102 Recent Wiltshire Books, Pamphlets, and Articles. 
chapters. When the author claims that the pedigree from the date of 
the Conquest is ‘‘ recorded and unquestioned” he is making rather a 
large demand on the reader’s faith. A good many pedigrees are recorded, © 
but not many are wnquestioned, and the descent of the Lords Stourton 
from the Botolphs of Stourton of the days of the Conquest is scarcely so 
clearly traced and proved as to deserve the epithet. Family history, 
indeed, when carried back to Norman times, must in the great majority 
of cases be only a matter of surmise and conjecture—especially in the 
absence of documentary evidence, which appears to be largely the case 
here. Indeed it is hardly too much to say that the real value of the book 
begins where the ‘‘ early history ” of the family ends, with the advent of 
Sir William Stourton, and the creation of his son amd heir, John, as first 
Baron Stourton of Stourton. The author establishes the fact that the 
Lords Stourton have hitherto numbered themselves wrongly; all the 
peerage books, until quite recently, having omitted Francis, 4th Lord 
Stourton (the son of John, the 3rd Lord), thus making William, brother 
(not son, as Dugdale says) of John, the 3rd Lord, the 4th instead of the 
5th Baron, as he should be. This Francis died as a child Feb. 18th, 1487. 
The story of the murder of the Hartgills by Charles, 8th Lord Stourton, 
is gone into in great detail—Canon Jackson’s account of the matter being 
largely and appreciatively drawn upon. The author, as is natural, sets 
forth the case for Lord Stourton as favourably as may be, not indeed 
palliating the murder itself, but dwelling on the provocation given by the 
Hartgills, who had long been especially obnoxious to Lord Stourton from 
the fact of their siding with Agnes Ryce (afterwards wife of Sir Edward 
Bainton), his father’s mistress, against him, and pleading that the 
contemporary accounts were a good deal coloured by prejudice against 
him as a papist. 
The author accepts the traditional attribution of the tomb in the nave 
of Salisbury Cathedral, of which he gives an illustration, to this Lord 
Stourton—and regards the orifices in the sides as representing the six 
wells of the Stourton arms, but it is more probable that this very curious 
tomb is an early one, and that the orifices were for the exhibition of relics 
contained within it. 
The book is beautifully got up, the portraits especially being admirably 
reproduced in soft tints—though it is remarkable that nothing earlier 
than the portrait of Mary, d. of William, 11th Lord, who died 1650, is 
available. The process views are not all of them quite so good. On the 
whole, however, the work is excellently dressed, and if the earlier chapters 
contain a good deal that seems to the dispassionate reader to rest too 
largely on inadequate proofs, the same cannot be said of the rest of the 
book, which tells us everything that anyone can want to know of the 
authentic history of the Stourtons. 
A Handbook for Residents and Travellers in Wilts — 
and Dorset. Fifth edition, with maps and plans. London: John — 
Murray. 1899. Cloth. Cr. 8vo. Pp. xlvii. and 712—(in the body of the ~ 
work the columns are paged separately, so that each page counts 
