memory outlived him; and persons sixty years of age can remember his name in frequent mention, coupled with epithets of truculent notoriety, and of even traditionary influence. In Devonshire and the neighbouring counties, the children playing at the game called 'Tom Tiddler's Ground' (and which consists in making forays into the ground of Tom Tiddler for the purpose of 'picking up gold. and silver,' until Tom can catch one of the marauders, who then takes his place), instead of calling the territory 'Tom Tiddler's Ground,' style it 'Judge Jeffreys's Ground;' and as the holder is supposed to be an ogre of vindictive and sanguinary habits, is it supposing too much that the memory of the terrible judge of 'The Merciful Assize' is still retained in the very sports of the children in the districts over which he exercised his fearful sway? (See Notes and Queries, No. 158.)

WEST HORSLEY PLACE AND THE WESTONS.

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EARLY in the centre of the county of Surrey

lies one of its oldest historic estates-West Horsley Place-where the very ancient family of Weston of Weston have been seated from the time of the Norman Conquest. The present mansion is partly of the time of James I.; but the memories of the old place, and its noble possessors, extend long beyond that period.

From Domesday Book it appears that Walter Fitz-Otho de Windsor held this manor, then called Orselei. He was then Governor of Windsor Castle, whence his descendants took their name. William de Windsor, and his son Walter, accompanied King Richard on an expedition to Normandy in 1194; and William probably died there. Hugh de Windsor, who lived in the reign of Henry III., dying without male heirs, the estate passed to Christiana-called in some pedigrees his sister, but in others his daughter and heiress. Whichever degree of kinship should be assigned to her, she conveyed the estate in marriage to Sir Ralph Berners; but upon his death, in 1297, it reverted to Christiana as his widow. Among the curious memorial entries,

we find, in the reign of Edward III., Sir John Berners paid to the heirs of Hugh de Windsor half a pound of cuminseed at Easter.'

James, the son and heir of Sir John Berners, was one of the obnoxious favourites of Richard II.; and he was involved in the ruin that befel Richard himself in 1388, when his folly and tyranny had incited the principal nobility (headed by his uncle the Duke of Gloucester) to an insurrection against his government. Sir James Berners was arrested, and committed a prisoner to the castle at Bristol; and having been attainted by the Parliament, he was beheaded, and his estates were forfeited to the crown. Stow, after mentioning the decollation of Lord Beauchamp of Holt, on Tower Hill, says: 'Sir James Berners, Knight of the King's Court, a lustie young man, was in the same place beheaded.'

Juliana Barnes, or Berners, Abbess of Sopewell, near St. Albans, in 1460, and authoress of the celebrated work generally called The Boke of Seynt Albans, containing tracts on hawking, hunting, fishing, etc., is said to have been the daughter of Sir James Berners; but the statement is doubtful.

King Richard, in 1393, granted the manor of West Horsley, with the park and warrens, to the widow of Sir James Berners. Henry IV., in the first year of his reign, made a grant in fee of the estate to her son Sir Richard Berners ; and three years afterwards he obtained a licence from the king to put this manor in feoffment, that he

might be enabled to make a settlement on his wife Philippa, the daughter and heiress of Edmund Dalyngruge. This lady survived her husband, and was married to Sir Thomas Lewknor; but Margery, the only daughter of Sir Richard Berners, on his death in 1421, succeeded to the possession of his estates, including the manor, park, warrens, and advowson of West Horsley. She married Sir John Feriby; and he dying without issue, she was married a second time to Sir John Bourchier, a knight of the garter, and Constable of Windsor Castle. He died in 1474; and, agreeably to his own directions, was interred in the Chapel of the Holy Rood within the Abbey of Chertsey, to whose monks he gave a silver cross, and other articles, valued at forty pounds.

Sir Humphrey Bourchier, K.B., the eldest son of Sir John, lost his life in the service of King Edward iv. at the battle of Barnet in 1471; and the succession to the family estates devolved on John Bourchier, the eldest son of Humphrey, who, on the death of his grandfather, became Lord Berners, and sat in several Parliaments in the reigns. of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. He distinguished himself at the battle of Blackheath in 1497, where the Cornish insurgents were defeated; and he served as captain of the pioneers at the siege of Terouanne in 1535, when the king, Henry VIII., commanded in person.

But Lord Berners is most advantageously known as the translator of the Chronicles of Froissart, by command of the king. This work was published in folio in 1525; and

in 1528 he had a grant of the manors of Ockham, Effingham, Woldingham, and Titsey (part of the forfeited estates of Edward Duke of Buckingham), which may have been designed by his royal master as the reward of his learned. labour.1

Lord Berners had previously received many especial marks of the monarch's favour. He held the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer for life; was LieutenantGeneral of the town and marches of Calais; and was appointed, with other persons of rank, to attend the Princess Mary on her voyage to France, to become the queen of Louis XII. in 1514. Lord Berners died at Calais in 1532-3,

1 Froissart has been happily styled the Herodotus of the Middle Ages. 'More important than the poems of Dante and Chaucer, or the prose of Boccaccio, was the introduction of the new literature represented by Froissart. Hitherto chronicles had for the most part consisted of the record of such wandering rumours as reached a monastery, or were gathered in the religious pilgrimages of holy men. But at this time there came into notice the most inquiring, enterprising, picturesque and entertaining chronicler that had ever appeared since Herodotus. John Froissart, called by the courtesy of the time Sir John, in honour of his being priest and chaplain, devoted a long life to the collection of the fullest and most trustworthy accounts of all the events and personages characteristic of his time. From 1326, when his labours commenced, to 1400, when his active pen stood still, nothing happened in any part of Europe that Froissart did not rush off to verify on the spot. If he heard of an assemblage of knights going on at the extremities of France, or in the centre of Germany; of a tournament at Bordeaux, a court gala in Scotland, or a marriage festival at Milan, his travels began—whether in the humble guise of a solitary horseman, with his portmanteau behind his saddle and a single greyhound at his heels, as he jogged wearily across the Border till he finally arrived in Edinburgh; or in his grander style of equipment, gallant steed, with hackney led beside him, and four dogs of high race gambolling round his horse, as he made his dignified

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