Huntingdonshire

“ HUNT, ROGER (fl. 1433) , speaker of the House of Commons, may have belonged to the same family as the Thomas Hunt who was prior of Walsingham in 1455 (Paston Letters, ed. Gairdner, i. 347, cp. i. 443) . He was probably the son of Roger Hunt who was attornatus regis in 1406; he lived at Chalverston in Bedfordshire. He was returned to the House of Commons as member for the county of Bedford in 1414 and 1420, and afterwards sat for Huntingdonshire until 1433. ”

“ In the east midland counties villages of collected homesteads must have very largely prevailed, for this is the common type of village met with in these counties. The old villages with the homesteads more or less collected always was the system in these shires since the coming of the Anglo-Saxon people. They are especially noticeable in Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, and Buckinghamshire, and they may be commonly seen to have roads leading to them from various directions, originally the ways from the villages to the common fields that lay around them. ”

“ TAXES AND TITHES.
The rates for the poor, for repair of roads, for police (for there is a policeman in every village) , and for the county prison amounted in the parish I speak of to about [364] two shillings and sixpence in the pound of the assessed annual value of the land. As the pound is twenty shillings, the assessment consequently is over twelve per cent.
The burden of supporting the poor, while much lighter than in Ireland, must be far heavier than in our country. Huntingdonshire is one of the smallest counties in England. ”

“ Huntingdon, John Holland, Earl of (1417-42) , afterwards Duke of Exeter, ii. 8, 38.
Huntingdonshire, iv. 116.
Huntingfield, Suffolk, vi. 80, 148.
Hunton, H., iii. 227.
Husband, David, i. 272; v. 107.
Hyde, R., v. 147, 152.
Hygham. See Higham.
Hykele, ii. 149.
Hyllyngworth, ——, iii. 270.
Hypgame, Thos., ii. 217.
Hyrste, Hobbe, vi. 131.
Hythe (Hith) , Kent, iv. 57.
Ic Ip
Ichyngham, Robert and Joan, ii. 293.
Iceland (Islond) , vi. 136-137.
Ickborough (Ikburgh) , Norfolk, iii. 81.
Iden, Alex., i. 74.
Illee, iv. 230.
Illingworth, Rich., Knight and Chief Baron of the Exchequer (1462-71) , iii. 84 ”

“ The remains of the castle of Huntingdon, though reduced to banks, ditches, and a mound, nevertheless show how spacious and how strong must have been this chief seat of the broad earldom of Countess Judith and her descendants the kings of Scotland, earls also of Huntingdon. The Danes were encamped here in 921, and the burh which had been ruined was restored by Eadward in the same year. The ditches were fed from the Ouse, which expanded before the castle as a broad marsh, now a fertile meadow. ”

“ The shops are not so large and their contents not so costly. There is not a show of so much business and so much opulence. But Huntingdon is a very clean and nice place, contains many elegant houses, and the environs are beautiful. Above and below the bridge, under which the Ouse passes, are the most beautiful, and by far the most beautiful, meadows that I ever saw in my life. The meadows at Lewes, at Guildford, at Farnham, at Winchester, at Salisbury, at Exeter, at Gloucester, at Hereford, and even at Canterbury, are nothing, compared with those of Huntingdon in point of beauty. ”

“ For no man, be he duke or prince, can be of better blood than we of the House of Rothes, not to speak of Xaintrailles and many other gentlemen of our company.
The Duke, then, put not his noble person in any jeopardy, but, more wisely, he sent messengers after my Lord of Huntingdon that he should bring up the English to aid the Burgundian hare-hunters. But Huntingdon had departed to Rouen, where then lay Henry, King of England, a boy on whom and on whose House God has avenged the Maid with terrible judgments, and will yet the more avenge her, blessed be His name! ”

“ As was only natural, Huntingdon was strongly adverse to the proposed marriage between Mary Queen of Scots and Norfolk. He held meetings at his house to organise resistance to it, and his energetic measures had considerable influence in frustrating the designs of the northern conspirators in 1569. When rumours arose of a possible northern rebellion, precautions were taken by Elizabeth to prevent the escape of the Queen of Scots. ”

