242 ANCIENT MEMORIAL BRASSES OF DORSET. 



Common Pleas, February, 1426. Sir James himself was a man 

 of note in his time Sheriff of Yorkshire, 1469 ; and, having 

 espoused the part of the House of York in the Civil Wars, was 

 made Speaker of the House of Commons, i Edward IV. (see 

 speech of the King, Rot. Parl. v. 487). He is here represented 

 kneeling at a desk and dressed in a tabard of his arms. His 

 lady, also kneeling, has on her mantle the arms of her husband, 

 on her kirtle her own. Between them is a large shield charged 

 with the coat of Strangways, quartering Darcy and Meynell. 

 Behind her kneel Margaret, Eleanor, and Elizabeth, her three 

 daughters ; and behind him Sir Richard, Knt., his eldest son 

 and heir, and other sons ; under the whole this inscription : 

 " Orate pro bono statu Jacobi Strangways et Elizabethae uxoris 

 ejus et omnium puerorum suorum." 



Lady Harriet Frampton (the third daughter of Henry 

 Thomas, second Earl of Ilchester) says the first of the name 

 who settled in this county was Thomas Strangways, Esq., 

 son of Roger, a younger brother of Sir James Strangways, of 

 Yorkshire. He was brought into these parts by Thomas de 

 Grey, Marquis of Dorset. Thomas Strangways, Esq., married, 

 i Edward IV. (1460) Eleanor, daughter of Walter Talboys, of 

 Kyme, by Alice, his wife, daughter of Sir Humphrey Stafford, of 

 Hooke, co. Dorset, Knt., and co-heir of her first cousin, 

 Humphrey Stafford, Lord Stafford, of Southwick, Earl of Devon, 

 ob. 1501 ; and by her had a great part of the estate of the 

 Staffords. Eleanor, his relict, lived to a very great age, and 

 parted not the lands (between the issue of Sir Edmund Cheyney, 

 her mother's first husband, and her own) till 1492, 7 Henry VII. 

 She made her will about 1500, and died soon after, her house- 

 hold goods being parted 1502, 17 Henry VII. 



Henry Strangways, Esq., son of the above Thomas and 

 Eleanor, married as his third wife Katherine, daughter of Sir 

 John Wadham and relict of William Bruning, of Melbury, and 

 was the first of the family who possessed Melbury Sampford. 

 By his will, dated January i2th, 1503, proved May loth, 1504, 

 he ordered his body to be buried at St. Mary's Chapel, in 



