322 



" Ludger shall Castle and its History. 31 



is made of any governor in this or the succeeding- reigns. 1 

 And though Edmund of Hadham, Earl of Richmond, held the 

 manor of Lutegershall in fee tail and died possessed of it 35 Hen. VI., 

 and George, Duke of Clarence (that Duke of Clarence who is 

 popularly supposed to have been drowned in a butt of malmsey), 

 though he had a grant of it in special tail, 16 Edw. IV., with all the 

 knights' fees thereunto belonging, yet nothing is said of the castle, 

 which renders it probable that it was either dismantled or that the 

 king did not choose to trust it in the hands of a subject. In 

 Leland's time, the beginning of the sixteenth century, it was "clene 

 down/' but a " pratie lodge n had been built out of the ruins and 

 still belonged to the crown. 



In the time of Edw. VI. it was granted to the first Earl of 

 Bedford, but soon afterwards became the property of the Brydges 

 family, ancestors of the Duke of Chandos. Sir Richard Brydges 

 was Member for the borough in 1553. He married Jane, daughter 

 of Sir William Spenser, of Wormleighton, in Warwickshire. There 

 is a fine old monument, but in a somewhat dilapidated condition, 

 erected to their memory in the Church. He died in 1558 ; she was 

 living at Ludgershall with her j^ounger son, Edmund, in 1587. I 

 cannot find any records of proprietors of the manor between 1587 

 and 1751, when it belonged to John Selwyn, Esq., who in the same 

 year bequeathed it to his father. George Augustus Selwyn, the cele- 

 brated wit of George the Third's time, succeeded to it in 1763. 

 Thackerary, in one of the early numbers of the "Cornhill Magazine," 

 in one of his lectures on the four Georges, says of Selwyn that he 

 "represented Glo'ster for many years, and had a borough of his 

 own, Ludgershall, for which when he was too lazy to contest Glo'ster, 

 he sat himself. The subserviency of Ludgershall to its witty patron 

 was so well known that it is said he was once asked if he could not 



1 " Robert Attewater perpetual chaplain of the Chantry of S. Mary of Ludgar- 

 shall by consent of John Mervyle and Wm. Allemore seneschal of the chantry 

 have granted to John and Margery North two burgages in Ludgarshall in the 

 street called Winchester St. for 101 years, paying 8 d a year. Witness John Pille 

 Wm. Bushap, Walter South and John Sabbe then Bailiff of the vill : " 



[One of the seals that of the town of Ludgershall.] 

 Dated Feast of All Saints, 7 Henry IV. (Heneage's Deeds.) 



