The Strife of the Roses and Days of the Tudors in the WestRogers, W. H. Hamilton (William Henry Hamilton)
History
The Strife of the Roses and Days of the Tudors in the West
Rogers, W. H. Hamilton (William Henry Hamilton)
Great Britain -- History -- Tudors, 1485-1603; Great Britain -- History -- Wars of the Roses, 1455-1485
As usual with influential families resident near large ecclesiastical
foundations, and having considerable landed property in the district,
the Paveleys, who were the Lords of Westbury Hundred, were doubtless
largely connected with the welfare of the Monastery, and as liberal
donors toward the building of the Abbey Church. The armorial story
told on the tomb, points to its being the memorial of Sir Ralph
Cheney, who married Joan, one of the daughters and coheiresses of Sir
John Paveley, and succeeded in her right to Broke. He died 2 Henry
IV., 1401. The great William of Edington, consecrated Bishop of
Winchester, 1345, and afterward Chancellor and Treasurer to King
Edward III., was born here, and became a considerable benefactor to
the village and Monastery. His surname has not been recovered, but
surmised to have been Cheney,--at any rate in a deed dated 1361, the
Bishop is described as "guardian of the heiresses of Sir John
Paveley,"--and one of these, Joan, as we have observed, married Sir
Ralph Cheney, and as a consequence with great probability she found
sepulchre here with her husband, in their Chantry in the Abbey Church.
Back to the railway station again, and a place among the cohort of the
iron horse, for a long journey is before us, even from the open,
breezy chalk-plains of Wiltshire, to the marge of the majestic Tamar
in westernmost Devon, and the granite-bouldered precincts of east
Cornwall, where we hope to get further clue to the haunts of
Willoughby when in the flesh. Here, we are leaving what was probably
his first home and earliest associations before ambition dawned on his
future path; there, we shall visit his later possessions when the sun
of fortune had shone on him, and he basked in its rays of honours and
wealth. There also our pilgrimage will eventually lead us to that last
house, the which he in common with earth's humblest denizen must
share.
Before, however, we proceed further on our way to what we may term his
second home, it behoves us to say something anent the antecedents and
coming of the knight himself, and how the name of Willoughby
originally became located in the west country. Like many a younger son
rejoicing in a titled extraction, coupled with probably only a slender
portion of the family patrimony, the wooing of a distaff--who, beside
let us hope, being endowed with her full share of love's talisman,
personal attractions, enjoyed also the further potent charm of being
an heiress to boot--brought the father of our knight from the fens of
Lincolnshire to the distant altitudes of Wilts, and in winning the
hand of Anne Cheney for a wife, subsequently became in her right the
Lord of Broke. A similar errand sent his son away to the boundary line
that divides Devon from Cornwall, and with the well-dowered Blanche
Champernowne of Beer-Ferrers for his helpmate, there to find his
future home, and where we propose to look for him again, after we have
gossiped over his lineage awhile.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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