Abingdon People - Abingdon on Thames Town Council

Thomas Duffield

Thomas Duffield, Abingdon’s MP from 1832 to 1844, was born in 1782 at Syston, Lincolnshire, second son of Michael Duffield. The family moved in 1805 to a new seat at Sunninghill, Berkshire. Thomas seems to have been intended for an academic career; he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1800, and in 1807 gained his MA and took up a fellowship at Merton. However, his ambitions were for a higher station in life. Emily Frances Elwes was the only child of George Elwes of Marcham Park, and sole heiress to a fortune said to be of almost a million pounds. Her father might reasonably have hoped for Emily to marry into the nobility, but in 1810 she and Thomas eloped and were married at Gretna Green. The elopement was widely and sensationally reported in the newspapers.

When George Elwes died in 1821 Thomas became the owner of Marcham Park, which he rebuilt and modernised. An interest in politics developed slowly; in 1825 he publicly supported the Tory candidate for one of the Berkshire county seats. In 1826, Abingdon Conservatives, who included most of the Corporation, invited him to stand against their incumbent, the Liberal John Maberly, but he decided that Maberly was too well entrenched and withdrew.

Nonetheless, he continued to be active in public affairs and to nurse the constituency. He was High Sheriff of Berkshire in 1827. He donated very generously to local social and charitable funds, and subscribed £100 of the £1700 cost of widening Abingdon Bridge in 1829, the largest contribution by any individual. He was a signatory to the 1831 Berkshire petition, where some 150 of the most prominent residents of the county publicised their opposition to the proposed parliamentary reforms and extension of the franchise.

In 1832, Maberly became bankrupt and had to flee abroad to avoid the debtor’s prison. Duffield was the obvious man to succeed him and had the support of most members of the Corporation. The Liberal candidate, Thomas Bowles of Milton Hill, was supported by ‘some of the gentry and nearly all the respectable tradesmen’ but withdrew, hinting at large-scale bribery by the wealthy Duffield with which he could not compete. He was replaced as candidate by a son of Maberly without local connections. Duffield won the seat by 157 votes against 43. He became as entrenched in Abingdon as Maberly had been, and was returned unopposed at the elections of 1835, 1837 and 1841.

Duffield was never an active parliamentarian and there is no record of him speaking in the House of Commons. His main political interest was in agricultural matters. He strongly opposed repeal of the Corn Laws. However, he also worked hard in support of local interests and, in particular, helped to defeat an early attempt in the Berkshire Quarter Sessions to close the Abingdon gaol and remove the convicts there to Reading. The Corporation trooped in a body to Marcham Park to thank him.

It may have seemed that Duffield would hold the Abingdon seat for a very long time, but in 1844 he unexpectedly resigned and was replaced by another Conservative, Frederick Thesiger. The Abingdon Corporation, nearly all Conservatives, manipulated the election so that it was impossible for the Liberals to field a candidate, and Thesiger walked over.

Thesiger was solicitor-general, and had lost his seat at Woodstock because the Duke of Marlborough wanted it for his son. The coup at Abingdon came about because the government needed to keep his services. It was speculated, probably rightly, that Duffield had received a payoff of £7500 or thereabouts from the Treasury.

Duffield’s motives remain a mystery – he plainly didn’t need the money – but it is possible that he was simply tired of parliamentary duties and anxious to spend more time with his young second wife and their growing family. His first wife, Emily, had died in 1835 after bearing ten children, eight of whom survived infancy. In 1838, he married Augusta Elizabeth Rushbrooke, daughter of a fellow-MP. His oldest son had died tragically in a shooting accident in 1833 at the age of twenty, and a daughter at the same age in 1841. Augusta died in 1846, probably after the birth of their fifth child.

In the summer of 1847, Duffield left Marcham Park and moved with his younger children to a new home, the Castle Priory in Wallingford. He continued active in public affairs, and was soon made High Steward of the town. He died in 1854.

© AAAHS and contributors 2016

St Edmund with infant (Chaource, France)

St Edmund of Abingdon

Edmund of Abingdon, the future scholar, archbishop and saint, was born in about 1175, probably in West St Helen Street, where his father, Reginald, had property. Reginald may have been a lay official in the Abbey. Edmund attended the grammar school near to St Mary’s in Oxford, and after further study in Paris became a teacher of the liberal arts in Oxford. After some years he returned to Paris for advanced study in theology. He was back in Oxford by about 1214, not (as is often said) the first doctor of theology in the still new university, but probably the first to have an international scholarly reputation.

