How many travellers from London, or Oxford, or Leicester, or Ashby-de-la-Zouch, to Derby, passing in all those centuries over Swarkstone Bridge, have paused to ask when, or why, or by whom it was there erected for their convenience?
Tradition is best preserved when crystallised in a story.
There were gay doings in the hall and the villages around Bellamont in the June of 1258, when a noble party of guests had assembled at the hall to share the festivities at the forthcoming marriage of the ladies Idonea and Avice, the twin daughters of Richard Earl Bellamont and his noble countess.
More than one disappointed suitor was there amongst the party, either too proud to show his wounds, or gallantly indifferent; for as the earl's only son had been drowned in his childhood, the fair maidens were known to be co-heiresses, and not a neighbouring lord or knight but would have been well pleased to add a slice of the Bellamont lands to his own estate.
Then report said the sisters were wonderfully fair and virtuous; that their lady-mother had early initiated them into the mysteries of good housewifery; and the learned Prior of Burton (John de Stretton) had opened unto them the still greater mysteries of reading, writing, accounts, and religion—not least, if last.
No wonder, then, that many a lance was set in rest and broken in tilt or tourney for one or other of the sisters, seeing they were endowed with beauty, wealth, thrift, learning, and the Christian graces.
Such prizes are not often offered for the winning.
The Countess Joan would fain have given one of her daughters to a kinsman, William Harpur, of Ticknall, but fate, and, it may be, Prior John, had determined otherwise.
Idonea had promised her hand to Sir Ralph de Egginton; and Sir Gilbert Findern—in whose gardens bloomed the fair blossoms his father had brought from the Holy Land—was the heart's-chosen of sweet Avice.