A book of the west. Volume 1, Devon : $b being an introduction to Devon and CornwallBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A book of the west. Volume 1, Devon : $b being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Devon (England)
The deed was accomplished about ten o'clock on the night of February
11th, 1591, and all four were tried at Barnstaple, whither the
assizes had been moved from Exeter because the plague was raging in
the latter city, and were executed on March 20th following. Philip
Wyot, town clerk of Barnstaple, kept a diary at the time, extracts
from which have been printed. He gives some particulars:--"The
gibbet was sat up on the Castle Green and xviij prisoners hanged,
whereof iiij of Plimouth for a murder." These four were the
murderers of Page. How it was that Ulalia was hanged instead of
being burnt, in contravention of the law, does not appear, and
we may doubt the statement. Three of those hanged were buried in
the churchyard at Barnstaple, but Ulalia Page was laid in that
of Bishops Tawton. Now as to the statement that Judge Glanville
sentenced his own daughter.
In the first place, _was_ she his daughter? It appears not; for from
the tract already referred to, "in the town of Testock (Tavistock)
... there dwelled one Mr. Glandfield (Glanville), a man of good
wealth and account as any occupier in that cuntrie," whose daughter
Eulalia was; and she set her affections on George Strangwich, who
was in her father's employ. Mr. Glanville, of Tavistock, almost
certainly was a near relative of the judge. The Glanvilles were
tanners of Whitchurch, in trade, but the family was respectable.
They have been given a fanciful pedigree from a Norman Lord of
Glanville near Caen, but it is deficient in proof. What is clear
is that the family occupied a respectable position near Tavistock
in the reign of Elizabeth; they had their tan pits, and they went
into trade without scruple. In fact, John Glanville, father of the
judge, was himself a merchant, _i.e._, shopkeeper in Tavistock. That
Eulalia was a _sister_ of the judge is possible enough. That her
name was not inserted in the pedigree as recorded in the Herald's
Visitation may easily be understood.[32]
[32] Glandfeelde is the same as Glanville; so in the Tavistock
register, Grenville is entered as Greenfeelde.
The next point is--Did Judge Glanville preside at the trial?
Now we are informed by E. Foss (_Biographia Juridica_, 1870, p.
303) that Glanville "was promoted to the bench as a Justice of the
Common Pleas on June 30th, 1598." Consequently he was not a judge at
the time that Eulalia Page was tried. The judge who tried the case,
as we learn from Wyot's diary, was Lord Anderson. Nevertheless,
Glanville was present at Barnstaple at the assizes, for Wyot
mentions him as Serjeant Glandye, who was one of the principal
lawyers present, and he had been "called to the degree of the coif,"
Ford records, two years before. So, as far as we can discover:--
1. Eulalia was very probably _sister_ of Judge Glanville, she
being daughter of a merchant Glanville, of Tavistock, as he was
son of one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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