In 1222, Edmund’s career changed direction. He left Oxford for Salisbury, where he was given charge of the cathedral treasury, responsible for vestments and ceremonial equipment. However, his high status was shown by the grant of the lucrative prebend of Calne for his maintenance. The Bishop of Salisbury, Richard Poer, was a close associate of the highly controversial Archbishop Stephen Langton, and the move put Edmund clearly into Langton’s circle and in line for further promotion. He is reported as having travelled extensively, especially in the politically troubled west of England, as a preacher.

Langton died in 1228 and his immediate successor in 1233. It was a time of internal warfare. King Henry III and his advisors were at odds with a party among the English barons, who were in armed revolt. Their main complaint was the influence of the king’s minister, Peter des Roches. The king, or des Roches, successively nominated three candidates for the archbishopric, but the pope refused to accept any of them. He imposed Edmund, with the brief to act as a peacemaker.

Even before he had been consecrated, Edmund and his bishops were active in the Welsh border country where the fighting was most intense, negotiating local truces and seeing that they were kept. At a session of the king’s council, Edmund spoke vigorously against des Roches, and ordered the king, on pain of excommunication, to sack him, which was done. Edmund then presided over ceremonies of peace and reconciliation between the king and his barons. This ending of a civil war must stand as the greatest achievement of Edmund’s career.

Matthew Paris: Edmund forcing Henry III and Gilbert Marshall to be friends
(Wikimedia Commons)

In October 1240, Edmund set off for a routine visit to Rome. He fell ill and died close to the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy. Miracles were reported to have taken place around his corpse. This was kept by the Cistercians, who started a campaign to have him declared a saint so that they could benefit from pilgrimages and relics. There was widespread political support both in France and in England. Some of the usual formalities were dispensed with, and he was duly canonised in the remarkably short time of six years. The stories that circulated describing him as unusually austere and saintly in life have been taken by hagiographers at face value ever since, but in fact were part of the canonisation campaign and must be read with caution.

Shrine of St Edmund in the Abbey of Pontigny
(Photo courtesy of Terryl N. Kinder)

Edmund is known in England as St Edmund of Abingdon, and in France as St Edme. His attributes in French art often include infants; he was revered as miraculously bringing still-born babies to life just long enough for them to be baptised. His remains are still at Pontigny, in an ornate shrine held by angels above the main altar.

© AAAHS and contributors 2014

Faricius (Faritius)

Faricius was one of the two greatest abbots of Abingdon Abbey. Aethelwold, a century and a half before him, was the other.

Faricius was an Italian from Arezzo in Tuscany. Nothing is known of his early career, but before the end of the eleventh century he was a monk at the abbey of Malmesbury, already with a reputation for learning and, especially, for his medical skills.

At this time, Abingdon Abbey was in difficulty. King William Rufus had despoiled it and left it for three years without an abbot. Many of its estates had been taken and sold off. Its buildings were so dilapidated that the monks had to sleep in the church. But in 1100, William Rufus died and was succeeded by his brother Henry I. Henry allowed Faricius to be appointed abbot.

As a medical man, Faricius treated the king and many of the most prominent people of his time, and also their wives and mistresses. He was especially good at helping women in childbirth. Thus, when he set about restoring the Abbey’s lost properties, which he did in a very aggressive manner, he tended to find favour with the king and in the law courts. He was even given estates by grateful patients. The Abbey’s finances were transformed. Faricius started a great building programme; in his time, the nave of the church was completed and the crossing, which would support the central tower, was built up to window level. He rebuilt the domestic ranges, and added private quarters for himself as abbot. Manuscripts were produced, saints’ relics and liturgical utensils and vestments acquired, and the Abbey became once more a place of splendour.

When there was a vacancy in the archbishopric of Canterbury, Henry wanted to appoint Faricius, but was prevented by the opposition of his minister, Roger of Salisbury, who seems to have feared that Faricius’s autocratic nature would be a cause of trouble. There was certainly a development of discontent in the monastery, and some of the monks complained to the king about a reduction of their cheese ration. Roger headed a high level investigation which found against Faricius and the cheese ration was restored. Faricius died soon after, in 1117.

