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cities or castles, would not be much in accordance with our ideas of such places in the present age.

The Nunnery of Lacock is far more interesting than the Castle of Dunvallo. In the year 1232, Ela, only child of William Earl of Salisbury, and sole heiress of all her father's vast landed possessions in Wiltshire, laid the foundation of this religious house in her widowhood, in pious and affectionate remembrance of her husband William Longspé (in her right Earl of Sarum), who had then been dead six years. This brave man was the eldest natural son of Henry II., by the lady whose transcendent beauty has become proverbial under the name of Fair Rosamond. He assisted in founding the magnificent Cathedral of New Sarum in the year 1220 six years afterwards he died of poison at the Castle of Old Sarum, and was the first person buried within the walls of New Sarum Cathedral, where his tomb now remains. The earliest ancestor of Ela, whose existence rests on credible record, was Edward of Salisbury, Sheriff of Wilts, whose name occurs in Domesday book, and attesting several charters of the Conqueror.

The childhood and early life of the pious Ela are fraught with romantic interest. She was born at Amesbury in 1188. Until her father's death in 1196, Ela was reared in princely state. Earl William, her father, was one of the distinguished subjects of the chivalric lion king, Richard, and took a prominent part at both his coronations. He also kept the king's charter for licensing tournaments throughout the country. One of the five steads or fields

then appointed ie wumines in Figlind was started Between Solisay and Whe, and on the sit a child the fire Albess & Lood mor have fiy ressed the perlos giety of knightly entering and is proud exhibitions of personal courage and external sple dour and gallantry. The station is well known ea de downs in front of the site of Sarum Castle.

Such was the scene on which Fa in her childhood might have gazed when animated with the glitter of arms ard banners; but from which, on the death of her father, this richly portioned heiress was suddenly snatched and sub jected to seclusion in a foreign country. All that is said in the transcript of the annals of the Abbey of Lacock the original perished in the fire at the Cotton Library is that Ela was secretly taken into Normandy by her relations, and there brought up in close and secret custody. These relations, it is conjectured, were her mother and her mother's family, whose estates were either in Normandy or Champagne. Immediately upon the inquisition held after her father's death, Ela's land would, in due course, be taken into the possession of the king, as she had become a royal ward: but such was not the case. The event which arose from these circumstances is highly characteristic of the court of the minstrel monarch. An English knight, named William Talbot, undertook to discover the place of the youthful heiress' concealment; the idea having been suggested, if the fact be admitted, by King Richard's own dis covery, a few years before, by aid of the minstrel Blondel,

Assuming the garb of a pilgrim, the gallant Talbot passed over into Normandy, and there continued his search, wandering to and fro for the space of two years. When at length he had found the Lady Ela of Salisbury, he exchanged his pilgrim's dress for that of a harper or travelling troubadour, and in that guise entered the court in which the maid was detained. As he sustained to perfection his character of a gleeman, and was excellently versed in the jests or historical lays recounting the deeds of former times, the stranger was kindly entertained, and soon received as one of the household. At last his chivalric undertaking was fully accomplished; when, having found a convenient opportunity for returning, he carried with him the heiress, and presented her to King Richard. Immediately after, the hand of Ela was given in marriage to William Longspé by his brother King Richard,—Ela being then only ten years old, and William twenty-three.

After the marriage of Ela, 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, perhaps, in the peaceful shades of her native Amesbury.1

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Aubrey tells us that the last Lady Abbess of Amesbury was a Kirton, who, after the Dissolution, married to Appleton of

Hampshire. She had 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.

Dur

son Stephen; so that, of all her family, she left only two sons and three daughters surviving, one of whom died in the following year. Ela's son William Longspé the second, having joined the expedition of St. Louis to the Holy Land, perished at the assault of Mensoura. His mother, according to the monkish legend, seated in her abbatial stall in the church at Lacock, saw, at the same moment, the mailed form of her child admitted into heaven, surrounded by a radius of glory. His son William Longspé 11. was killed in a tournament near Salisbury.

The annals of the abbey after the death of Ela are by no means complete. In 1291 we first collect a view of its

yearly revenue,

191, 12s. 4d.

here included is a manor in the

Among the possessions

Isle of Wight, which had

been given to the abbey by Amicia Countess of Devon, and Lady of the Isle,' together with her heart. The obit of the Countess was yearly celebrated in the church of Lacock Abbey, on the feast of St. Andrew (November 30), when four bushels of corn were distributed to the poor; and on the eve and day of that feast, three poor persons were fed with bread, drink, and meat, to the value of 2d. each. Another instance of pious affection in 1297, is the bequest. of the heart of the aged Nicholas Longspé, Bishop of Salisbury, the last surviving son of the foundress.

The last abbess was Joanna Temys. Lacock was one of the thirty monasteries which the king spared in 1536; but it was surrendered in 1539, and the fatal document is still preserved in the Augmentation Office. It is ratified by the

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