Dame Olave, a daughter and coheire of Sir [Henry] Sharington of Lacock, being in love with [John] Talbot, a younger brother of the Earle of Shrewsbury, and her father not consenting that she should marry him; discoursing with him one night from the battlements of the Abbey Church, said shee, “I will leap downe to you:” her sweet heart replied he would catch her then; but he did not believe she would have done it. She leap’t downe, and the wind, which was then high, came under her coates and did something breake the fall. Mr. Talbot caught her in his armes, but she struck him dead: she cried out for help, and he was with great difficulty brought to life again. Her father told her that since she had made such a leap she should e’en marrie him. She was my honoured friend Col. Sharington Talbot’s grandmother, and died at her house at Lacock about 1651, being about an hundred yeares old. Quaere, Sir Jo. Talbot? [This romantic story seems to have escaped the attention of the venerable historian of Lacock, the Rev. Canon Bowles. The late John Carter mentions a tradition of which he was informed on visiting Lacock in 1801, to the effect that “one of the nuns jumped from a gallery on the top of a turret there into the arms of her lover.” He observes, as impugning the truth of the story, that the gallery “appears to have been the work of James or Charles the First’s time.” Aubrey’s anecdote has an appearance of authenticity. Its heroine, Olave, or Olivia Sherington, married John Talbot, Esq. of Salwarpe, in the county of Worcester, fourth in descent from John, second Earl of Shrewsbury. She inherited the Lacock estate from her father, and it has ever since^ remained the property of that branch of the Talbot family, now represented by the scientific Henry Fox Talbot, Esq.—J. B.] The last Lady Prioresse of Priorie St Marie, juxta Kington St. Michael, was the Lady Mary Dennys, a daughter of the Dennys’s of Pocklechurch in Gloucestershire; she lived a great while after the dissolution of the abbeys, and died in Somersetshire about the middle or latter end of the raigne of King James the first The last Lady Abbese of Amesbury was a Kirton, who after the dissolution married to….. Appleton of Hampshire. She had during her life a pension from King Henry VIII.: she was 140 yeares old when she dyed. She was great-great-aunt to Mr. Child, Rector of Yatton Keynell; from whom I had this information. Mr. Child, the eminent banker in Fleet Street, is Parson Child’s cosen-german. [The name of the last Abbess of Amesbury was Joan Darell, who surrendered to the King, 4 Dec. 1540. Hoare’s Modern Wiltshire, Amesbury Hundred, p. 73. J. B.] When King Charles II. was at Salisbury, 1665, a piper of Stratford sub Castro playd on his tabor and pipe before him, who was a piper in Queen Elizabeth’s time, and aged then more than 100.