A HISTORY OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE 



by an inquisition post mortem held 4 November, 4 Henry VII, by which it 

 was found that John Fereby, who died 6 December, 3 Henry VII, had enfeoffed 

 certain feoffees of Knyghtes Place, Kent, with 1 2 marks a year held of the 

 abbey of Lesnes, and that Margaret Fereby, aged 6, was his heir. The 

 Feribys, or Ferbys, were anciently of Speldhurst, and then of Paul's Cray in 

 Kent. 1 They were also connected with Surrey. 



It appears from the Bill referred to that the endowment of Chipping 

 Campden School consisted of the moiety of the manor of Lyneham, Oxford- 

 shire, called in another document Fynes Court, which rather looks as if 

 Margaret Feriby was a coheiress of the manor. Though hitherto nothing 

 has been produced to connect the John Feriby who died in 1487 with the 

 founder of Campden School, it may fairly be assumed that as he had an 

 heiress Margaret, he is the same person. 



The certificate of the Chantry Commissioners which would have estab- 

 lished it to be a * service ' in the church, a kind of chantry, having been 

 crossed out and a memorandum substituted treating it solely as a school, it 

 escaped being confiscated under the Act. We must assume, therefore, that it 

 went on in the even tenor of its way as a grammar school, first under 

 Glaseman and then under unknown successors till it made its appearance in 

 the Court of Chancery. The tale told in the Decree 8 is that about fifty 

 years before, i.e. 1576, the surviving feoffees of the school lands made 

 a fraudulent lease of the half manor of Lyneham, and subsequently sold 

 the reversion for 1,100, buying in exchange lands worth 700 in 

 Barton on the Heath, Warwickshire ; the difference they pocketed, and 

 the lands themselves they let at low rents to their friends. When, about 

 1625, the town arranged to appoint fourteen new feoffees, the fraudulent 

 trustees, who had been paying the schoolmaster only 13 6s. 8d., made 

 feoffment to John Gilby and others ' living far away/ and ' divers persons 

 of their affinity and kindred, some of them young children who were 

 not fit and capable in managing the estate or to control the others in mis- 

 employing the property.' 



Sir Baptist Hickes, who had bought the manor of Campden and after- 

 wards became Viscount Campden, Robert Lilly the vicar, and others then 

 filed a bill in Chancery. The defence was that the rents had been applied 

 ' for the corporacion of Campden ' and the bridge. But ' his lordship did 

 utterly mislike the same,' and 7 June, 1627, ordered the accounts to be taken 

 and nothing allowed the defendants. 



By a deed of 24 September, 1627, the land at Barton was assigned to 

 thirteen trustees, including Sir Baptist Hickes and the famous Endymion 

 Porter, for the advancement and benefit of the school and poor of the town, 

 which probably meant the township ' of Chipping Campden,' and that they 

 should ' pay to ... the schoolmaster for the teaching of a free grammar 

 school . . . such yearly salary or stipend for his pains as should be thought 

 meet by the feoffees or the greater part of them,' the overplus ' towards the 

 maintenance relief and succour and for the good and benefit of the poor . . . 

 and for necessary uses in and about the same schoolhouse and poor.' The 

 schoolmaster was to be named by the feoffees and to be ' of good and civil 



1 Hasted, Hut. of Kent, \, 146 ; Phillipots, Vtllare Cantianum (1657), p. 109. 

 1 B.M. Lansd. MSS. 227, fol. 280. 



418 



