the same church for the parishioners to read on.” It is an application of this original meaning that is found in the commercial usage of the term for the principal book of account in a business house (see [Book-Keeping]). Apart from these applications to various forms of books, the word is used of the horizontal timbers in a scaffold (q.v.) lying parallel to the face of a building, which support the “put logs”; of a flat stone to cover a grave; and of a stationary form of tackle and bait in angling. In the form “lieger” the term was formerly frequently applied to a “resident,” as distinguished from an “extraordinary” ambassador.
LEDOCHOWSKI, MIECISLAUS JOHANN, Count (1822-1902), Polish cardinal, was born on the 29th of October 1822 in Gorki (Russian Poland), and received his early education at the gymnasium and seminary of Warsaw. After finishing his studies at the Jesuit Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici in Rome, which strongly influenced his religious development and his attitude towards church affairs, he was ordained in 1845. From 1856 to 1858 he represented the Roman See in Columbia, but on the outbreak of the Columbian revolution had to return to Rome. In 1861 Pope Pius IX. made him his nuncio at Brussels, and in 1865 he was made archbishop of Gnesen-Posen. His preconization followed on the 8th of January 1866. This date marks the beginning of the second period in Ledochowski’s life; for during the Prussian and German Kulturkampf he was one of the most declared enemies of the state. It was only during the earliest years of his appointment as archbishop that he entertained a different view, invoking, for instance, an intervention of Prussia in favour of the Roman Church, when it was oppressed by the house of Savoy. On the 12th of December 1870 he presented an effective memorandum on the subject at the headquarters at Versailles. In 1872 the archbishop protested against the demand of the government that religious teaching should be given only in the German language, and in 1873 he addressed a circular letter on this subject to the clergy of his diocese. The government thereupon demanded a statement from the teachers of religion as to whether they intended to obey it or the archbishop, and on their declaring for the archbishop, dismissed them. The count himself was called upon at the end of 1873 to lay aside his office. On his refusing to do so, he was arrested between 3 and 4 o’clock in the morning on the 3rd of February 1874 by Staňdi the director of police, and taken to the military prison of Ostrowo. The pope made him a cardinal on the 13th of March, but it was not till the 3rd of February 1876 that he was released from prison. Having been expelled from the eastern provinces of Prussia, he betook himself to Cracow, where his presence was made the pretext for anti-Prussian demonstrations. Upon this he was also expelled from Austria, and went to Rome, whence, in spite of his removal from office, which was decreed on the 15th of April 1874, he continued to direct the affairs of his diocese, for which he was on several occasions from 1877 to 1879 condemned in absentia by the Prussian government for “usurpation of episcopal rights.” It was not till 1885 that Ledochowski resolved to resign his archbishopric, in which he was succeeded by Dinder at the end of the year. Ledochowski’s return in 1884 was forbidden by the Prussian government (although the Kulturkampf had now abated), on account of his having stirred up anew the Polish nationalist agitation. He passed the closing years of his life in Rome. In 1892 he became prefect of the Congregation of the Propaganda, and he died in Rome on the 22nd of July 1902.
See Ograbiszewski, Deutschlands Episkopat in Lebensbildern (1876 and following years); Holtzmann-Zöppfel, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirchenwesen (2nd ed., 1888); Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains (6th ed., 1893); Brück, Geschichte der katholischen Kirche in Deutschland im neunzehnten Jahrhundert vol. 4 (1901 and 1908); Lauchert, Biographisches Jahrbuch, vol. 7 (1905).
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LEDRU-ROLLIN, ALEXANDRE AUGUSTE (1807-1874), French politician, was the grandson of Nicolas Philippe Ledru, the celebrated quack doctor known as “Comus” under Louis XIV., and was born in a house that was once Scarron’s, at Fontenay-aux-Roses (Seine), on the 2nd of February 1807. He had just begun to practise at the Parisian bar before the revolution of July, and was retained for the Republican defence in most of the great political trials of the next ten years. In 1838 he bought for 330,000 francs Desiré Dalloz’s place in the Court of Cassation. He was elected deputy for Le Mans in 1841 with hardly a dissentient voice; but for the violence of his electoral speeches he was tried at Angers and sentenced to four months’ imprisonment and a fine, against which he appealed successfully on a technical point. He made a rich and romantic marriage in 1843, and in 1846 disposed of his charge at the Court of Cassation to give his time entirely to politics. He was now the recognized leader of the working-men of France. He had more authority in the country than in the Chamber, where the violence of his oratory diminished its effect. He asserted that the fortifications of Paris were directed against liberty, not against foreign invasion, and he stigmatized the law of regency (1842) as an audacious usurpation. Neither from official Liberalism nor from the press did he receive support; even the Republican National was opposed to him because of his championship of labour. He therefore founded La Réforme in which to advance his propaganda. Between Ledru-Rollin and Odilon Barrot with the other chiefs of the “dynastic Left” there were acute differences, hardly dissimulated even during the temporary alliance which produced the campaign of the banquets. It was the speeches of Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc at working-men’s banquets in Lille, Dijon and Châlons that really heralded the revolution. Ledru-Rollin prevented the appointment of the duchess of Orleans as regent in 1848. He and Lamartine held the tribune in the Chamber of Deputies until the Parisian populace stopped serious discussion by invading the Chamber. He was minister of the interior in the provisional government, and was also a member of the executive committee[1] appointed by the Constituent Assembly, from which Louis Blanc and the extremists were excluded. At the crisis of the 15th of May he definitely sided with Lamartine and the party of order against the proletariat. Henceforward his position was a difficult one. He never regained his influence with the working classes, who considered they had been betrayed; but to his short ministry belongs the credit of the establishment of a working system of universal suffrage. At the presidential election in December he was put forward as the Socialist candidate, but secured only 370,000 votes. His opposition to the policy of President Louis Napoleon, especially his Roman policy, led to his moving the impeachment of the president and his ministers. The motion was defeated, and next day (June 13, 1849) he headed what he called a peaceful demonstration, and his enemies armed insurrection. He himself escaped to London where he joined the executive of the revolutionary committee of Europe, with Kossuth and Mazzini among his colleagues. He was accused of complicity in an obscure attempt (1857) against the life of Napoleon III., and condemned in his absence to deportation. Émile Ollivier removed the exceptions from the general amnesty in 1870, and Ledru-Rollin returned to France after twenty years of exile. Though elected in 1871 in three departments he refused to sit in the National Assembly, and took no serious part in politics until 1874 when he was returned to the Assembly as member for Vaucluse. He died on the 31st of December of that year.