Mr. Milton lived next Towne to Fosthill within a mile [Holton] and they were Raungers of the Forest.

John, he believes.

Λ

Q. Ubi vixit if not at Shotover.

impression, Milton's grandfather (named John, as his informant believed,) had married a Jeffrey, and had by her two sons- the elder being John, the poet's father; and the younger another Milton, whose Christian name was unknown, and who had most probably remained about Shotover. But before Aubrey had parted with the MS. certain changes were made both by addition and erasure. (1) In the first generation there is inserted the note conveying the additional information relating to the locality and the occupation of the old Milton, the poet's grandfather; and there is also inserted the additional information relating to the Jeffrey he had married, conveyed by the appended sketch of arms. The purport of the information in this second case seems to be that the Jeffrey was a widow of that name, whose original name had been Haughton.1 The arms appended are those which her first husband, Jeffrey, would have used to signify his marriage with her to wit, the arms of Jeffrey (azure, a fret or; on a chief of the second, a lion passant sable) impaling those of Haughton (sable, three bars argent); and, to indicate the fact that, though a Haughton originally, she had been intermediately the wife of a Jeffrey, Aubrey has kept these arms, only drawing his pen through the Jeffrey side of the shield, to signify that, on her second marriage, the "Jeff." was done with. She came to Milton as a Jeffrey; but had he signified the fact of his marriage with her by a heraldic sketch, it would have been by substituting his own arms as Milton (argent, a double-headed eagle displayed gules, etc.) for those of the deceased Jeffrey on the one side of the shield, retaining her paternal arms as Haughton untouched on the other. In order to isolate all this information or put it in a corner by itself, Aubrey seems to have drawn the curved line; which curved line, lest it should look like a mark of total obliteration, he afterwards scrolled over. (2) In the second generation there is an erasure of the name of the supposed second son of the old Milton and his wife; as if the existence of this country brother of the scrivener had become doubtful. a

Wood's Account. "His father, Joh. Milton, who was a scrivener living at the Spread-Eagle in the said street, was a native of Halton in Oxfordshire. His Grandfather Milton, whose Christian name was John, as he [Wood's chief informant, i. e. Aubrey] thinks, was an under-ranger or keeper of the Forest of Shotover, near to the said town of Halton, but descended from those of his name who had lived beyond all record at Milton near Halton and Thame in Oxfordshire. Which grandfather, being a zealous Papist, did put away, or, as some say, disinherit his son because he was a Protestant; which made him retire to London, to seek, in a manner, his fortune."

1 This explanation of the sketch, which Philips (1815), it is given there incorrectly, seems to me the most probable, was suggested to me by Mr. James Hannay, whose skill on points of genealogy is as well known to his friends as his general literary merits are to the public.

The pedigree is not printed at all in the edition of Aubrey's Lives appended to the Bodleian Letters (1813); and, though it is given in the reprint of Aubrey's Life of Milton in Godwin's Lives of Edward and John

without any indication of the additions and erasures. The old Milton's wife is given there simply as a Jeffrey, without any note about the Haughton connection-probably because the copyist imagined the erasure to apply to the whole heraldic sketch, with the words written above it. But then, on the other hand, he has retained the reference to the second son, although that is distinctly cancelled.

Philips's Account. "His father, John Milton, an honest, worthy, and substantial citizen of London, by profession a scrivener; to which profession he voluntarily betook himself by the advice and assistance of an intimate friend of his, eminent in that calling, upon his being cast out by his father, a bigoted Roman Catholic, for embracing, when young, the Protestant faith, and abjuring the Popish tenets. For he is said to have been descended of an ancient family of the Miltons of Milton, near Abingdon in Oxfordshire; where they had been a long time seated, as appears by the monuments still to be seen in Milton Church, till one of the family, having taken the wrong side in the contests between the houses of York and Lancaster, was sequestered of all his estate but what he held by his wife.”

Out of these accounts, several matters arise for further investigation, respecting Milton's pedigree on the father's side.

As to the alleged Miltons of Milton in Oxfordshire, the remote progenitors of the poet, research has been fruitless. There are, as we have said, two places in Oxfordshire named Milton- the village of Great Milton in the Hundred of Thame, some eight miles south-east from Oxford, and giving its name to the two contiguous parishes of Great Milton and Little Milton, both in that Hundred; and a small hamlet, called Milton, about twenty-three miles farther north in the same county, near Banbury, and attached as a curacy to the vicarage of Adderbury. The former is clearly the "Milton near Halton and Thame in Oxfordshire" referred to by Wood; Thame, which gives its name to the Hundred, being about five miles distant, and Halton or Holton about three. The reference of Philips is also to the same village of Great Milton; for, though he says "Milton near Abingdon," and there is a Milton near Abingdon, that Milton, like Abingdon itself, is in the county of Berks. That Philips, however, intended the Oxfordshire Milton is clear by his adding the words "in Oxfordshire," words which, as they stand, are a blunder arising from his writing from hearsay. His reference to the monuments of the Miltons in Milton Church must also have been from hearsay. Dr. Newton searched in vain, prior to 1749, for any traces of such monuments in the church of Milton near Abingdon in Berkshire; nor has repeated search in all the extant records of the other and far more likely Great Milton in Oxfordshire recovered any traces of the Miltons supposed to have radiated thence. As the registers of Great Milton, how