© AAAHS and contributors 2014

Henry Forty

Henry Forty, preacher and occasional religious writer, was the first professional minister to lead the Abingdon Baptist community after the death in 1656 of its founder, John Pendarves.

His origin and early career are obscure. Accounts differ on the year of his birth, and are silent as to the place. Most probably, he was a Londoner, since he seems in the 1640s to have had some role at the proto-Baptist church at Swan Alley, off Coleman Street. By 1651, Forty was prominent enough to sign on behalf of his congregation a Confession of Faith of the Particular or Calvinistic Baptist sect that had been set up some years earlier and which Pendarves represented in Abingdon.

Soon after this we find him in the West Country as minister of a Particular Baptist community in Totnes. Pendarves was himself a west-countryman and kept up his connections there; in 1656 both Pendarves and Forty were among the signatories to a controversial tract called Sighs for Sion which might be read as a call for armed resistance to the Cromwell government. In the same year, Forty was one of the many Baptists who gathered in Abingdon for Pendarves’ funeral and had to be ejected from the town by the militia after disturbances.

Several accounts say that at the Restoration in 1660 Forty was arrested and held in prison at Exeter for twelve years. He may well have been held there for some time, but was back in London, probably at Swan Alley, by May 1670 when there was a crackdown on illegal religious assemblies. He was imprisoned at Southwark, and released two years later. It has been suggested that Forty was now officiating at Swan Alley, but this is uncertain. He published at least one tract from there in the 1670s, but in 1675 moved to Abingdon as minister.

For almost twenty years after Pendarves’ death, the congregation he had founded was led by its lay preachers, notably the wealthy maltster John Tomkins (1621-1708). Forty now took it in hand. Probably his greatest achievement was the revival from 1678 of Pendarves’ Abingdon Association, a regional grouping which held regular conferences at which representatives – ‘messengers’ – of the member churches worked to maintain unity of practice and administration. This now covered a much greater area than it had in Pendarves’ day, extending from its Abingdon centre as far as Reading and Cirencester.

Persecution of religious Dissenters intensified in the 1680s. Forty was excommunicated by the Church of England in 1684, which will have been intended as a financial rather than an ecclesiastical penalty since excommunicated persons were effectively excluded from the civil courts. But he had his triumph in July 1686 when James II was granting Protestant Dissenters dispensations from the repressive laws in the hope of gaining toleration also for his Catholic coreligionists. Forty was at the head of a group of twenty-five Abingdon Baptists on trial at the Berkshire assizes when their defending counsel, Thomas Medlycott, came with a royal dispensation in due form and they had to be acquitted. The hearing was on a Saturday. The Baptist chapel had been closed and, it seems, vandalised, but was cleaned up overnight and triumphantly re-opened for services the next day.

In June 1689, after the accession of William and Mary, the repressive laws were relaxed. Forty led some fifty members of his flock in publicly taking the oaths of allegiance to the new regime.

Forty’s position in the doctrinal debates of his time seems to have varied during his career, following changes in intellectual fashion. He moved early from the principle of open communion to one where access to the Lord ’s Supper was limited to those baptised as believing adults – but may have moved back again later. In the 1680s, there was controversy among the Baptists on whether hymn singing should be part of divine service, and he accepted this. It seems that he never did accept the laying on of hands as a qualification for the Baptist ministry and never underwent this ritual.

Forty died on 25 January 1692/3, presumably at Southwark where his funeral took place. The minister officiating described him, in spite of his effective pastoral work at Totnes and Abingdon, as merely a lay preacher.

© AAAHS and contributors 2017

Sir Ralph Glyn

Ralph George Campbell Glyn was probably Abingdon’s longest serving MP, holding the seat from 1924 to 1953. He was born in 1885; his father was Bishop of Peterborough and his mother a daughter of the eighth Duke of Argyll. Intended for the army, he was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst and commissioned in 1904 into the Rifle Brigade. He seems from the start to have gravitated to headquarters and staff rather than regimental duties. In 1910 he transferred to reserve status, managing to combine staff work at the War Office with helping to reorganise the Conservative Party and unsuccessfully contesting various Scottish constituencies.

