Note 141 — Chapter I · (continued 2)
Reading edition
Hazlitt, Tenures of Land, 80; other examples refer to the Hundred of Cholmer and Dancing, in Essex, 75; to Kilmersdon, in Somersetshire, 182; to Hopton, in Salop, 165. John of Gaunt is responsible for many of these curious and interesting remains of tribal antiquity. Bisley's Handbook of North Devon, 28, refers to one relating to the manor of Umberleigh, near Barnstaple, and I have a note from Mr. Edmund Wrigglesworth, of Hull, of a parallel to this being preserved by tradition only. There is a tradition respecting the estate of Sutton Park, near Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, which states that it formerly belonged to John of Gaunt, who gave it to an ancestor of the present proprietor, one Roger Burgoyne, by the following grant:—
"I, John of Gaunt, Do give and do grant, To Roger Burgoyne And the heirs of his loin Both Sutton and Potton Until the world's rotten."
Potton was a neighbouring village to Sutton. There is a moated site in the park called "John o' Gaunt's Castle," see Notes and Queries, tenth series, vi. 466. Cf. Aubrey, Collections for Wilts, 185, for an example at Midgehall; Cowell's Law Interpreter, 1607, and the Dictionarum Rusticum, 1704, for the custom of East and West Enborn, in Berks, which was made famous by Addison's Spectator in 1714.