Captain Myles Standish: His Lost Lands and Lancashire Connections. By
the Rev. T. C. Pollens. (Manchester University Press and Longman& 3s. 6d. net.)—Myles Standish, the Pilgrim Fathers' military expert, declared in his will, made a few months before his death in 1656, that he was heir-apparent by lawful descent to lands in " Ormistick, Borsconge, Wrighting- ton, Maudeley, Newburrow, Crawston and the Ile of Man," and that these lands had been " surruptuously detained" from him. This statement led a number of his American descendants in 1846 to set up a claim to the estates of the family of Standish of Duxbury, which were said by imaginative American orators to be worth anything up to half a million a year. Mr. Porteus has studied the history of the three leading Standish families of Lancashire, and shows that the lands claimed by Myles Standish belonged at one time not to Standish of Duxbury, but to Standish of Ormskirk—the " Ormistick " of the will. These lands, however, had for the most part been alienated before 1584, the supposed date of Myles Standish's birth. Mr. Porteus finds no trace of Myles in any Standish pedigree, but conjectures that he came of a branch of the Standishes of Ormskirk, which had settled in the Isle of Man. Myles's own assertion that his great- grandfather was a " second er younger brother from the house of Standish of Standish" cannot be verified, and seems on the whole improbable. Like many other people, he doubtless cherished the belief that, if he had his rights, he would be a wealthy landowner, without inquiring minutely into the basis of such a belief. Standish is by no means an uncommon name in Lancashire, and Myles may have belonged to some minor and landless branch of the family. Mr. Porteus's essay is a good piece of work, though its conclusions are mainly negative.
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