Next year he returned to take part in the second rising, but, this proving no more successful than the first, he again took refuge in Scotland. In 1074 he went to Normandy and made peace with William. In the struggle between Henry I. and Robert of Normandy, Edgar sided with the latter. He was taken prisoner at the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106, but was subsequently released. The date of his death is uncertain, but he was certainly alive about 1125.
EDGECUMBE, or Edgecombe, the name of a celebrated west of England family, taken from the manor of Edgecumbe in Cornwall. One of its earlier members was Sir Richard Edgecumbe (d. 1489), who was descended from a Richard Edgecumbe who flourished during the reign of Edward I. Richard was a member of parliament in 1467; afterwards he joined Henry, earl of Richmond, in Brittany, returned with the earl to England, and fought at Bosworth, where he was knighted. He received rich rewards from Henry, now King Henry VII., who also sent him on errands to Scotland, to Ireland and to Brittany, and he died at Morlaix on the 8th of September 1489. His son and successor, Sir Piers Edgecumbe, went to France with Henry VIII. in 1513, and when he died on the 14th of August 1539 he left with other issue a son, Sir Richard Edgecumbe (1499–1562), a cultured and hospitable man, who is celebrated through Richard Carew’s Friendly Remembrance of Sir Richard Edgecumbe. Sir Richard’s eldest son, Piers or Peter Edgecumbe (1536–1607), was a member of parliament under Elizabeth for about thirty years.
Another famous member of this family was Richard, 1st baron Edgecumbe (1680–1758), a son of Sir Richard Edgecumbe. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was successively member of parliament for St Germans, Plympton and Lostwithiel from 1701 to 1742; on two occasions he served as a lord of the treasury; and from 1724 to 1742 he was paymaster-general for Ireland, becoming chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster in 1743. Edgecumbe was a faithful follower of Sir Robert Walpole, in whose interests he managed the elections for the Cornish boroughs, and his elevation to the peerage, which took place in 1742, was designed to prevent him from giving evidence about Walpole’s expenditure of the secret service money. He died on the 22nd of November 1758. His son and successor, Richard, the 2nd baron (1716–1761), was comptroller of the royal household, a member of parliament, and a major-general in the army. A wit, a writer of verse, a gambler and an intimate friend of Horace Walpole, “Dick Edgecumbe” died unmarried on the 10th of May 1761.
Edgecumbe’s brother, George, 1st earl of Mount Edgecumbe (1721–1795), was a naval officer who saw a great deal of service during the Seven Years’ War. Succeeding to the barony on the 1st baron’s death in 1761 he became an admiral and treasurer of the royal household; he was created Viscount Mount-Edgecumbe in 1781 and earl of Mount-Edgecumbe in 1789. He died on the 4th of February 1795, his only son being his successor, Richard, the 2nd earl (1764–1839), the ancestor of the present earl and the author of Musical Reminiscences of an Old Amateur. He died on the 26th of September 1839. His son, Ernest Augustus, the 3rd earl (1797–1861), wrote Extracts from Journals kept during the Revolutions at Rome and Palermo.
EDGE HILL, an elevated ridge in Warwickshire, England, near the border of Oxfordshire. The north-western face is an abrupt escarpment of the lias, and the summit of the ridge is almost level for nearly 2 m., at a height somewhat exceeding 700 ft. The escarpment overlooks a rich lowland watered by streams tributary to the Avon; the gentle eastern slope sends its waters to the Cherwell, and the ridge thus forms part of the divide between the basins of the Severn and the Thames. Edge Hill gave name to the first battle of the Great Rebellion (q.v.), fought on the 23rd of October 1642. Charles I., marching on London from the north-west, was here met by the parliamentary forces under Robert Devereux, earl of Essex. The royalists were posted on the hill while the enemy was in the plain before Kineton. But the rash advice of Prince Rupert determined the king to give up the advantage of position; he descended to the attack, and though Rupert himself was successful against the opposing cavalry, he was checked by the arrival of a regiment with artillery under Hampden, and, in the meantime, the royalist infantry was driven back. The parliamentarians, however, lost the more heavily, and though both sides claimed the advantage, the king was able to advance and occupy Banbury.
EDGEWORTH, MARIA (1767–1849), Irish novelist, second child and eldest daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (q.v.) and his first wife, Anna Maria Elers, was born in the house of her maternal grandparents at Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, on the 1st of January 1767. Her early efforts in fiction were of a sufficiently melodramatic character; for she recollected one of her schoolgirl compositions, in which the hero wore a mask made of the dried skin taken from a dead man’s face. Her holidays were often spent in the house of the eccentric Thomas Day, for whom she entertained a genuine respect. She had ample opportunities for society among her father’s neighbours in Ireland, among whom were the second Lord Longford, whose daughter, “Kitty” Pakenham, became later duchess of Wellington, Lady Moira at Castle Forbes, and Maria’s aunt, Margaret Ruxton, at Black Castle. She gained a first-hand experience of the Irish peasantry by acting as her father’s assistant in the management of the estate. The Edgeworths were in Ireland from 1793 onwards through that dangerous period, and Maria’s letters, always gay and natural, make very light of their anxieties and their real perils.
Mr Edgeworth encouraged his daughter’s literary instincts. It has been the fashion to regard his influence over Maria’s work as altogether deplorable, but against the disadvantages arising from his interference must be weighed the stimulus she undoubtedly derived from his powerful mind. Her first publication was a plea for female education, Letters to Literary Ladies (1795), and in 1796 appeared the collection of stories known as The Parent’s Assistant (2nd ed., 6 vols., 1800), an unpromising title which was not chosen by the author. The stories had been submitted as they were written to the juvenile critics of the Edgeworth nursery. They were therefore children’s stories for children, even though the morals were Mr Edgeworth’s. In 1798 Mr Edgeworth’s fourth marriage threatened the family harmony, but Maria soon became a close friend of her stepmother. Practical Education (2 vols., 1798) was written in conjunction with her father, who also collaborated with her in the Essay on Irish Bulls (1802). Miss Edgeworth’s first novel, Castle Rackrent, an Hibernian Tale taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires before the year 1782, was written without her father’s supervision, and appeared anonymously in 1800. It is the story of an Irish estate and its owners, the Rackrents, as told by Thady, the steward. Its success was immediate, and a second edition soon appeared with the author’s name. Perhaps because of the absence of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s co-operation, the book is the most natural and vigorous of her novels. The course of the story is not altered to suit any moral, and the personages appear to be drawn immediately from the natives of Edgeworthstown, though Miss Edgeworth asserts that only Thady himself was an actual portrait. In her realistic pictures of Irish peasant life she opened up a new vein in fiction, and even if the unquestionable excellences of Castle Rackrent were less, it would still be a noteworthy book. In the “General Preface” to the 1829 edition of his novels Sir Walter Scott, writing of the publication of Waverley, says: “I felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland,” and in the “Postscript, which should have been a preface,” in the original edition of Waverley, he describes his aim as being “in some distant degree to emulate the admirable Irish portraits of Miss Edgeworth, so different from the ‘Teagues’ and ‘dear joys’ who so long, with the most perfect family resemblance to each other, occupied the drama and the novel.” Belinda (1801) is a society novel, and one of her best books. Mr Saintsbury thinks that Miss Austen’s heroines owe something of their naturalness to Belinda, who was one of the earliest to break with the tradition of fainting