“ There does not appear to be any plan of Huntingdon Castle, that is, of the earthworks known as Castle Hill, which still are seen; and as they are extensive and partly included within a private garden, a mere handsketch is scarcely practicable. The position is a fine one. The Ouse, here deep, broad, and sluggish, in its way from Bedford and Eaton to the Fens, recedes from the higher land to the northward, and makes, between Huntingdon and Godmanchester, a bold curve to the south; thus enclosing a grand circle of meadow about half a mile in diameter, and now used as the racecourse. ”

“ Huntingfeld-Hall Of the Huntingfields I find that Roger, lord of the manor of Huntingfield in Suffolk, soon after the Conquest, assumed the name of his lordship, and left it to William de Huntingfield, his son and heir, who founded Mendham priory in Suffolk, and died in 1155, and had by Sibil de Harleston, his wife, daughter of Roger Gyny, nine children, besides her eldest son and heir, Roger, who flourished in Henry the Second's time, and left William, his son and heir, who was a baron in King John's time, and had two wives ”

“ From Chatteris I came back to Huntingdon and once more saw its beautiful meadows, of which I spoke when I went thither in 1823. From Huntingdon, through Stilton, to Stamford (the two last in Lincolnshire) , is a country of rich arable land and grass fields, and of beautiful meadows. The enclosures are very large, the soil red, with a whitish stone below; very much like the soil at and near Ross in Herefordshire, and like that near Coventry and Warwick. Here, as all over this country, everlasting fine sheep. The houses all along here are built of the stone of the country: you seldom see brick. ”

“ Huntingdon arrived at Wingfield on the 19th, and assisted Shrewsbury in conveying the Queen of Scots, for greater safety, to Tutbury, which he garrisoned with five hundred men. On 22 Sept. 1569 Elizabeth sent instructions to Huntingdon to supersede Shrewsbury, the ground of the ‘direction so sudden and strange’ being ascribed to ‘the said Earls infirmities and request for help, and to the Queens fear of some escape’ (Cal. Hatfield MSS. i. 422; Haynes, p. 526) . ”

“ But my purpose here is not to defend William Huntington, either as a man or a Christian, but to present him as an English agricultural labourer, struggling to develop what was in him without any help from his country—shut out, in fact, by his poverty from any share in the wealth of culture and experience England inherits from the past. We have no right to sit in judgment on such men, for they owe us nothing. We make England even appear to them the hardest of stepmothers, instead of the loving mother they have a right to expect. ”

“ It was the custom, by the way, so Evelyn tells us, when a monarch passed through Huntingdon, to meet him with a hundred ploughs as a symbol of the fruitful soil: the county indeed at one time was rich in vines and hops, and has been described by old writers as the garden of England. Still here as elsewhere the farmers' outlook is a poor one to-day, although there are, of course, exceptions. ”

“ On 4 July 1479 he gave up the earldom of Pembroke in exchange for the earldom of Huntingdon at the request of the king, who desired to bestow it on his son Edward. He was captain of the army in France, June to September 1475; was appointed justice of South Wales on 15 Nov. 1483, and acted as commissioner of array in Wales, Monmouth, and Herefordshire. He died in 1491. On 28 Feb. 1484 he covenanted to marry Catherine, daughter of Richard III; but the princess died before the time appointed for the marriage, and Huntingdon married Mary, fifth daughter of Richard, earl Rivers. ”

“ The ninth Earl of Huntingdon, father of the first Countess of Moira, died in 1746, and was succeeded by his son, brother of the Lady Moira. The tenth earl, however, died without issue in 1789; whereupon the earldom became suspended, and so continued for thirty years, a fact involving matters of very deep interest, but of no importance so far as present purposes are concerned. The tenth Earl of Huntingdon’s heir was his sister, Lady Moira, and upon her descended the ancient baronies of the Huntingdon earldom—namely, Hastings, Hungerford, Botreaux, and Molines. ”

“ The Cromwell blazonry ‘on the great bay window,’ which Noble makes so much of, is now gone, destroyed by fire; has given place to Montague blazonry; and no dull man can bore us with that any more.
Huntingdon itself lies pleasantly along the left bank of the Ouse; sloping pleasantly upwards from Ouse Bridge, which connects it with the old village of Godmanchester; the Town itself consisting mainly of one fair street, which towards the north end of it opens into a kind of irregular market-place, and then contracting again soon terminates. ”

