1217, where William, son of Stur, and William his son are the first witnesses, while in the preceding charter of Richard de Redvers, 1184, it is William, son of Estur. In the inquisition taken on the death of Baldwin de Redvers (Fine Roll, 47 Henry III) the Lady Matilda de Gatcombe is mentioned as holding five knights' fees of the Lord of the Castle of Carisbrooke, and in the knights' fees belonging to the Castle of Carisbrooke, taken from the 'Testa de Nevill,' Lady Matilda de Estour, Lady of Gatcombe, holds the largest number of knights' fees, viz. five, in the Isle of Wight after John de Insula, and it is further added that William de Estur, son and heir of the same, holds the manors of Gatcombe, Whitwell, and Caulbourn of her gift. The duties of these landholders, who are frequently described in the charters of the Lords of the Island as their barons, are specified in this document. They were subject to the services of conducting the lords to the sea when passing into foreign parts, to defend and keep the Castle of Carisbrooke and the lands of the Island by a space of forty days in the time of war, and make and do their free suit at the Lord's Court from three to four weeks, together with the feudal requirements of being chargeable towards making the eldest son of the lord a knight, and contributing to the marriage of his daughter.

In the reign of Edward II, Lisle, by marrying the daughter and heiress of the Sturs, or de Esturs, became the proprietor of their possessions. That branch of the family of the Lisles of Wootton ended, as appears in the Inquisition post mortem, 23 Edward III, with John Lisle, and by the marriage of Lisle's daughter with John Bremshot the manors of Gatcombe, Whitwell, and Westover came to her husband. The family of Bremshot ended in two daughters; and it appears from an inquisition taken on the death of Edmund Dudley, 2 Henry VIII, that John Bremshot died in 1468, and that his manors with the advowson of the church at Gatcombe came to his two daughters and heirs, Elizabeth and Margaret. Elizabeth married John Dudley, by whom she had issue Edmund Dudley. Margaret married John Pakenham, by whom she had a son, Edmund Pakenham. In the right of their wives John Dudley and John Pakenham held the manors in co-partnership. When

Edmund Dudley married Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Edward Grey, Viscount Lisle, the moiety of Gatcombe was settled upon the marriage. This Edmund Dudley was, along with Empson, an instrument of the exactions of Henry VII. As Lord Bacon has said in his history of that King's reign, 'these two men turned law and justice into wormwood and rapine.' Dudley was a lawyer, who, according to the forcible expression of the same great writer, could put hateful business into good language. . . . To hunt up his game he kept packs of spies and informers in every part of the kingdom, and to strike it down with the legal forms he kept a rabble to sit on juries. . . . By these and many other courses fitter to be buried than repeated,' Dudley, with his low-born associate Empson, preyed upon the people, 'like tame hawks for their master, and like wild hawks for themselves; insomuch as they grew in great riches and substance.'

Dudley's moiety of Gatcombe was purchased by Richard Worsley, Captain of the Island. John Pakenham left Sir Edward Pakenham his son and heir, whose estate was inherited by two daughters. One of these daughters married Richard Earnley in the county of Sussex, and the other married Sir Geoffrey Pole, brother of Cardinal Pole. The Poles were of very illustrious descent on the side of their mother, who was the daughter of George Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV, and cousin-german to Queen Elizabeth, queen of Henry VII, and mother of Henry VIII. Earnley and Pole had a moiety of Gatcombe by their marriages. This moiety was purchased off their hands by John Worsley, whose son Thomas devised it to his younger son John; Appuldurcombe being left to the elder-Sir Richard. In this branch of the family Gatcombe remained for many years.

Mr. (afterwards Sir) Edward Worsley of this family was one of the most devoted adherents of Charles I. In the narrative of the attempted escapes from Carisbrooke Castle by George Hillier will be found (p. 107) a letter from Colonel Hammond to the Earl of Manchester, Speaker of the House of Lords, dated May 29, 1648, of the attempt made by Worsley and his companion Osborn to rescue the King. The manor was

afterwards purchased by Alexander Baring, the first Lord Ashburton, and is now the property of Charles Seely, Esq., M.P. Mr. Seely's purchase was a happy event for Gatcombe, as every labourer on the estate of that benevolent landlord has a well-constructed cottage, a ton of coals for the winter, and a good dinner for Christmas Day.

