By W. W. RavenMll, Esq. 



47 



Henry and Joseph Collier, fellow claimants with Wake of the 

 Croke Articles, were the sons of the Rev. Henry Collyer, Rector 

 of Steeple Langford, Wilts, a pleasant village on the banks of the 

 Wylye, rejoicing' in fair meadows, pure streams, and corn clad hills. 

 Their nephew, in the following century, obtained a certain fame as 

 the author of a religious treatise called the Clavis Universalis. 

 Some attention was directed to him, and his family, in the 

 year 1837, by the publication of a memoir written by Mr. Benson, 

 Recorder of Salisbury. Four successive Colly ers, during four 

 successive generations, held the living of Steeple Langford, from 

 an early period in the seventeenth century. 1 The father of the 

 two Exeter prisoners, was instituted to the living, on the death 

 of their grandfather in 1635. He possessed the advowson, and on 

 his expulsion for using the book of Common Prayer, he presented 

 one Joseph J essop ; perhaps under some arrangement, whereby he 

 retained a portion of the tithes. The Sequestrators, keen of scent, 

 specially where fatness abounded, soon overturned poor Jessop, and 

 placed in that pulpit with its emoluments, a hot gospeller named 

 Gyles, without reserving one farthing for Colly er or his family. 



Let us read their sad but graphic story preserved by Mr. Walker, 2 

 chiefly narrated to him by their author nephew above-mentioned, 

 the Rev. Arthur Collyer. 



Mr. Walker commences by saying that he (Rev. Henry Collyer) 

 was a very early sufferer being turned out some years before the 

 general dissolution began in this county. His living was rich, £400 



century. " Isaac "Wake," he said, " orator of the University of Oxford had a 

 good Ciceronian style, but his utterance and matter was so grave that when he 

 spake before him he was apt to sleep ; but Sleep, the deputy orator of Cambridge, 

 was quite contrary, for he never spake but he kept him awake and made him 

 apt to laugh."— 1 Wood's Fasti, p. 345. 



1 They appear to have come from Bristol and held the living of Steeple 

 Langford from 1608 to 1734, when it passed (having been previously sold) to its 

 present possessors, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 



2 Mr. Walker was Rector of St. Mary's in the More, in Exeter, and some 

 time Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. His history of the sufferings of the 

 clergy during the Interregnum was published in London, 1714. See p. 227 for 

 this extract. 



