It has been already noted that Randle Holme III. lived in Bridge
Street. This house he apparently built about 1670, and did this without
consulting the Corporation, and he was ordered to pull it down, and
fined for persisting in building it. The house, however, was not
demolished until early in the nineteenth century, when the Grosvenor
Bridge was built over the Dee, and it was subsequently converted into a
tavern called “The Lamb.”
Randle Holme III. died on March 12, 1699-1700, in the seventy-third
year of his age. He was thrice married, and had issue eight sons
and six daughters. Of the former only three survived him--Randle,
by his first wife, born in 1659, and George and John by his second.
Randle was taken into partnership by his father when he was thirty-one
years of age--that is, in 1690. In 1691 he became a member of the
Stationers’ Company, of which he was elected an alderman in 1705,
the same year in which he was one of the two sheriffs of the city.
Like his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, he also served
the office of churchwarden of St. Mary’s, and like them, too, he
was deputy to Norroy King-of-Arms. He continued the work of his
ancestors, and the churchwardens’ accounts of St. Mary’s contain
various entries of payments to him for work done. He died August 30,
1707, aged 48, all his five children having predeceased him. In his
will, referred to above, he bequeaths all his books and collections
of heraldry to his half-brothers George and John, to be equally
divided between them. These books and collections no doubt represented
the work and labours of all four Randle Holmes, as well as what the
first of that name obtained by his marriage with the widow of Thomas
Chaloner. They represented the researches of over a hundred years,
and contained abstracts of many documents which no longer exist, and
accounts of visits paid to many churches, with accurate descriptions
of the monumental inscriptions, and the old heraldic stained glass
in the windows. Early in the eighteenth century they were purchased
by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, having been, it is said, first
offered to the Corporation of Chester, who declined to buy them. They
now form a portion of that magnificent collection of manuscripts in
the British Museum known as “the Harleian MSS.,” and run to about
270 volumes. Naturally their contents are extremely diversified, and
they vary considerably in value; but there can be no doubt that to
any one inquiring into the history of Chester, Cheshire, Lancashire,
and North Wales they contain a mine of information, and are simply
invaluable. Unfortunately there is no complete and sufficient index
of their contents, so that laborious perusal of them is necessary, for
the acquisition of the information which they can convey. Allowance,
too, will have to be made for the fact that none of the four were
good mediæval Latin scholars, for none of them had the advantage of a
university education.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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