THE LADY MARGARET trees and some very old thorns. In the chancel of Stoke Rochford is a brass to Henry Rochford, 1470, and on a brass plate this inscription to Oliver St. John and his wife Elizabeth Bygod, 1503:—
"Pray for the soil of Master Olyr-Sentjehn Squier, sonne unto ye right excellent hye and mightty pryncess of Som~sete g~ndame unto ou~sovey~n Lord Kynge Herre the VII. and for the soll of Dame Elizabeth Bygod his wiff, whoo dep~ted from this t~nsitore liffe ye XII daye of June, i~ ye year of ou~ Lord MCCCCC and III."
Thus Oliver was brother to Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, the mother of the King. She made a great mark on the history of her time, which was the fifteenth century. Daughter of the first Duke of Somerset and wife successively of the Earl of Richmond, who was half-brother to Henry VI., and of Henry Stafford, son to the Duke of Buckingham, and of Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, and mother, by her first marriage, of Henry VII., she was a magnificent patron of learning, for she endowed Christ's College and St. John's College, Cambridge, and founded the "Lady Margaret" professorships of Divinity both at Cambridge and at Oxford. Oliver's mother had been the wife of Sir John Bigod, who with his father was killed on Towton field, near Leeds, in 1461, when, after a very bloody fight, the throne was secured to Edward IV., 28,000 Lancastrians, it is said, though this is hardly credible, having been left on the field of battle. Oliver, whom Leland describes as a big black fellow, died at Fontarabia, in Spain, but was buried at Stoke Rochford. It shows of how little account the spelling even of proper names was in the fifteenth century when we find here the brass plate on his daughter's tomb inscribed, "Hic jacet Sibella Seyntjohn quondam filia Oliveri Sentjohn." Perhaps there is something after all in the remark I heard a farmer make in the train at Boston: "Well, I reckon it is a clear gift, is spelling. My boy John, he's nobbut eleven, and he can spell owt, but I'm noä hand at it mysen, and I reckon theer's a stränge many is makes but a poor job on it." In the museum at Peterborough there is a notebook of The Lord Chief Justice, Oliver St. John, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, dated 1649, who earned for himself the undying gratitude of his own and all future generations by saving Peterborough Cathedral.
