OF SELBOBNE. 
435 
LETTER VIII. 
UR forefathers in this village were no ^oubt 
as busy and bustling, and as important, as 
ourselves : yet have their names and trans- 
actions been forgotten from century to cen- 
tury, and have sunk into oblivion ; nor has 
this happened only to the vulgar, but even to men remark- 
able and famous in their generation. I was led into this 
train of thinking by finding in my vouchers that Sir Adam 
Gurdon was an inhabitant of Selborne, and a man of the 
first rank and property in the parish. By Sir Adam Gurdon 
I would be understood to mean that leading and accom- 
plished malecontent in the Mountfort faction, who distin- 
guished himself by his daring conduct in the reign of 
Henry III. The first that we hear of this person in my 
papers is, that with two others he was bailiff of Alton before 
the sixteenth of Henry III. viz. about 1231, and then not 
knighted. Who Gurdon was, and whence he came, does 
not appear: yet there is reason to suspect that he was 
originally a mere soldier of fortune, who had raised himself 
by marrying women of property. The name of Gurdon 
does not seem to be known in the south ; but there is a 
name so like it in an adjoining kingdom, and which belongs 
to two or three noble families, that it is probable this 
remarkable person was a North Briton ; and the more so, 
since the Christian name of Adam is a distinguished one to 
this day among the family of the Gordons. But, be this as 
it may. Sir Adam Gurdon has been noticed by all the writers 
of English history for his bold disposition and disaffected 
spirit, in that he not only figured during the successful 
rebellion of Leicester, but kept up the war after the defeat 
and death of that baron, intrenching himself in the woods 
of Hampshire, towards the town of Farnham. After the 
battle of Evesham, in which Mountfort fell, in the year 126^*' 
Gurdon might not think it safe to return to his house foi 