During the First World War he participated in a military-diplomatic mission to Russia and to allies and neutrals in the Balkans. He served as a staff officer in the Dardanelles campaign and in Egypt and later in France. He finished with the rank of major, a Military Cross, three mentions in dispatches, the Légion d’Honneur, the Imperial Russian Order of St Anne, the Serbian Order of the White Eagle and the American Distinguished Service Medal.

In the post-war election he was finally successful in entering the House of Commons as member for Clackmannan and East Stirlingshire, but lost the seat in 1922. The Abingdon division of North Berkshire, as it was officially known, was a very extensive and still largely rural constituency. He first contested it in 1923 losing by 254 votes, but won it in the following year with a majority of over 4000. He then held it for almost thirty years.

Glyn was assiduous as a constituency MP, supporting and appearing at local events and communicating well with his electorate through regular articles in the Wallingford-based Berks and Oxon Advertiser. He became High Steward of Wallingford in 1933. In Abingdon, he was an active governor of Abingdon School for many years and latterly vice-chairman of the governing body, but his greatest contribution to the town was in his support for the civic society, the Friends of Abingdon. He was among the founders of the society in 1944 and its president from 1945 until his death. He was particularly effective as a fund raiser, and obtained over several years a total of £5000 from the Pilgrim Trust which made possible the acquisition and renovation of the Checker and Long Gallery. In 1952, he was active in the campaign to save Fitzharris House from demolition, but this was ultimately unsuccessful.

Glyn lived in Ardington and later near Farnborough where his almost 2000 acres on the Berkshire Downs were said to make him the largest landowner in the Commons. As a parliamentarian, he was always ready to support agricultural interests, with a particular emphasis on sheep farming and horse breeding. In 1928 he introduced the private member’s bill that eventually reorganised racecourse gambling and set up the tote, a publicly owned system that diverted betting profits to the benefit of the sport. But he was a businessman as well as a farmer, holding a number of industrial directorships.

In the Commons, Glyn was always his own man and never a party hack. It was entirely consistent with his independent views that he welcomed the formation of a ‘national’ coalition government to deal with the financial crisis of 1931, and he became parliamentary private secretary to the Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald. This was the nearest he ever got to a government, as against a parliamentary, position. The parliamentary record, Hansard, shows him to have been an active debater with a wide range of interests. He was made a baronet in 1934.

One of his interests, no doubt stemming from his military experience, was in foreign affairs, and sometimes he would make his own visits to trouble spots and, if he felt it necessary, criticise government policies. In the 1925 dispute over the fate of Mosul he went to Constantinople and wrote home supporting the Turkish case over the British. In 1938 he made an ostensibly private trip to the Balkans and had talks with the Hungarian prime minister. He favoured the League of Nations and disarmament.

After the Second World War, Glyn was a leading member of the Commons Committee on Estimates which monitored government expenditure. He became its chairman in 1951. His greatest disagreement with his own party was over transport policy. Although a director of one of the ‘big four’ railway companies, he supported nationalisation in 1948 and opposed privatisation of road haulage in 1953. He argued that all transport should be centrally managed and rail and road be allowed to cross-subsidise each other. Whatever differences he may have had with his party whips, his support among North Berkshire voters remained firm throughout his tenure of the seat: he was unopposed in 1931 and 1935, and had majorities approaching 5000 in each of the post-war elections

In 1952 Glyn indicated a wish to retire. He became Baron Glyn in the coronation honours of 1953 and moved to the House of Lords where he remained active until his death in May 1960. He had married in 1921 Sybell Long, widow of a senior officer killed in 1917. She died in 1958. There were no children of the marriage, and the barony became extinct.

Ralph Glyn was an old-fashioned figure even in his own time – a back-bencher who saw his prime duty as being to his country and his constituents, not his party. His private means enabled him to take personal initiatives. His business interests made him indifferent to hopes of government office. He worked hard for his constituents, and thoroughly deserved the confidence they placed in him.

© AAAHS and contributors 2019

Simon Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt

Simon Harcourt was of a gentry family whose seat was at Stanton Harcourt. He was educated at a dissenting academy at Shilton, near Burford. He went on to Pembroke College at Oxford, which was closely connected with Abingdon.

