14 Nov. 1148 (Matt. West ii. 40; Dugdale). In 1386 Bishop Braybroke [q. v.] decreed that the days of the saint's death and translation, which had of late been neglected, should be kept holy, and they were observed with great honour as first-class feasts at St. Paul's (Stubbs). A spurious privilege, purporting to be a grant of Pope Agatho to St. Paul's, is said to have been brought from Rome by Earconwald, to whom it is addressed; another privilege, also spurious, to the monastery of Chertsey is addressed to the bishop (Councils and Eccl. Docs. iii. 161). There is no historical foundation for the belief that he visited Rome. His chief claim to remembrance is that he must have developed the organisation of the diocese ‘from the missionary stage in which Cedda had left it’ (Stubbs). An exhaustive discussion by Bishop Stubbs, on the chronology of his episcopate, and full particulars of the legends relating to him, and of the reverence paid to his memory, will be found in the ‘Dictionary of Christian Biography.’
[Bædæ Hist. Eccles. iv. 6; Kemble's Codex Dipl. 35, 986–8; Eddi, Vita Wilfridi, c. 43; Historians of York, 1 (Rolls Ser.); Florence of Worcester, sub ann. 675; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, p. 143 (Rolls Ser.); Life from Capgrave in Acta SS. Bolland. 30 April, iii. 790; another life from Cotton MS., Claudius, A 5, printed in Dugdale's History of St. Paul's (ed. 1818), p. 289, see also p. 15; Thorpe's Ancient Laws, p. 45; Green's Making of England, pp. 328, 330; art. ‘Erkenwald,’ Dict. of Christian Biog. ii. 177–9.]
ERLE, THOMAS (1650?–1720), general, of Charborough, Dorsetshire, was second son of Thomas Erle, who married Susan, fourth daughter of the first Lord Say and Sele (Collins, vi. 32), and died during the lifetime of his father, Sir Walter Erle, knt., the parliamentarian, who died in 1665 (Hutchins, Dorsetshire, iii. 126). Thomas Erle appears to have succeeded to the family estates at the death of his grandfather (ib.), and in 1678 was returned to parliament for the borough of Wareham, Dorsetshire, which he represented many years. On 27 May 1685 he was appointed a deputy lieutenant for Dorsetshire, and a letter of the same date to ‘Mr. Thomas Erle of Charborough’ directs him, in the absence of the lieutenant (Lord Bristol), to do ‘all manner of acts and things concerning the militia which three or more deputy lieutenants are by the statute empowered to do’ (Home Off. Mil. Entry Book, i. 184). His appointment as deputy lieutenant is the first mention of his name in existing war office (home office) records. On 13 June following similar letters were issued to two other deputy lieutenants of Dorsetshire, Colonel Strangways, of the ‘western regiment of foot,’ and Sir Henry Portman, bart., who were further directed, if necessary, to march the militia out of the county. This was the date on which the ‘red’ regiment of Dorsetshire militia entered Bridport to oppose the Duke of Monmouth's advance (Macaulay, History, vol. i.). Drax, Erle's successor in the Charborough estates, caused an inscription to be put up over an ice-house in the grounds recording that ‘under this roof, in the year 1686, a set of patriotic gentlemen of this neighbourhood concerted the great plan of the glorious revolution with the immortal King William …’ (Hutchins, iii. 128). According to Narcissus Luttrell, who styles him ‘major,’ Erle was raising men after William of Orange landed (Relation of State Affairs, i. 482). On 8 March 1689 he was appointed colonel of a new regiment of foot, with which he went to Ireland and fought at the battle of the Boyne and the siege of Limerick in 1690, and in the campaign of 1691, where he much distinguished himself at the battle of Aghrim, in which he was twice taken by the Irish and as often rescued by his own men. Erle, who is described by General Mackay at this time as a man of very good sense, a hearty lover of his country and likewise of his bottle, had meanwhile been transferred, on 1 Jan. 1691, to the colonelcy of Luttrell's regiment (19th foot), which he took to Flanders and commanded at the battle of Steinkirk, 3 Aug. 1692. The same year he made his only recorded speech in the house in the debate on the employment of foreign generals (Parl. Hist. v. 718). Erle was made a brigadier-general 22 March 1693, and left a sick bed at Mechlin to head his brigade at the battle of Landen, where he was badly wounded. About the end of the year his name appears as a subscriber of 2,333l. 6s. 8d. to the ‘General Joint Stock for East India’ under the charter of 11 Nov. 1693 (All Souls' Coll. MS. 152D, fol. 45 b). He commanded a brigade in the subsequent campaigns in Flanders, and was with the covering army during the siege of Namur. From 1694 to 1712 Erle was governor of Portsmouth. In June 1696 he became major-general, and in 1697 his original regiment, referred to in some official records under the misleading title of the ‘1st battalion of Erle's’ (Treas. Papers, lx. 20, 21), was disbanded. In 1699 Erle was appointed second in command under Lord Galway in Ireland, and on the accession of Queen Anne was made commander-in-chief there, and for a time was one of the lords justices. Some of his official letters to Hyde, earl of Rochester,
