The authority for this grave charge against a famous judge is John Aubrey, the antiquary, who was born in 1627, just twenty years after Popham's death. "For severall yeares," this collector says of the Chief Justice, "he addicted himself but little to the studie of the lawes, but profligate company, and was wont to take a purse with them. His wife considered her and his condition, and at last prevailed with him to lead another life and to stick to the studie of the lawe, which, upon her importunity, he did, being then about thirtie yours old." As Popham was born in 1531, he withdrew, according to this account, from the company of gentle highwaymen about the year 1561--more than sixty years before Aubrey's birth, and more than a hundred years before the collector committed the scandalous story to writing. The worth of such testimony is not great. Good stories are often fixed upon eminent men who had no part in the transactions thereby attributed to them. If this writer were to put into a private note-book a pleasant but unauthorized anecdote imputing _kleptomania_ to Chief Justice Wiles (who died in 1761), and fifty years hence the note-book should be discovered in a dirty corner of a forgotten closet and published to the world--would readers in the twentieth century be justified in holding that Sir John Willes was an eccentric thief? But Aubrey tells a still stranger story concerning Popham, when he sets forth the means by which the judge made himself lord of Littlecote Hall in Wiltshire. The case must be given in the narrator's own words. "Sir Richard Dayrell of Littlecot in com. Wilts. having got his lady's waiting-woman with child, when her travell came sent a servant with a horse for a midwife, whom he was to bring hoodwinked. She was brought, and layd the woman; but as soon as the child was born, she saw the knight take the child and murther it, and burn it in the fire in the chamber. She having done her business was extraordinarily rewarded for her paines, and went blindfold away. This horrid action did much run in her mind, and she had a desire to discover it, but knew not where 'twas. She considered with herself the time she was riding, and how many miles she might have rode at that rate in that time, and that it must be some great person's house, for the roome was twelve foot high: and she should know the chamber if she sawe it. She went to a justice of peace, and search was made. The very chamber found. The knight was brought to his tryall; and, to be short, this judge had this noble house, park, and manor, and (I think) more, for a bribe to save his life. Sir John Popham gave sentence according to lawe, but being a great person and a favorite, he procured a _nolle prosequi_."