Harcourt was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1683, became Recorder of Abingdon in 1689, and in 1690 was elected unopposed to Parliament for the Abingdon seat as a high Tory and Anglican. He soon developed a reputation as an orator and administrator, and gradually gained recognition and promotion. This was especially the case in the time of Queen Anne (reigned 1702-14), whose chief minister was Robert Harley. Harcourt and Harley had been contemporaries at the Shilton academy, and they now worked closely together. For many years, he maintained a legal career in addition to his political one, the two feeding off each other, and he became very rich. By 1711, he had become Lord Keeper and was soon made a baron. In 1713, he was promoted to Lord Chancellor.

In the later part of Anne’s reign, Harcourt was among her principal ministers. When she was succeeded by George I, a Whig, it seemed to be the end of his political career, as it was for his colleagues. But unlike them, he was able to make his peace with the new regime. Against expectation, he had government office again in 1720, was made a viscount in 1721, and by 1722 was back in the Privy Council. When the king was out of the country, Harcourt was one of the Lords Justices, holding vice-regal power.

Harcourt made his home at Cokethorpe and bought the estate of Nuneham Courtenay. At Cokethorpe he entertained widely, including literary men of congenial political views such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. He died in 1727, and is buried at the old family seat at Stanton Harcourt.

Harcourt was three times married, but his first wife, Rebecca, was the only one with whom he had children: two daughters and three sons. The first and third sons died young. The second, Simon, in spite of the influence his father exerted on his behalf, had a short and only mediocre career. He was MP for Abingdon 1713-15, but was not re-elected. He died in 1720. A grandson, also Simon, became in 1749 Viscount Nuneham of Nuneham Courtenay and Earl Harcourt of Stanton Harcourt.

© AAAHS and contributors 2016

From Wikimedia; public domain)

Peter Heylyn

Peter Heylyn was one of the great intellectuals of his time and one of its most enthusiastic controversialists. He was equally at home writing poetry and prose, serious or satirical, on geography, history, theology and foreign travel. Born into a prosperous family in Burford and educated at Oxford, he lived at Lacies Court in Abingdon from 1653 till shortly before his death in 1662.

In the 1620s and 30s, Heylyn became close to William Laud, chancellor of the university and later Archbishop of Canterbury, strongly supporting his campaigns for strengthening the power and authority of the Church of England and against puritanism. Laud brought him to the notice of Charles I, to whom he appealed by writing a book on the history of the Order of the Garter. He became a chaplain-in-ordinary to the king. Thereafter he was used by the church authorities and by the court as a polemicist, attacking in print those who opposed their policies. He made many enemies. But even those who disagreed with him admitted that his scholarship and research went deeper than those of his opponents.

In the Civil War he joined the king in Oxford and continued in his role as a propagandist, starting the royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus. Afterwards, he was heavily fined by the victorious parliamentarians and lost the church living at Alresford, Hants, that had been his home. However, he was able to retain or recover most of his properties and remained a wealthy man. For six years he lived in semi-retirement, managing a family-owned estate at Minster Lovell, but in 1653 he settled in Abingdon. He bought (or leased) Lacies Court from Paule Dayrell whose father he would probably have known from his Oxford days. Abingdon was away from the now hostile atmosphere of Oxford, but still near enough for him to patronise the bookshops and use the Bodleian Library.

He expanded Lacies Court, building on to it a small oratory where he could privately read the liturgy and administer communion in the traditional way while remaining within the law. He made it a centre for local people who shared his religious and political opinions. Apart from the Dayrells, they are known to have included Robert Jennings, the schoolmaster who had lost his position in Reading, the lawyer Charles Tooker who had lost his at the Berkshire archdeaconry, and another lawyer, Christopher Blower, known to have been allied to the largely conservative Mayott clan. To the local puritans, he remained hostile. An anecdote has him exchanging insults with the parliamentary soldier Francis Allen, now a magistrate, on the social status of their respective wives. His was a gentlewoman; Allen’s a tripe-wife.

