THE EARLY DAYS OF MARLBOROUGH COLLEGE, 



CHAPTER I. 



LTHOUGH we cannot expect mankind to care much 

 about remote posterity, I should feel grateful if the 

 forefathers of the hamlet had taken the trouble to 

 place on record the principal events which have 

 occurred from time to time in our village here. 

 Or better still, if each succeeding age had produced 

 its Gilbert White, who would have told us not only 

 who built the Rectory,* and the houses whose walls are four feet 

 thick, but also how the village fared when the wolfs howl was 

 re-echoed from the church tower, and eagles, cranes, and bitterns 

 frequented the valley of the Evenlode. We might also have learnt 



* On a memorial marble in the Church, one Dowdeswell, an ancestor of mine who flourished during the 

 reign of James II., is alluded to as hospitii vicini fundator. According to "The Antiquary," the hospitium 

 was a place for entertaining strangers, and this description would certainly apply to the Rectory since I have 

 known it. 