The rumour of war-and war too near at hand-wonderfully quickened the pulse of the inhabitants of quiet Gatcombe in 1799. In the dread of an invasion by Napoleon, the little village provided its own quota of volunteers; for in Albin's Isle of Wight Magazine for January of that year, Captain Alexander Campbell, Lieutenant Henry Way, and Ensign Richard Brown are enumerated as the officers commanding the Gatcombe contingent to the Volunteer Corps raised for the defence of the Isle of Wight. When Hassell was making his tour in the Island in 1790, he speaks of the refinement and kindness of the ladies of the family occupying Gatcombe House. Gatcombe is in this respect more fortunate than many a small village where the great house of the neighbourhood has fallen into disuse, or is converted into a farm-house in consequence of the owners being either unable from want of means or unwilling to live among the scenes of country nature and their own people. Gatcombe House has never fallen into that sad condition of decay which has overtaken so many of the ancestral homes of the landed gentry of England. Long may it stand as an English country gentleman's house, with boys and girls playing in its pleasant gardens, full of that life which, let us hope, may for a long time to come not ebb away from within its walls.

October 31, 1885.

CARISBROOKE CHURCH COMMUNION

PLATE, A.D. 1750-51-54-57.

THE subject of church communion plate has quite recently been studied in England. The example was first set by that accomplished antiquary, Chancellor R. S. Ferguson, F.S.A., who with the assistance of his colleagues brought out in 1882

Old Church Plate of the Diocese of Carlisle. Chancellor Ferguson has been followed in this hitherto unexplored path of ecclesiastical antiquities by the Rev. Andrew Trollope, An Inventory of the Church Plate of Leicestershire, with some account of the Donors (2 vols., Leicester, Clarke and Hodson). For the loan of these lavishly illustrated volumes I am indebted to the kindness of Lady Harpur-Crewe, of Spring Hill, East Cowes. The Vicar of Edith Weston, Rutland, has also been cataloguing and annotating the church plate of the neighbouring county. Mr. Nightingale's systematic collection of papers on the Dorsetshire plate has also met with high commendation.

It is to be hoped that some one may be induced to undertake the same work for the communion plate of the Isle of Wight. No one would be better fitted for this task than the present zealous and intelligent Archdeacon of the Island. In the meanwhile, I venture on giving a short account of the rich and valuable plate which was presented to Carisbrooke Church about the middle of the last century, and which, like most of the communion service of that date, is distinguished rather for its very solid construction than for any elegancy of design.

The history of communion plate dates from very early times, when it consisted of the chalice, or cup in which the wine was consecrated at the celebration of the Holy Communion, and from which the communicants drank ; and of the paten, or shallow vessel in which the bread for the Eucharist was placed and consecrated. Both these vessels were in use from the time that the formal ritual of the Lord's Supper was established, and were either actually such as had served domestic purposes, or were formed on the same model. When the administration of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was connected both in time and place with the feasts of charity-agapae-the distinction between the vessels used for each purpose was less strongly drawn than afterwards came to pass, and thus in the beginning the eucharistic cup and dish were the same both in form and in decoration as those of the domestic table. The material was commonly silver. Pope Leo IV, 847-855, laid down the rule that no one should celebrate the mass in a vessel of

wood, lead, or glass. In England before the Reformation the church plate was often the gift of private donors, whose names are recorded in mediaeval inventories of church goods. This plate has long ago disappeared, for with the exception of a few pieces, such as that at Gatcombe, there are no sacramental vessels older than the reign of Elizabeth in this country. The cause of this can be shortly told.

At the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII part of the spoils was the store of monastic gold and silver plate. This plunder indirectly lessened the security of the communion plate belonging to parochial churches. The feeling that their turn might soon come induced the church officers to part with their plate before it could be seized. When the chantries were dissolved in the second year of Edward VI, and such chantry plate as had not already been sold was seized by the King, the panic increased. In 1574, when the communion in both kinds was approved by Convocation and sanctioned by Parliament, another inducement had been offered to churchwardens to part with the sacred vessels by the issue of the King's injunctions and the visits of the Commissioners, armed with articles of inquiry as to whether the injunctions had been carried out. Communion plate is not mentioned in these articles, but needy church officials did not fail to find in them an excuse for selling various pieces of plate, along with the images of the rood-loft and other forbidden articles of church furniture. This hurried parting with the church plate caused the King and his advisers again to appoint Commissioners early in the following year, 1548, to see that the injunctions were enforced, and also to make inventories of church goods, with a view to stopping any further sale. This stock-taking by the King's Commissioners to a certain extent prevented the further sale of communion plate, but it by no means frightened churchwardens out of their now well-established custom of selling the gifts made to their church for such purposes as they saw fit. For instance, in some parishes in the Isle of Wight the communion plate was sold to provide a piece of ordnance for the village. Such sales took place more or less throughout the country to the end of the reign of Edward VI, when at last, in the sixth year of that king, in 1552, his counsellors