male portraits; the Earl and Countess of Thanet; and their son Thomas Tufton, Earl of Thanet, who died at the age of 75, in 1619.

The whole of this most superb mansion is most elegantly furnished; the bedchambers are numerous; and even the apartments, designed for shew and state, are still not too magnificent to be comfortable.

The Gardens and Grounds are seen to great advantage from the south front, and eastern wing of the house; the west end is occupied by the church and its surrounding cemetery; and the views from the terrace, and of the house from different parts of the garden, are very striking. The gardens have enough of the 'ancient regularity of alleys, lawns, and parterres, to serve as a specimen of that style, and they have at the same time enough of the modern taste, to shew that art has been but the handmaid of nature.

But the most interesting prospect about the house is from the roof which looks down upon the grounds and park, as on a map; and from whence, indeed, the visitor may see the whole of this diminutive county.

The Church is a plain neat building, embosomed in trees; and the whole vicinity very appropriately joins its neatness with the magnificence of the lordly mansion.

ASHWELL lies a short distance to the north-west of Burley on the Hill. It now contains only thirty-six houses, and 192 inhabitants; but was of sufficient consequence at the Norman Survey to be very particularly noticed. In the Saxon times it was called Exwell; and in Domesday-book it appears, that Earl Haroldus held here two carucates of land; but the arable land was six carucates; and there were two carucates held by one Gozelinus, on which only there were thirteen villeins, and three bordarii, or cottagers, all of whom had among them five carucates, and sixteen acres of meadow. At this time, too, its value was increased to six pounds from one hundred shillings, which it had been estimated at in the reign of the Confessor.

From this pe

riod,

it

riod, until the reign of Edward II. we find no account of it; was then the property of the family of Tuchet, and Sir John Tuchet, Knt. in the 33d year of Edward III. acknowledged himself to hold this manor from Edward the Black Prince, as part of the lands of Robert de Brus, attainted of high treason. It passed afterwards to Henry VIII. who granted it to Brian Palmer, who fixed his habitation in this place, which thence became the seat of his posterity for several generations. It has since passed through several hands.

During the Catholic times, the Hospital of Burton Lazars in Leicestershire held some lands here: but they were granted, at the Dissolution, to the Dudley family.

The church is ancient, and contains three very antique altarmonuments: one of them is of wood, and has a curious figure of a cross-legged knight, a crusader, in coat of mail. Another is of stone, to the memory of an ecclesiastic, who is represented in his sacerdotal robes. The third is in the chancel, and has the effigies chaced on it, of John Vernam, and Rose, his wife, about 1479; their son, John, was prebendary of the cathedral churches of Salisbury and Hereford.

A brass plate in the church records a singular instance of honest industry, and of liberal charity, which must not pass unnoticed.

"Elizabeth Wilcox, born in this town, but living in Derbyshire, in the condition of a servant, did, in the year 1648, give and bequeath the rent of a tenement, situate in the parish of St. Peter at Derby, of the value of seven pounds per annum, to the poor for ever, viz. one moiety thereof to the poor of this town; the other to be equally divided between the poor of St. Peter's parish in Derby, and the poor of Elvaston, in that county, yearly."

It is only further necessary to notice a Mr. Thomas Mason, who was rector of this parish in the reign of Charles I. As a steady loyalist he became obnoxious to the Puritanic party; was several times imprisoned, plundered, and otherwise maltreated.

On two different occasions he was sent prisoner to Nottingham Castle, for reading the Common Prayer in private families; and became at length so much of the church militant, that he actually got the command of an independent company at Belvoir Castle; and once escorted his royal master from Newark to Banbury,

The country round WISSENDINE is very hilly, and finely di versified; and its ancient church is an interesting object in the landscape. This place existed in Saxon times, and the maner was then valued at eight pounds per annum; its original name being Wichingedine. Immediately after the Norman Conquest, it was held by Earl Waltheof; and at the time of the Survey was the property of his widow, Judith, Countess of Huntingdon: being then estimated at thirteen pounds per annum, containing thirteen carucates, in which were twenty-seven villeins and six bordarii.

In the interval between that period and the reign of Edward II. it appears to have been divided in various hands; and was then the property of the families of Wake, Helewelle, Harrington, and Whittlebury. The greatest part of the manor, on the death of the last Lord Wake, went by his sister Margaret, to the Hollands, Earls of Kent; then by heiresses to Mortimer, Earl of March, to Charlton, Lord of Powis, and to Grey; and since that to the Sherards, Earls of Harborough, who had an ancient seat here.

