102 Recent Wiltshire Books, Pamphlets, and Articles. 



chapters. When the author claims that the pedigree from the date of 

 the Conquest is ''recorded and unquestioned" he is making rather a 

 large demand on the reader's faith. A good many pedigrees are recorded, 

 but not many are unquestioned, and the descent of the Lords Stourton 

 from the Botolphs of Stourton of the days of the Conquest is scarcely so 

 clearly traced and proved as to deserve the epithet. Family history, 

 indeed, when carried back to Norman times, must in the great majority 

 of cases be only a matter of surmise and conjecture — especially in the 

 absence of documentary evidence, which appears to be largely the case 

 here. Indeed it is hardly too much to say that the real value of the book 

 begins where the " early history " of the family ends, with the advent of 

 Sir William Stourton, and the creation of his son and heir, John, as first 

 Baron Stourton of Stourton. The author establishes the fact that the 

 Lords Stourton have hitherto numbered themselves wrongly ; all the 

 peerage books, until quite recently, having omitted Francis, 4th Lord 

 Stourton (the son of John, the 3rd Lord), thus making William, brother 

 (not son, as Dugdale says) of John, the 3rd Lord, the 4th instead of the 

 5th Baron, as he should be. This Francis died as a child Feb. 18th, 1487. 

 The story of the murder of the Hartgills by Charles, 8th Lord Stourton, 

 is gone into in great detail — Canon Jackson's account of the matter being 

 largely and appreciatively drawn upon. The author, as is natural, sets 

 forth the case for Lord Stourton as favourably as may be, not indeed 

 palliating the murder itself, but dwelling on the provocation given by the 

 Hartgills, who had long been especially obnoxious to Lord Stourton from 

 the fact of their siding with Agnes Byce (afterwards wife of Sir Edward 

 Bainton), his father's mistress, against him, and pleading that the 

 contemporary accounts were a good deal coloured by prejudice against 

 him as a papist. 



The author accepts the traditional attribution of the tomb in the nave 

 of Salisbury Cathedral, of which he gives an illustration, to this Lord 

 Stourton — and regards the orifices in the sides as representing the six 

 wells of the Stourton arms, but it is more probable that this very curious 

 tomb is an early one, and that the orifices were for the exhibition of relics 

 contained within it. 



The book is beautifully got up, the portraits especially being admirably 

 reproduced in soft tints — though it is remarkable that nothing earlier 

 than the portrait of Mary, d. of William, 11th Lord, who died 1650, is 

 available. The process views are not all of them quite so good. On the 

 whole, however, the work is excellently dressed, and if the earlier chapters 

 contain a good deal that seems to the dispassionate reader to rest too 

 largely on inadequate proofs, the same cannot be said of the rest of the 

 book, which tells us everything that anyone can want to know of the 

 authentic history of the Stourtons. 



A Handbook for Residents and Travellers in Wilts 



and Dorset. Fifth edition, with maps and plans. London: John 

 Murray. 1899. Cloth. Cr. 8vo. Pp. xlvii. and 712— (in the body of the 

 work the columns are paged separately, so that each page counts 



