A parish register at Hursley, 1653, recording births (not baptisms), mentions the opening of a chalk-pit at Hatchgate in 1655, and at Otterbourne. The children of William Downe of Otterbourne Farm are distinguished by double black lines below their names. Oliver Cromwell, according to an old village tradition, sunk his treasure at the bottom of Merdon Well, in an iron chest which must have been enchanted, for, on an endeavour to draw it up, no one was to speak. One workman unfortunately said, “Here it comes,” when it immediately sank to the bottom and (this is quite certain) never was seen! The well was cleaned out in later times, and nothing was found but a pair of curious pattens, cut away to receive a high-heeled shoe, also a mazer-bowl, an iron flesh-hook and small cooking-pot, and a multitude of pins, thrown in to make the curious reverberating sound when, after several seconds, they reached the water. A couple of ducks are said to have been thrown down, and to have emerged at Pool hole at Otterbourne with their feathers scraped off. On 3rd September 1658, the family party at Hursley was broken up by the unexpected death of the Protector. He was not yet sixty years of age, and had not contemplated being cut off before affairs were more settled; and when, in his last moments, he was harassed with enquiries as to his successor, he answered, “You will find my will in _such_ a drawer of my cabinet.” Some of his counsellors thought he named his son Richard; and no one ever found the drawer with the will in it, in which it was thought that his son-in-law Fleetwood, a much abler man, was named. At any rate, Richard was accepted in his father’s place by Parliament and army, and went to much expense for the Protector’s funeral. It must have been a great misfortune to him that his shrewd father-in-law, the witty and thrifty Mr. Maijor, was sinking under a complication of incurable diseases, of which Morley speaks somewhat unkindly, and he died in the end of April 1660. Richard had never been a strong partisan of the Commonwealth, though he had quietly submitted to whatever was required of him. He had been member of Parliament for the county of Hants, and had been placed at the head of the list of his father’s attempt at a House of Lords, and he allowed greatness to be thrust on him in a quiet acquiescent way. He dismissed the fictitious parliament that his father had summoned, and then offended the strict and godly of the army by promoting soldiers of whom they disapproved. “Here is Dick Ingoldsby,” he said; “he can neither pray nor preach, and yet I trust him before you all.”