But there seems to have been some attempt to build bridges with conservatives in the protectorate government. John Lenthall, son of the Speaker of the House of Commons, was nursing Abingdon for a political base, and the Lenthalls, like Heylyn, came from Burford. When the puritans sought to have the church of St Nicolas demolished as a hotbed of conservatism, they joined in campaigning to save it. When there was talk of Oliver Cromwell accepting the crown, Heylyn dedicated books to him and to his son Richard. Heylyn was a royalist, but his loyalty was not to any particular dynasty. His preoccupation was the Church of England in its early, non-puritan, form. His last published works were a series of hard-hitting books on church history, arguing that the Reformation throughout Europe had been subverted by puritan plotting, and presenting the executed Laud as a martyr in the cause of true protestant religion.

With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, it was widely expected that Heylyn would become a bishop. But he had no record of clandestine activity during the interregnum, his acerbic style was not what the new situation required, and by then he was almost completely blind. He remained sub-dean of Westminster and did finally move there, but died shortly after. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Heylyn married in 1628 Laetitia Highgate, who was already his sister-in-law. The marriage was at first clandestine, since he was still a fellow of Magdalen College. There were eleven children, none of whom seem to have achieved anything of note. His wife survived him.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

Sir John Holt

Sir John Holt, the greatest English lawyer of his age, was chief justice of the court of King’s Bench from 1689 until his death. He was born in Thame, the son of Sir Thomas Holt, who was recorder of Abingdon and MP for Abingdon. John is believed to have been educated at the free school in Abingdon (now Abingdon School). He was called to the bar in 1664 where he soon became known for his skilled advocacy in a wide variety of cases. In the crisis that arose when the Roman Catholic king, James II, fled the country in December 1688, Holt advised Parliament that James had renounced his position as king and that the throne was vacant and could be offered to William of Orange; thereafter William was summoned to the throne jointly with his wife Mary (daughter of James II). Soon after the accession of William III and Mary, Holt was appointed chief justice of King’s Bench at the early age of 46, which office he held for 22 years. His reputation as a judge rests both on the contribution that he made in developing the content of the common law, through the numerous judgments he gave in disputed cases, and also on the manner in which he conducted the trials that came before him. One biographer said that Holt was ‘the model on which, in England, the judicial character has been formed’. Holt died in 1710, leaving a widow but no children. He is buried at Redgrave church, Suffolk.

A W Bradley

Sir Thomas Holt

Thomas Holt, lawyer, was born about 1616 at Stoke in Oxfordshire and educated at Magdalen Hall in Oxford. About 1640, he married Susan Peacock of Chawley, near Cumnor. His activities during the Civil War are unknown, but by 1648 he was a barrister of Gray’s Inn. He was probably resident in Abingdon by 1653. He was a member of the Berkshire Commission of the Peace in that year, and a governor of Christ’s Hospital in 1655. He became Abingdon’s recorder in 1656.

In 1654, he was sent to Westminster as Abingdon’s member in Oliver Cromwell’s first parliament. Members were expected to sign a ‘recognition’ of the protectoral regime, and he seems to have done so. But he later went into opposition. When Cromwell set up army officers as local governors, Holt was prominent by his absence from Major-General Goffe’s advisory committee. He was re-elected to Parliament in 1656, but, with many others of doubtful loyalty, was excluded from it by the executive almost until its dissolution.

Meanwhile his legal career was flourishing. In 1661, amid enthusiasm for the newly restored Charles II, tax was paid on a ‘voluntary’ basis with payers encouraged to vie with each other publicly for how much they would give. Holt contributed £15, more than anyone else in Abingdon. The 1663 Hearth Tax assessments show him as living in Unicorn House in East St Helen Street, with thirteen chimneys, a number usually associated only with large inns.

In 1672, he added to his responsibilities by becoming steward (as they called their recorder) of Reading, and three years later the Abingdon Corporation, citing his frequent absences, sacked him from the recordership in favour of Thomas Medlycott. There may have been an additional reason: Medlycott inclined to the developing Whig party, and Holt to the Tory.

In January 1680, recently knighted, he presided over the county quarter-sessions which combined the functions of a county government and a court of law. This body insisted on joining a Whig-inspired campaign of petitioning for a new Parliament. He objected, and when there next was a Parliament, he was made to apologise for this objection on his knees at the bar of the House of Commons. This did no obvious harm to his career, and in 1686 he was named as a king’s serjeant, the highest legal rank that his career path could lead to. But he died in that year.

