PROCEEDINGS COTTESWOLD CLUB 



1913 



cause of his sending a rash-written and insulting challenge to his kinsman, 

 inviting to meet him half-way and fight at once. The answer was not delayed, 

 and was not unnaturally of a humiliating and contemptuous character. 

 The battle followed on immediately, and Smyth (vol. ii., 615) gives many 

 felicitous details as to the numbers and manoeuvring of each party, and as 

 to the actual encounter when Lord Lisle and his followers at sunrise moved 

 down from Nibley Green to meet Lord Berkeley and his brother Maurice 

 and all their men at Fowleshard (now Foley's Grove) and Micklewood (mis- 

 called Michaelwood). 



The statement, sometime made, to the effect that after the victors, led 

 by Lord Berkeley, had reached Wotton and pillaged Lisle House over Lady 

 Lisle's head, they destroyed that stronghold, is not supported by any solid 

 evidence. Even sacking a house is not necessarily destroying it, especially 

 if it be a fortress as strong as was Lisle House. But there was, over and above, 

 good reason for their not doing so. The quarrel on Lord Berkeley's part re 

 suited in his recovering this very important member of his ancient barony 

 and its stronghold, where his Berkeley ancestors had so often resided. The 

 last thing he can have desired was to destroy his own ancestral property, 

 and probably, with it, the invaluable documents which the Lisles and 

 Warwicks had taken from Berkeley Castle. Smyth says nothing whatever 

 calculated to support this statement. 



Lady Lisle was driven out, and we know that she obtained presently a 

 composition of ;/|ioo p. a. from Lord Berkeley, and soon became re-wedded to 

 Sir Henry Bodrugan, having meanwhile (and but sixteen days after the 

 fight) brought forth a still-born child. 



An interesting question remains : what became of Lord Lisle's body, 

 Where was he buried ? It is clear that Lord Berkeley did not entertain such 

 feelings of generosity to his hereditary enemy as to wish him buried at Wotton 

 or Nibley as a perpetual reminder. Nor is there any record of his having been 

 interred at either place. 



I venture, therefore, to repeat here a suggestion made by me some years 

 back that Lord Lisle may well have been removed by his vassals, as the 

 manor-lord, to one of his Talbot and undisputed Gloucestershire manors 

 — Painswick being the most important of these — and there interred. 



It is perhaps, more than coincidence that a contemporary and now name- 

 less altar- tomb of handsome design and proportion, survives there in St. 

 Peter's Chapel, which after having been at least twice appropriated and 

 used as a tomb for later lords of the Manor, was finally to be utilized as a shelf 

 for the 17th c. effigies of a Copy-holder in the person of Dr John Seaman 

 and his wife (1623), together with other remains of his now vanished 

 monument, which was formerly located in the Chancel of the Church. 



It is known, therefore, to have been appropriated by Lady Kingston in 

 1540 for the tomb and brass of her husband, Sir William Kingston, K.G. 

 Forty years before that date, apparently, a canopy, decorated with the 

 Tudor flower-ornament had been added to it so as to enrich the much- weathered 

 tomb, probably by one of the later Lisles. But the body of the tomb is 

 plainly older than this by a generation. 



As it cannot be the tomb of Lord Lisle's father, John, who was slain, 

 together with Lord Shrewsbury, in 1452, in France, nor probably that of the 

 Lady Lisle, who re-married after her husband's slapng, there is not a little 

 probability that it may veritably be the tomb of Thomas, their son, the 

 victim of the Wotton tragedy. [St. C. B.] 



