Abstract
Before any of the surviving London Carthusians could make their way out of their doomed house in November of 1538, they would have had to endure the final humiliation of being sent away by the King’s agents who remained in their house. Maurice Chauncy considered this action to have turned the “temple of the Lord” into “a den of thieves, a haunt of vice.”1 The monks were turned out with whatever small bits of their lives would escape the insidious eyes of their keepers.2 Probably more menacing to the monks as they left was the terrible reminder of the brutal slaughter of their former Prior John Houghton whose severed arm had hung on the gate of the charterhouse since his execution in 1535.3 Among those remaining Carthusian monks was Everard Digby, one of several under Prior John Houghton who “bore well-known names.”4
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Maurice Chauncy, The Passion and Martyrdom of the Holy English Carthusian Fathers. A.D. 1570, ed. G. W. S. Curtis, trans. A. F. Radcliffe (London: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1935), p. 127.
Quoted in John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry; or, Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland. Volume 4 (London: Henry Colburn, Publisher, 1838), p. 460.
S. M. Thorpe, “Sir Everard Digby (by 1472–1540),” in The House of Commons, 1509–1558, Volume 1, ed. Stanley Thomas Bindoff (London: Secker and Warburg Ltd., 1982), p. 44 [43–44].
E. Margaret Thompson, The Carthusian Order in England (London: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1930), p. 33. Thompson also tells us that of “[p]ersonal property [the monk] had none, and gifts from outside he might not receive” (p. 33).
Charles Wise, Rockingham Castle and the Watsons (London: Elliot Stock, 1891), p. 34, gives a lively account of this “extraordinary woman” based on that of John Nichols in his large and rambling History of Leicestershire (1746). Nichols claimed that Mary Neale outlived three husbands and lived to the ripe old age of 119 years! As Wise points out, this is certainly “a fiction” as with many genealogies then and now.
M. W. Greenslade, “Erdeswick, Sampson (c.1538–1603),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2004), online edition, accessed July 23, 2008. This ODNB entry for Erdeswick also provides the birth year as given here but Greenslade’s narrative acknowledges only that Erdeswick “was born probably in the later 1530s,” meaning his is a best guess. Much of what we do know about Erdeswick comes from his Survey (before 1603), Camden’s Britannia (1607), Anthony Wood’s Ath. Oxon. (1691), and other documents collected in various archives, most notably at the William Salt Library in Stafford, the Staffordshire Record Office, and the National Archives in London.
M. W. Greenslade, “The Staffordshire Historians,” North Staffordshire Journal of Field Studies, 16 (Keele: University College of North Staffordshire, 1976): p. 25 [23–41].
See also M. W. Greenslade, The Staffordshire Historians (Stafford: Staffordshire Record Society, 1982), his chapter on Erdeswick, pp. 22–36.
See Lettice Digby, My Ancestors being the History of the Digby & Strutt Families (London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co. Ltd., 1928), p. 8.
Marea Mitchell, The Book of Margery Kempe: Scholarship, Community, & Criticism (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005), p. 57.
Hilton Kelliher, “The Rediscovery of Margery Kempe: A Footnote,” The British Library Journal 23.2 (London: British Museum Publications, 1997), 259–260 [259–263].
Hilton Kelliher, “The Rediscovery of Margery Kempe: A Footnote,” The British Library Journal 23.2 (London: British Museum Publications, 1997): 260–261 [259–263].
Copyright information
© 2013 Julie A. Chappell
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chappell, J.A. (2013). Digbys, Erdeswicks, Bowdons, and Butler-Bowdons. In: Perilous Passages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277688_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277688_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44729-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-27768-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)