History of the Parish Church of Chipping Lambourn. By John
Footman, M.A. (Elliot Stock.)—The name of Lambourn first occurs, we are told, in King Alfred's will. He gave the " home" there to his wife Ealswith. The church appears for the first time in a document of the time of King Knut, relating to the priest and his rights. He was very well provided with tithes of all kinds, common rights (e.g., "forty swine ever free on wood and on field"), fuel (each day one horse's load or two men's from 'the King's wood for the priest's fire), and a multitude of other things. But he did not keep them ; they were soon handed over to the Dean of St. Paul's. The story thus begun Mr. Footman goes through in detail, and the reader who cares for such things—not an uncommon being, we trust—will find it ex- ceedingly interesting. There was an ancient school which was disendowed when the chantry was dissolved. The church furniture, of which a goodly list is given, went the same way. The seventeenth-century list of church possessions is very meagre compared with it. Mr. Footman has something to say about -various vicars c f Lambourn, and this, from the nature of the ease, is sometimes more entertaining than edifying. One James
Smith has an unenviable pre-eminence among them for his anxiety to obtain some better preferment (the living, it will be remembered, had been despoiled in King Knut's time). He had some right to look for it, for he was one of the King's chaplains. His methods, however, were certainly discreditable. But surely Mr. Footman does not perceive the satire in the letter from the Bishop which he so strongly blames. True, he writes, " I am so far from censuring that I rather approve what you have done with regard to Government ; " but when he goes on to advise him to watch the incumbents of Crown-livings, and adds, "other creatures besides undertakers and birds of prey watch for dead corpses," he shows his approval to have been ironical.
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