"Worcester, Aug. 5, 1665." The Bishop was cousin of Richard Skynner, of Cofton Hackett, the eldest son of Edward Skinner, of Ledbury, who purchased that manor for him from the Dyneley family, upon his marriage with his first wife, Miss Dyneley; and of Dr. William Skynner, his brother, fellow of All Soul's, Oxford; 1612, LL.D. March 31; 1625, chancellor of Hereford, April 29, 1626; rector of Beckenham, Kent, 1628; and in 1650 deprived of his living by the Parliament in favour of John Soter, and never restored, as he died at Ledbury, 1657, aged 66. This Richard's will showed, by his selection of his executors, and the course pursued by them in the Civil Wars, how friendships were broken; two, his brother-in-law, Sir Edward Lyttleton, Baronet, and Sir Edward Sebright, Baronet, were fined by Parliament as Royalists, and one was Humphrey Salwey, also married to a Miss Lyttleton, whom he styles his dear brother Humphrey Salwey, and whose son sat as one of the judges on the trial of King Charles I, and was M.P. for Worcestershire in the Long Parliament. A younger son of the Bishop's, William, was by his father appointed rector of Hartlebury, and there is a monument to his memory in that church. There was also another member of the Ledbury family connected with this county, as having been a member of the Oxford circuit, the Right Hon. Sir John Skynner, Knight, Lord Chief Baron. He was grandson of Edward Skynner, of Ledbury, and Margaret, his wife. On the 15th March, 1757, he was one of the counsel present in court, at the Worcester Assizes, when, between two and three o'clock, p.m., as Sir Eardly Wilmot began to sum up in the last cause, a stack of chimneys fell through the roof, killing many. The counsel then in court, being five in number, saved themselves under the stout table, and of these, four--Aston, Nares, Ashurst, and Skynner--after became judges; the fifth dying a king's counsel. We find traces of this old Ledbury family in this county, for in Nash's History of Worcestershire, vol. 2, we read that in the east window of the south aisle of Little Malvern Church are the arms of John Alcock, who was Bishop of Worcester from 1476 to 1486, and, in the south part of the same window is written "Orate pro animabus Roberti Skinner et Isabellæ, uxoris ejus, et filiorum suorum et filiarum." Richard Skinner, of Cofton, served the office of sheriff of Worcestershire in the 4th of Charles I (1628), and Edmund Skinner, of Wichenford, in the 12th George I (1726). The arms of Skinner are "Sable, a chevron or, between three griffins' heads argent." DODDINGTREE HUNDRED TWO CENTURIES AGO.