“ The sixteenth is Lincolnshire, of which the capital city is Lincoln, and to which are subject seven other counties, viz., Leicester, Hampton, Huntingdon, Hertford, Bedford, Buckingham, and Oxford; for the great bishopric of Lincoln extends from the Humber to the Thames. The twenty-fourth is Gloucestershire; the twenty-fifth is Worcestershire, in which is the see of Worcester. The twenty-sixth is Herefordshire, in which is the see of Hereford. The twenty-seventh is Salop; the twenty-eighth, Cheshire, in which is the bishopric of Chester [10] ”

“ Here at Cliefden, and at his other residences, were to be seen his boon companions; the Earl of Chesterfield, courtier, politician, satirist and mimic. Lady Huntingdon, who left his world for Whitfield’s, and whose name may be seen in almost every town in England on Dissenting Chapels to the present day; Bathurst, Queensberry, the clever Pulteney, Cobham, Pitt, the Granvilles, Lyttleton, the prig Bubb Doddington, whose one aim in life was to be a lord. ”

“ Here, at Hunstanton, at the height of its short season, the people that fill the place are from Leicester, Bedford, Lincoln and several Midland towns: very few Londoners. They are very nice looking people of Saxon type: the children wonderfully fine-looking, with very light hair, and many of the women large and fine, placid and cow-like for all their blue eyes. They are of course the well-to-do people of the towns they come from, Hunstanton being an expensive place to stay at. You are, I am afraid, more interested in humans than in birds. ”

“ Bedford is a contraction of Bedican ford, the Anglo-Saxon for “the protected ford.” Cambridge owes its name to the University town by the bridge over the Cam, or crooked river [see Camberwell] . Huntingdon was anciently a great deer forest, and therefore much resorted to for hunting. Northampton is a corruption of North-avon-town, alluding to its position north of the river Neu, in olden times known as the Avon. Rutland expresses the Anglo-Saxon for “red land,” referring to the colour of its soil. ”

“ The posterity of William, king of Scotland, the prince taken prisoner by Henry II., being all extinct by the death of Margaret of Norway, the right to the crown devolved on the issue of David, earl of Huntingdon brother to William, whose male line being also extinct, left the succession open to the posterity of his daughters. The earl of Huntingdon had three daughters; Margaret, married to Alan, lord of Galloway, Isabella, wife of Robert Brus or Bruce lord of Annandale, and Adama, who espoused Henry, Lord Hastings. ”

“ The young Earl of Huntingdon came of age in 1750, and the Countess gave up Donnington Park to him, removing her household to Ashby, living there with her other children and two of the Ladies Hastings. Towards the close of 1749 Whitefield desired, if possible, with the aid of Lady Huntingdon, to organise the vast numbers who had been greatly blessed by his evangelistic work, into a corporate body, like that which the clear, practical wisdom of John Wesley had created for the societies which looked up to him as leader. ”

“ Huntingdon was part of the patrimony of Earl Waltheof, and came to the Norman, Simon de Senlis, through his marriage with Waltheof’s daughter and heiress. The line of Senlis ended in [Pg 163] another heiress, who married David, afterwards the famous king of Scotland; David thus became Earl of Huntingdon. In the insurrection of the younger Henry in 1174, William the Lion, grandson of David, took sides with the young king, and consequently his castle was besieged and taken by the forces of Henry II., [485] and the king ordered it to be destroyed. ”

“ When the furie of this outragious wind and weather was asswaged, and the sea waxed calme, the earles of March and Huntington passed ouer with all their companie, and landing in Normandie, they marched through the countrie, destroieng the French villages, and taking preies on each hand, till they came to the king where he then was. ”

“ I was commissioned by the king to apprehend the Earl of Huntingdon. I brought with me a party of soldiers, picked and tried men, knowing that he would not lightly yield. I sent my lieutenant with a detachment to surprise the earl’s castle in his absence, and laid my measures for intercepting him on the way to his intended nuptials; but he seems to have had intimation of this part of my plan, for he brought with him a large armed retinue, and took a circuitous route, which made him, I believe, somewhat later than his appointed hour. ”