$&amp;gt; THE LIFE OF 



CHAP, the Aylmers, spreading in Norfolk and Suffolk; for the 

 L Aylmers of Quadring, in the county of Lincoln, gave a dif 

 ferent coat of arms, and so may be concluded to be of 

 another family. The Aylmers with whom we are to be 

 concerned bear for their coat of arms, argent, a cross sable, 

 between four choughs of the same; whence some derive 

 the name Ailmar, quasi ab alite de mari : but the chough 

 is no sea-fowl. The reason of which bearing may be per 

 haps conjectured from the relation some of the family, they 

 say, bore to a Duke of Cornwall; from whence, for their 

 crest, they bear on a ducal coronet a Cornish chough s head 

 and neck, wings displayed. He received his first breath in 

 the county of Norfolk, about the year 1521. For in 1581 

 I read him in one of his letters calling himself homo sexa- 

 trenarius, i. e. &quot; a man of threescore years of age.&quot; Born, 

 according to Dr. Fuller, at Aylmer Hall, in the parish of 

 Tilsley, as he saith the Bishop s nearest relation informed 

 him ; mistaken, I suppose, for Tilney in the same county ; 

 for as for Tilsley, there is scarce such a town in England. 

 In the neighbouring county of Suffolk, within four miles of 

 Ipswich, there is a very fair house called Claidon Hall, 

 now, or late, in the possession of the Aylmers. His elder 

 Sir Robert brother was Sir Robert Aylmer, of Aylmer Hall aforesaid, 

 Aylmer. w } lose ancestor was High Sheriff of that county of Norfolk 



in the time of Edward II. 



His educa- Aylmer, though he took his degrees of divinity in Ox- 

 tion ford, had his first education at Cambridge ; but when ad 



mitted, and under what tutor, and in what society, I am to 

 learn: whether in Bene t or Gonvil hall, where the Nor 

 folk youth commonly studied, or Trinity hall, entered 

 there by the fame that Bilney, formerly of that house, bore, 

 who much conversed and carried a great stroke among the 

 people of Norfolk. But these things are uncertain. Grey, 

 Marquis of Dorset, (afterwards Duke of Suffolk,) took a 

 liking to him from a child going to school, and entertained 

 him as his scholar, and exhibited to him when transplanted to 

 the University. After he had attained some competent know 

 ledge in University learning, and taken, I presume, his de- 



