Re'port of Meetings for 1879, by James Hardy. 13 



placed a modern stone sculptured with the crest of the Turnbulls 

 —a bull's head— with the motto, "I saved the king." Higher 

 up is an older stone, brought from the old mansion house of 

 Fulfordlees, now puUed down, which till recently, pertained to 

 the ancestors of the present occupant of Houndwood. On a cen- 

 tral shield is a monogram, TjjE, the whole surrounded with the 

 Latin rhyming couplet : — 



"nvnc mea, tvnc hvjys, 

 Post illivs nescio cvjvs, 

 1656;" 

 which is literally '' Now mine, then his, afterwards theirs, I know 

 not whose ;" or more freely, ' ' What is mine to-day, may be yours 

 to-morrow." Master (either a clergyman or a lawyer) Thomas 

 Eeidpeth was proprietor of " Foulfuirdleyes " before June 14, 

 1666, when Major John Eeidpeth, his immediately elder brother, 

 was served his heir of conquest ; i.e. he had laid out money in 

 acquiring the right ; in the lands of " Fowlfuirdleyes and Whyt- 

 lawclovis," in the parish of Oockburnspath.^' But the family 

 tradition represents that the T. E., of the inscription was a Major 

 Thomas Eeidpath, or Eidpeth, who in 1650 commanded the com- 

 panies that blocked up the Pass of the Pease, when Oliver Crom- 

 well was hemmed in, previous to his rupture of the cordon by 

 winning the battle of Dunbar.f There was once preserved in 

 the family a letter from one of the Icing Charleses, in which, 

 while thanking him for his efforts in his cause, it was said of 

 him, that if every leal subject had behaved as strenuously, the 

 affairs of monarchy would have been retrieved. "We find, how- 

 ever, Mr, and not Major, Thomas Eidpeth laird of Ffulfurdlies 

 from 1648 to 1661. In 1648, the last year of Charles I., he was 

 one of the Commissioners for Berwick to carry out '' An Act of 

 Posture anent the putting of the Kingdom in ane posture of warr 

 for defence ;" and in the time of Charles H., March 29, 1661, he, 

 as a heritor, occupied the same office, for "raising an annuitie 

 of 40000 lib. sterling granted to his Majestic. "| On this ac- 

 count I think that a Major John, and not a Major Thomas, was 

 the royalist. 



* Inquisit. Retornat. (Berwick), No. 340. 

 t "The enemy hatli blocked up our way at the Pass at Copperspath, 

 through which we cannot get without almost a miracle." — Carlyle's Crom- 

 well's Letters, &c., iii., p, 30. 



\ Act Pari, Scot, vi., part ii., p. 33. — vii. p. 95. 



