aie 
By the Rev. J. Wilkinson. 285 
from Castle Combe. As to how this came about there is no certain 
information. I will, however, hazard a presumed explanation. 
Of all the adherents of Thomas Ear] of Lancaster, in his armed 
assertion of the rights of the English nobility against foreigners 
in the time of Edward II., there was no one who suffered more 
(short of the extreme penalties), on Lancaster’s reverse of fortune, 
than Sir John de Maltravers. To him therefore, as to a partisan 
tried in the fire, much favour was shown, when’ another turn of 
the wheel brought his party again into power. The custody of 
the unhappy monarch was committed to him, and the manner in 
which he fulfilled that trust is too notorious.! He had large grants 
from Isabella and Mortimer; and his son John Maltravers, jun., 
was in 1329 rewarded, amongst the other Gifford estates, with the 
reversion of the manor of Broughton which the widowed Margaret 
Neville then had in dower. He afterwards for some, I know not 
what, offence incurred the King’s displeasure. Possibly he was 
implicated, or suspected of being implicated, in his father’s murder 
of the Earl of Kent, the King’s uncle. However this may be, he 
appears to have fallen with Mortimer’s party, as one of them, in 
1230. There exists a grant? 19 Oct., 1337, to John de Wylyngton, 
Ralph his brother, and Alianora, Ralph’s wife, of the reversion of 
the manor of Broughton, after Margaret’s death. This grant 
never took effect. Before the Lady’s decease, the Johns Maltravers, 
senior and junior, had both recovered the royal favour. The father 
and son had been hiding on the continent. The latter, as the less 
flagrant offender, made his peace in 1342, served in the French wars, 
obtained good employments, and died before his father, 13th Oct., 
1360. The former threw himself at Edward’s feet on his landing 
at Sluys in Flanders, and was restored by Parliament 1351. He 
died 16th Feb. 1364, and was succeeded in his rights by his grand- 
daughter, Eleanor, who had married first Sir John Fitz-alan, and 
secondly Reginald Lord Cobham. She died 1405. Sir John Fitz- 
alan is styled Baron Maltravers jure uxoris, but was not so sum- 
1 The corpse of the King was privately interred in that Abbey Church of 
Gloucester, which the Giffords had endowed. 
* Sloane MSS. quoted by Hoare. ‘Modern Wilts,’ Heyts. p. 180. 
