With them it continued till 1497, when Sir Simon Mountfort, charged, but perhaps unjustly, with assisting Perkin Warbeck with 30_l_. was brought to trial at Guildhall, condemned as a traitor, executed at Tyburn, his large fortune confiscated, and his family ruined. Some of his descendants I well know in Birmingham; and _they_ are well known to poverty, and the vice. In the reign of Henry the Seventh, it was almost dangerous, particularly for a rich man, even to _think_ against a crafty and avaricious monarch.--What is singular, the man who accused Sir Simon at the bar, succeeded him in his estate. Simon Digby procured a grant of the place, in whose line it still continues. The hall is inhabited, but has been left about thirty years by the family; was probably erected by the Mountforts, is extensive, and its antique aspect without, gives a venerable pleasure to the beholder, like the half admitted light diffused within. Every spot of the park is delightful, except that in which the hall stands: our ancestors built in the vallies, for the sake of water; their successors on the hills, for the sake of air. From this uncouth swamp sprung the philosopher, the statesman, and tradition says, the gunpowder-plot. DUDDESTON. Four furlongs north-east of Birmingham, is _Duddeston_ (Dud's-town) from Dud, the Saxon proprietor, Lord of Dudley, who probably had a seat here; once a considerable village, but long reduced to the manor-house, till Birmingham, swelling beyond its bounds, in 1764, verged upon this lordship; and we now, in 1783, behold about eighty houses, under the names of Duke-street, Prospect-row, and Woodcock-lane. It afterwards descended to the Paganalls, the Sumeris, then to the Bottetourts, and was, in 1323, enjoyed by Joan Bottetourt, lady of Weoley castle, a daughter of the house of Sumeri. Sir Thomas de Erdington held it of this lady, by a chief-rent, which was a pair of gilt spurs, or six-pence, at the option of the tenant. Erdington sold it, in 1327, to Thomas de Maidenhache, by whose daughter, Sibell, it came in marriage to Adam de Grymforwe; whose posterity, in 1363, conveyed it for 26_l_. 13s. 4d. now worth 20,000_l_. to John atte Holt; and his successors made it their residence, till the erection of Aston-hall, in the reign of James I. It is now converted into beautiful gardens, as a public resort of pleasure, and dignified with the London name of Vauxhall. The demolished fish-ponds, and the old foundations, which repel the spade, declare its former grandeur. In 1782 it quitted, by one of the most unaccountable alignments that ever resulted from human weakness, the ancient name of Holte, familiar during four hundred and nineteen years, for that of Legge.