The ancient church contains in the chancel an alabaster tomb for Bartholomew Villers, second son of William Villers of Brokesby, in Leicestershire, and Margaret, his wife; but even in the early part of the last century, this was so much defaced, that it was impossible to ascertain her family, though it is believed that she was a daughter of Thomas Holand, Earl of Kent.

We find it recorded of this church, that it is a vicarage valued in the king's books at only seven pounds and one shilling, which, even 150 years ago, was so small a sum for the support of a clergyman, that the benevolent Henry Forster, of Thistleton, in addition to his other charities in this county, gave and granted

ተ

ten

ten pounds per annum, out of his estates in Swineshead and Buck. minster, in Lincolnshire, for the perpetual augmentation of this living. It is also a curious fact, that in the reign of Edward I. the advowson of the church was in the monastery of Lindores in Scotland; for it appears that Sir John Swinbourne, Knt. and Friar John de Lindores, as procurators for that monastery, presented to the church; but, in the succeeding reign, it was alienated to the prior and convent of Sempringham in Lincolnshire.

1

TEIGH is a small village in this neighbourhood, pleasantly situated, and commanding a fine prospect over Leicestershire. It is described in Domesday-book as having been the property of Godwin before the Conquest, when it was considered as amounting to five carucates. At the Survey it appears, however, to have undergone, like most other manors, a change of masters, and was then in the hands of Robert Mallet, who held two carucates; there were also fifteen villeins who held four carucates; and a meadow of four furlongs in length, and as many in breadth, with a mill of two shillings value; the whole of which, according to the computation of that period, amounted to four pounds. The Folvilles, who were a very ancient family in this county, though now scattered, possessed this manor soon afterwards; and they must at that time have been of considerable consequence, for John de Folville, in the reign of Edward I. was knight of the shire in several Parliaments; and, in the 29th of that monarch's reign, had summons to attend the royal standard, with horse and arms, well fitted, at Berwick-upon-Tweed, on the nativity of St. John the Baptist, in the prosecution of the Scottish wars.

The family seems after this to have moved their residence; for in the early part of the reign of Edward III. the lord of this manor was designated as John Folville, of Ashby Folville in Leicestershire; and the manor seems then to have gone to a junior branch; for there is a grant in trust of his execution, to William Kaythorp, parson of Teigh church, of the manor and appurtenances then held in dower by Alice de Folville, widow of

his father, Eustace. This trust, twenty-one years afterwards, was fulfilled by Kaythorpe's conveyance of the manor to the second son, Sir Jeffrey Folville, Knt. and Isabel, his wife. This Jeffrey, on the death of his elder brother without issue, became heir to the family estates; but this manor appears to have been sold soon afterwards to the family of Helewell, whose heiress marrying an ancestor of the present Lord Harborough, the manor has passed into their possession.

The church is quite in the style of the rural Gothic, and contains nothing worthy particular notice; except a grave-stone in the centre of the chancel for an honest, loyal, Scotchman, James Adamson, who died here in 1661, after having been rector for thirty-one years, and having suffered much for his attachment to his king during the unhappy times of Charles.

MARKET OVERTON has afforded considerable grounds for conjecture and disputation to the antiquaries of this county. Grose observes, that the only Roman station in this county is said by some to have been here, and supposed to have been the Margidunum of Antoninus, particularly as many Roman coins have been dug up here; and in the Bibliotheca Topographica,* the same idea is started; but this seems to have been taken from Camden, and other writers; for he, in his first edition of his Britannia, asserts, that Market Overton is a corruption of Margidunum; or, at least, that "Overton" is an addition only of recent date in his time, from its situation on a hill, and thus being above, or over, the other villages in its vicinity. Mr. Wright, in contradiction to this, says, that here was formerly a market, and that the name is derived from that circumstance; but for this assertion there is no proof that can be adduced, except there having been a market here, appointed by a charter of Bartholomew Lord Badlesmere. Camden, indeed, seems to have changed his opinion, and actually, in a subsequent edition, stated, that Belvoir Castle was the true Margidunum ; but in this he has again been contradicted : and several commentators have endeavoured to prove that his first posi

tion

Vol. III. p. 485.