Whittington and His Oat, 



109 



wholly without foundation, and was no doubt originally made, to 

 heighten by the contrast the exalted position to which he attained- 

 His father was Sir William Whittington, Knight ; and an honor of 

 that kind was not easily obtained in those days, nor so lavishly 

 bestowed, as it is now. But besides that fact, by the pedigree of the 

 family in the Heralds' College and British Museum, it is shown that 

 our hero was descended from the Whittingtons who, as early as the 

 reign of Edward I., were owners of land in Gloucestershire, so 

 that the family were landed proprietors ; and Richard may have been 

 poor as compared with his brother, who was the elder son and so heir 

 of the estate ; yet it could not have been any such depth of poverty as 

 the story would lead us to suppose. !N"or does the fact that his father 

 was branded with the stigma '^utlagatus" the outlaw, prove that the 

 family were poor; for the outlawry neither tainted the blood nor confis- 

 cated the estate; since he was outlawed simply because he would 

 marry Joan the widow of Thomas de Berkley, without the king's con- 

 sent, or in opposition to it; for in the time of Edward III., injunctions 

 were issued against second marriages, whether avowed or secret ; and 

 they were punished with a degree of severity that was in accordance 

 with the maxims of the times, but which we, at the present day, can 

 hardly understand. 



But however untrue the story of his poverty may be, there is no 

 doubt of the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Bow bells made to the 

 young wanderer, as he sat on the stone on Highgate hill. Nor is it 

 difiBcult to understand how the boom of the bells should seem to say — 

 " Turn again, Whittington, 

 Tlirice Lord Mayor of London town," 



as the principal vowel sounds in the sentence would be used, if we 

 wished to imitate the round full tone of a bell ; still there has been 

 another conjecture offered, which is curious, even if we cannot accept it. 



Whittington was from Gloucestershire in the north of England, and 

 his family for many centuries lived there. Now Gloucester was one 

 of the earliest bell foundries in England, having been established at the 

 beginning of the century in which Whittington was born ; and this, 

 together with the earlier one established at Salisbury, were probably the 

 only bell foundries in the kingdom. The monks of Ely at London em- 

 ployed the Gloucester bell founder; and it is not unlikely that the parish- 

 ioners of Bow had obtained their bells from the same source. So 

 when the bells sounded, they may have recalled a home feeling to the 

 young apprentice, and touched a chord in his heart, that induced him 

 to return again to his duty. But be this as it may, he was three times 



