The manor of Sandridge, at the time of the dissolution, formed part of the possessions of the Abbot of St. Albans, and is thus described in the Domesday Survey. “It answered for ten hides. There is land to thirteen ploughs. The Abbot himself holds Sandridge. Three hides are in the demesne, and there are two ploughs here, and a third may be made. Twenty-six villanes here have ten ploughs Meadow for two ploughs. Pasture for the cattle. Pasturage for three hundred hogs. The whole value is 18_l._ When received 12_l._ And the same in King Edward’s time.”—_Clutterbuck’s Hist. of Hertfordshire_, p. 216. Upon the dissolution, this manor came to the crown, and was granted by charter, anno 32 Henry VIII., to Ralph Rowlat, whose sister married Ralph Jennings, the grandfather of Richard Jennings. Footnote 8: With the day of her birth I have been assisted by the kindness of a friend. Coxe mentions merely the year. Footnote 9: I am enabled, by the kindness and intelligence of the Rev. Henry Nicholson, rector of the Abbey of St. Alban’s, to give the corroborating evidence to this fact. A member of the highly respectable family of a former rector of St. Albans distinctly recollects that it used to be the boast of her aunt, an old lady of eighty, not many years deceased, that she had herself been removed, when ill of the small-pox, to the very room in the house where Sarah Duchess of Marlborough was born. This was a small building since pulled down, and its site is now occupied by a summer-house, between what is called Holywell-street and Sopwell-lane in St. Alban’s, and within the space afterwards occupied by the pleasure-grounds of the great house at Holywell. Holywell is said by tradition to have been so called, because in it was a well, marked in an old map of St. Albans, where the nuns of Sopwell used to dip their crusts, too hard to be eaten without such a process. Footnote 10: Clutterbuck’s History of Hertfordshire, p. 57. Footnote 11: Bishop Burnet’s Hist. of His Own Times, vol. v. p. 53. Footnote 12: Granger, art. M. B. Footnote 13: Macpherson’s Hist. of Great Britain, vol. i. p. 174. Footnote 14: Macpherson, p. 177. Footnote 15: Life of James II., edited by Macpherson, vol. i. p. 73. Footnote 16: Hist. Brit., vol. i. p. 178. Footnote 17: See Archdeacon Coxe’s Life of John Duke of Marlborough, vol. i. Introduction, p. 45; also Lediard’s Life of Marlborough. For a further account of the Churchill name and lineage, see Appendix II. Footnote 18: See Coxe, p. 47 and 49. Footnote 19: See Grammont. Footnote 20: This early exploit was the result of a wager of Turenne’s. “I will bet a supper and a dozen of claret,” said the general, “that my handsome Englishman will recover the post with half the number of men commanded by the officer who has lost it.” The wager was accepted and won.—Lediard, vol. i. Footnote 21: Coxe, p. 9.