for which Knole--one of the stateliest of the Baronial Mansions of England--has long been famous. No precise date can be assigned to the structure; it is certain that so far back as the Conquest there was “a residence” here; we have, however, no authentic records of its occupants until early in the reign of John, when “the Manor and Estate” were held by Baldwin de Bethune, from whom they passed by marriage to the Mareschals, Earls of Pembroke, one of whom--a “rebellious Baron”--forfeiting, the lands were bestowed upon Fulk de Brent, a low soldier of fortune--“a desperate fellow,” as Camden terms him, whose arms had been useful to the King and his son, Henry the Third. Upon the subsequent disgrace of this mercenary, the lands reverted to the Earl of Pembroke; from whom they passed to the Bigods, the Grandisons, the Says, and--in the reign of Henry the Sixth--to James Fienes, summoned to Parliament in the twenty-fourth of that Monarch’s reign as Lord Say and Sele; and murdered in Cheapside by order of “Jack Cade.” His son and heir conveyed the estates to Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, who having “rebuilt the Manor-house, and enclosed a Park round the same,” bequeathed it, in 1486, to the See. Knole thus became the dwelling-house of the several Archbishops until the twenty-ninth of Henry the Eighth, when Cranmer, “willing to surrender a part of the possessions of the Church to preserve the remainder,” granted Knole and its appurtenances to the King. By Edward the Sixth they were given to the Dudleys: on the failure of the attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne, they reverted to the Crown. By Queen Mary they were presented to Cardinal Pole. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, after having been held for a brief time by the Earl of Leicester, they were bestowed upon Thomas Sackville, created Baron Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset. In this family they have ever since remained; the present owner of the noble Mansion and Estates being the Countess Amherst, relict of the sixth Earl of Plymouth, and daughter of the third Duke of Dorset, co-heiress, with her sister the Countess De la Warr, of her brother, the fourth Duke, who died “of full age, but unmarried and without issue,” in 1815.[59]