His son Sir John Holt (1642–1710), educated at Abingdon School, would become lord chief justice, and one of the greatest lawyers of his generation.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

Robert Jennings

It is not every schoolmaster who can retire to great wealth and a landed estate, but Robert Jennings, Master of Abingdon School from 1657 to 1683, did so. Born about 1622, he was the second son of John Jennings, a prominent Reading mercer. John Jennings was Mayor of Reading in 1630-40, but his name disappears from the corporation records after the taking of the town by the parliamentarians in the Civil War. This suggests a strong royalist allegiance, which was shared by his son.

Robert studied at St John’s College in Oxford, matriculating in 1639/40. A fellowship of that college had been the launch pad for the ascent of William Laud, a Reading man, to the archbishopric of Canterbury, and the relationship between Reading and St John’s was close. Robert chose to remain in Oxford throughout the war while it was the royalist capital, taking his MA in 1647/8. But in the purges that followed the parliamentarian victory he was expelled from the university on the grounds that ‘he had borne arms for the king’. He moved to London and in 1649 was in residence at the Middle Temple, but it is not clear that he ever seriously studied or practised law. His activities in the next several years are obscure.

In 1655 there were vacancies at the schools of both Reading and Abingdon. Robert had support from such worthies as Bulstrode Whitelocke, High Steward of Reading, former recorder of Abingdon and now a senior figure in the protectorate government, and from the prominent Laudian Peter Heylin, expelled from Oxford and now resident in Abingdon. He opted at first for Reading, but this turned out badly. The ruling élite of the town was deeply split, and Robert was the candidate of only one faction. The others preferred a St John’s graduate of the post-war generation untainted by royalism, and were able to get an order from the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, in his favour. Robert was dismissed. At Michaelmas 1657, he took over at Abingdon School.

The salary was an ungenerous £30 per year, but Robert seems to have had access to capital. Where this came from is uncertain. As a second son, he would not have inherited his family’s fortune. Nothing is known of his marriage, but it seems likely that it was an advantageous one. The school was at that time located in the area in front of the present Guildhall, with the schoolmaster’s house on the south side of the courtyard. Robert repaired the house and refurbished the school library. He built over a part of the courtyard to accommodate boarders as a profit-earning venture. There were repeated negotiations with the Corporation over money, and by 1678 he was able to make a loan of £400 towards the building of the County Hall.

There is little information on his performance as a schoolmaster, but if, as seems likely, the future Lord Chief Justice, John Holt, was one of his pupils, it must have been at least competent. Modern historians have drawn disapproving attention to his expulsion in 1671 of ten boys from families of religious dissenters, but it was a time of deep religious division. Royalism went together with hostility to dissent. There will have been pressure from other parents and from the Corporation. In fact, the boys may well have been better taught at Henry Langley’s dissenting academy at Tubney. Such schools educated boys for commerce rather than the church, and the curriculum will have been stronger in mathematics and modern languages than in the classics that Jennings would have been teaching.

Robert Jennings retired in 1683. In 1687 or 8, as an Oxfordshire magistrate, he was included in the great survey made by James II on attitudes to granting toleration to Protestant Dissenters and Catholics. His opinions had not changed. His answers were strongly against what the king wanted, and he was removed from the bench.

In 1688 came the revolution that swept James II from the throne, and many English Catholics sold up to join him in exile at St Germain. Among these were the Plowden family of Shiplake Court near Henley. Jennings was able to buy the estate for £5800 plus a £60 per year payment to a Plowden grandmother for the remainder of her life. In 1694, he was pricked High Sheriff of Oxfordshire, but because of his age he arranged for the duties to be carried out by his son James. He died in 1704.

Robert’s son James Jennings (?1670-1739) maintained his connection with Abingdon. He was its MP from 1710 to 1713, and again from 1715 to 1722. Although a Tory, he opposed and defeated the unimpressive son of Simon Harcourt in 1715. He stood unsuccessfully in 1722 and 1734, being defeated on each occasion by a Whig. He died rich enough to leave £4000 in cash to each of his two surviving daughters, as well as the Shiplake estate to his son.

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