The History of Oswestry: Comprising the British, Saxon, Norman, and English eras; the topography of the borough; and its ecclesiastical and civic history; with notices of botany, geology, statistics, angling, and biography: to which are added sketches of the environsCathrall, William
History
The History of Oswestry: Comprising the British, Saxon, Norman, and English eras; the topography of the borough; and its ecclesiastical and civic history; with notices of botany, geology, statistics, angling, and biography: to which are added sketches of the environs
Cathrall, William
Natural history -- England -- Shropshire; Oswestry (England) -- History
After describing the pictures and books at Halston at the time he was
writing, he adds,
“Mr. W. Mytton was engaged for many years in collecting materials for
a History of the County, but unfortunately died before he arranged
them. Among the collection is a manuscript copy of the History of
the County, by Mr. E. Lloyd, of Trenewydd, which Mr. Pennant, by some
blunder, mistook for Mr. Mytton’s.”
The Chapel of Halston is a donative, without any other revenue than what
the chaplain is allowed by the owner, and is of exempt jurisdiction.
The Mytton family are of great antiquity, and their connection with
Shrewsbury is of remote date. The late John Mytton, Esq., sold, among
other property belonging to him in that town, a field called the “Chapel
Yard,” on Coton Hill. When Leland visited Shrewsbury the Myttons lived
on Coton Hill. In the bailiff’s accounts for a year from Michaelmas, 2nd
Richard III., among rents in decasu (in decay) is one “Procapella de
Coten Thome Mytton,” the sum defaced; and his descendant Thomas Mytton,
Esq., was rated for it to the poor as late as 1686. Major-General Thomas
Mytton, the great parliamentary commander in the Civil Wars, was a
descendant of the Myttons of Shrewsbury. Halston was his birth-place,
and he resided there for many years. He was a zealous and untiring
leader of the parliament forces under the Commonwealth, and gave his days
and nights to the Protector’s cause; but he lived long enough to realize
the truth of the poet’s exclamation,
“How wretched is the man that hangs on Princes’ favours!”
He saw men of inferior talent, but ostentatious in profession, placed
over him in rank, and had to suffer the penalty which many others paid
for their attachment to Cromwell—the neglect and indifference of the
party whom he had so long delighted to serve, and the favour of the
Protector extended to sycophants and flatterers.
The late John Mytton, Esq., was the last member but one of the family who
possessed the Halston estates. This unfortunate gentleman passed a brief
life in folly and dissipation, and closed his existence with an
unenviable notoriety. On reaching his majority he found himself the
owner of immense wealth, in money and landed property. Under pernicious
influences he plunged into extravagance, recklessly squandered away his
patrimony, and in a few years became the inmate of a gaol,
“Deserted at his utmost need,
By those his former bounty fed.”
He drew his last breath within the gloomy walls of a prison, at the early
age of thirty-eight, and was interred, with his ancestors, in the
burial-ground at Halston Chapel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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