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the abbess had confined her, and sustained no injury from her fall but the fracture of her little finger." Mrs. Crawford relates some interesting recollections of an inmate of the abbey, Lady Shrewsbury, a strict Catholic, eighty years of age, who had been in her youth a great beauty. She had frequently friends staying here; the Blounts, Cliffords, and Hydes being her most frequent guests. The family priest, a sort of Will Wimble,' had three rooms for his special use a bed-chamber hung with tapestry, and filled with all sorts of curious things; and two chambers-a printingoffice and turning-shop.

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Lady Shrewsbury was pious without parade, and one of the old aristocracy, without any of those unbecoming airs of pride too often attending high rank. She was sent by her father, Lord Dormer, to a French convent to be educated. Her own account of her first interview with the Earl of Shrewsbury is amusing: Being told that an English gentleman had brought letters from my father, I hurried into the Lady Abbess' parlour, where the Earl, then a beautiful young man, was waiting to see me. I had been so long within those dismal walls, and never seen a man but our own confessor, and a hideous-looking creature who came to draw my tooth, that the Earl looked like an angel to me.' They were soon married, and spent some time at the French court. On her arrival in England, Lady Shrewsbury went, in all her bridal state, to visit her sister, Miss Dormer, at the convent where she was passing her novitiate, previously to her taking the veil. Lady Shrewsbury used all her sisterly arts

to entice back the young recluse to the gay world she had forsaken, but in vain.

LEGEND OF SPYE PARK.

Mrs. Crawford appends: Half-way up to Bowden Hill, and between Bowood and Lacock Abbey, stands Spye Park, the seat of the Bayntons, a family of great antiquity. In 1652, at the defeat of Sir William Waller by the Lord Wilmot, Bromham House, the former seat of the Bayntons, was burnt down, after which they removed to Spye Park. There is now in the Royal Museum a curious old pedigree, showing that the Bayntons, in the reign of Henry II., were Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. Sir Henry Baynton held the office of knight-marshal to the king, a place of great authority at that time; and his son, who was slain at Bretagne in the year 1201, was a noble Knight of Jerusalem. Sidney, in his Treatise on Government, mentions this family of 'great antiquity, and that in name and ancient possessions it equals most, if it is not far superior to many, of the nobility.' As all old mansions in the country must be associated with some portion of the superstitious and the wonderful, Spye Park was not without its. share. There was a story told (and credited by the peasantry) of a knight, clad in armour, haunting one of the chambers-supposed to be the spirit of the gallant Sir Henry Baynton, who was beheaded at Berwick, in the time. of Henry IV., for taking part with the rebel Earl of Northumberland. More modern spirits also were said to trouble

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with him the heiress, and presented her to King Richard. Immediately after, the hard of Fla was given in marriage to William Longspe by his brother King Richard,—Ela being then only ten years old, and William twenty-three.

After the marriage of E. we have little to recount of her for several years, unless it were to enumerate the names of her flourishing family of four sons and as many daughters. The Earl was in frequent attendance upon King John; but the Countess Ela appears to have passed most of her life in provincial sovereignty at Salisbury, or in the quiet retirement of some country manor,-most frequently, perha in the peaceful shades of her native Amesbury.1

Appleton of

that the last Lady Abbess of Amesbury was a
e Dissolution, married to
during her life a pension from King Henry VIII.

We pass over the career of the Earl; his assumption of Ela's hereditary office of the Shrievalty of Wiltshire; his attendance at the coronation of John, and upon the king in Normandy; his progresses with John in England, and his appointment to military command and as Warder of the Marches; his ruinous campaign in Flanders; and his presence at the signing of Magna Charta. After the death of John, the Earl returned to his Castle of Salisbury, and to that most interesting scene in which the pious Ela was an active partaker with him. This was no less than the ceremony of founding the present beautiful Cathedral of Salisbury, the fourth stone of which was laid by the Earl, and the fifth by the Countess Ela. We next pass the Earl's visit to Gascony in the spring of 1224, and his disastrous return, when, according to Matthew Paris, he was 'for almost three months at sea' before he landed in England. ing the interval all his friends had despaired of his life, except his faithful wife, who, though now a matron, became an object of pursuit to the fortune-hunters of the Court. The Justice Hubert de Burgh, with most indecent haste, now put forward a nephew of his own as a suitor to the Lady of Salisbury. It is related by Matthew Paris, that whilst King Henry was deeply grieved at the supposed loss of the Earl of Salisbury, Hubert came and required him to bestow Earl William's wife (to whom the dignity of that She was 140 years old (?) when she dyed. She was great-great-aunt to Mr. Child, rector of Yatton Keynell, from whom I had this information. Mr. Child, the eminent banker in Fleet Street, is Parson Child's cousin-german.'-Natural History of Wiltshire, 4to, p. 70.

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earldom belonged by hereditary right) on his own nephew Reimund, that he might marry her. The king having yielded to his petition, provided the Countess would consent, the Justice sent Reimund to her, in a noble, knightly array, to endeavour to incline the lady's heart to his suit. But Ela rejected him with majestic scorn, and replied that she had lately received letters and messengers which assured her that the Earl, her husband, was in health and safety; adding, that if her lord the Earl had indeed been dead, she would in no case have received him for a husband, because their unequal rank forbade such a union. 'Wherefore,' said she, 'you must seek a marriage elsewhere, because you find you have come hither in vain.' Upon the Earl's return, he claimed reparation from the Justiciary, who confessed his fault, made his peace with the Earl by some valuable horses and other large presents, and invited him to his table. Here, it is said, the Earl was poisoned (probably with repletion). He returned to his castle at Salisbury, took to his bed, and died March 7, 1226; and, as already mentioned, was buried in Salisbury Cathedral.

Ela, now a widow, continued firm in her resolution to remain faithful to the memory of her first lord, and to maintain her independence in what was then termed, in legal phrase, 'a free widowhood.' Her choice, however, was singular; for ladies of large estate, at that period, were seldom permitted to remain either as virgins or widows without a lord and protector, unless they had arrived at an advanced age. Her case is deemed extraordinary in the

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