488
NOTES AND QUERIES.
S. NO 25., JUNE 21. '56.
"Letter from Dublin" (2 nd S. I. 447.) I beg
to suggest to the communicator of the interesting
" Letter from Dublin," June 12, 1689, that he has
misread the initials, " Sir J C : " they should
be, as I venture to affirm, "Sir T C ,"*
as those of Sir Thomas Crosby of Ballyheigue Castle, co. Kerry, whose son, Walter Crosby, was one of the most active and devoted agents in the plots against the government of King William, until arrested in London several years afterwards. His name is often mentioned in the private cor- respondence and printed records of the period. And from private sources of information, I know that this young man was a protegee and emissary of Sir Patrick Trant, one of the leading instru- ments of King James's Irish policy before the Revolution.
There is, in the " Letter from Dublin," internal corroboration of my surmise : for, in a further paragraph, it refers to the information given by "The Quakers and Crossby;" but it would be satisfactory to be assured that the misleading initials " J. C." had been misread or misprinted, as I assume them to be. And any other informa- tion which could be given of the ultimate fate of this daring Jacobite would be received as a favour. A. B. R.
Belmont.
L^STINGEAN.
In his note upon this word, occurring Bede, lib. in. c. xxiii., Mr. Stevenson says, " The present church (of Lastingham), if not the original build- ing of Cedda, is probably one of the earliest ec- clesiastical buildings in the kingdom." Mr. Chur- ton adopts this opinion : " Early English church," p. 82. This is certainly a mistake. I have no doubt but that Cedd did build a church at Last- ingliam, although Bede merely says that he ob- tained land whereon to build a monastery, and did thereon build one. But this church would un- doubtedly be of wood. Cedd and his brothers were at this time (660) rigid disciples of the Scottish school of Lindisfarne ; and there is no instance, I believe, of the Scottish monks having ever built otherwise than " more Scotico." But apart from this, Bede himself, ten lines below the reference above indicated, mentions that, after the death of Cedd, and before the time he wrote, the monks of Lastingham had built a church of stone : " Tempore autem procedente, in eodem monas- terio ecclesia est in honorem Beatae Dei Geni- tricis de lapide facta." Now, a mere glance is sufficient to show that the present church of Last- ingham is not a church of the age of Bede, and the local histories uniformly state that this second
[* This error, as it seems probable it is, occurs in the
original, where we distinctly read "Sir J C ." ED.]
church was destroyed by the Danes in the ninth
century. The present church, which has under-
gone great alteration, appears to me to have been
originally a Norman church, and the date assigned
to it is 1088. It is even a question whether there
were not another church at Lastingham during
the 200 years that elapsed between the de-
struction of Bede's church and the erection of the
present church. I have not met with any recordl
of one ; but it appears from Young's Whitby, that
there were monks at Lastingham during this
period, and if so, there would be a church there
of some sort, I suppose. This church would be
destroyed in the worse than Danish ravages in-
flicted upon Northumbria by the Conqueror in
1069.
At all events, I submit that, so far from being the first, the present church is not entitled to rank higher than the third of the Lastingham churches.
The crypt of Lastingham may be more ancient than the church, and I should be glad to have the opinion of some of your ecclesiological contributors upon its probable date. D.
HAUNTED HOUSES I PRIESTS* HIDING-PLACES, ETC.
If Mrs. Radcliffe, of romantic memory, had deferred to the present time the publication of her interesting works, abounding with " gloomy old castles and haunted abbeys," "dreary pas- sages," "trap-doors and winding stairs leading to darkness and danger," "fancied spectres and wondrous noises," " long-drawn, deep, and heavy sighs," " antique towers and vacant courts," &c., a greater portion of the charming excitement hitherto produced on a perusal of them would now be realised : the statements so frequently made in "N. & Q." as to priests' hiding-places undermining the very ground-work on which the pleasing fictions were based, and substituting mournful historical facts of man's tyranny towards his fellows, and those men Christian ministers. Although it was not to be expected that every reader would absorb all that Madame wrote, yet many were not unwilling to receive her narra- tives as " the wild illusions of a creative mind, in forms that pleased and touched the heart."
In Captain Duthy's Sketches of Hampshire*, a work full of interest, and worthy the attention of all antiquarian readers, the author notices some old family mansions as being the supposed scenes of ghostly terrors and supernatural visitations ; and also an ancient house called WOODCOTE, which, amongst its numerous rooms and secret recesses, comprised a " priests' hole : "
" In that edifice," he says, " behind a stack of chimnies, and accessible only by removing the floor boards, was an
- Longman & Co., and Nutt, London.