1 Newton's Milton, vol. i. p. 1 of "Life." 2 "In the Registers of Milton," says Todd (Life, p. 2, note: edit, 1809), "as I have been obligingly informed by letter from the Rev. Mr. Jones, there are no entries of the name

of Milton." Later still we have the assurance of Wood's editor, Bliss (Fasti I. 480), that he had himself inspected the Register, but "not found the name Milton, as a surname, in any part of it." I may add that there are

ever, go back only to 1550, and as Philips assigns the period of the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) as that of a traditional change for the worse in the fortunes of the family, it might be that in earlier times still Miltons held lands in this locality. Even this Mr. Hunter is disposed to question, on the ground that there is no trace of such a family in more ancient documents, where, had they existed, they would almost necessarily have been mentioned. In short, the conclusion is that there never was a race of persons in Oxfordshire answering exactly to the imposing idea called up by the phrase "Miltons of Milton," and that Philips's tradition of the ruin of the family by the Wars of the Roses is but the repetition of a legend common to many families. Next to having come in with the Conqueror, the most approved certificate of respectability in the history of an English family is its having been ruined in the Wars of the Roses.

Letting go the legendary Miltons of Milton, we do find persons named Milton living, immediately before the Wars of the Roses, in Oxfordshire and the adjoining counties, who may have originally radiated from Great Milton, and who, with such property as they had, did have to go through the chances of the York and Lancaster wars. In the twelfth year of the reign of Henry VI. (1433) a census was taken by appointed commissioners of all persons in the different counties of England that were considered of the rank of gentry. "The outward object was to enable the king's party to administer an oath to the gentry for the better keeping of the peace and observing the laws, though the principal reason was to detect and suppress such as favored the title of York then beginning to show itself." The returns then made are still extant, for all save ten counties.2 In some counties the Commissioners included in their lists persons of much meaner condition than in others, and so made their lists disproportionately large. The return for Oxfordshire is perhaps the largest and most indiscriminate of any. "The Commissioners in this county," says Fuller, "appear over-diligent in discharging their trust; for, whereas those in other shires flitted only the cream of their gentry, it is suspicious that here they made use of much thin milk." Whether belonging to the cream or to the thin milk, one of the four hundred persons thereby

several MSS. in the Ashmolean and British Museum, giving notes of old monuments and inscriptions in the churches of Oxfordshire, that of Great Milton included, and that I have found no reference in them to the Milton monuments mentioned by Philips. One

of these MSS. (Ashm. 8548) is of the date 1574.

1 Sim's Manual for the Genealogist, 1856, pp. 335-6.

2 They are given in Fuller's Worthies, each return under its proper county.

returned for Oxfordshire, is a Roger Milton, who was almost certainly the same person as a Roger Milton, reported by Mr. Hunter as having been four years later (1437), collector of the fifteenths and tenths for the county of Oxford.1 With the exception of a John Milton of Egham in Surrey, this Oxfordshire Milton is the only person of the surname Milton returned in the census of 1433 of the whole gentry of England. But Cheshire and Somersetshire, where Miltons were to be expected, are among the counties for which there are no returns; and Mr. Hunter finds a John de Milton in 1428 (possibly the same as the John Milton of Egham) holding the manor of Burnham in Bucks by the service of half a knight's fee. At least, there were two Miltons in all England living immediately before the Wars of the Roses in such circumstances that they could be included among the minor gentry; and both of these were in the circle of country which may be called the Milton neighborhood to wit, Oxfordshire and the adjacent counties, between Oxfordshire and London.

After the Wars of the Roses, Miltons in this neighborhood became more numerous. There was a William Milton, an inhabitant of the city of Oxford in 1523; there was a William Milton and also a Richard Milton in Berks in 1559; and these, as well as the more distant Miltons of Cheshire and Somersetshire, had their representatives in London, where, in the reign of Philip and Mary, a William Milton was collector of the customs,3 and where, during the reign of Elizabeth, the name Milton was not very uncommon. It is within this reign that we have to seek for traces of that particular Milton who was the poet's grandfather, and who is said to have lived at Holton.

Holton or Halton is a small parish of about two hundred and fifty souls, with a village of the same name, about five miles east from Oxford, between which and it lies the tract of wooded land which formed the royal forest of Shotover (Chateau vert). It is in the Hundred of Bullington, and the nearest parishes and villages to it in that Hundred in a northwest direction are Forest Hill, Stanton St. John's, Beckley, and Elsfield. Forest Hill is about a mile and a half from Holton; Stanton St. John's is about half a mile from Forest Hill; Beckley and Elsfield are each about two miles from Stanton St. John's; and all are within a radius of six miles from Oxford, and all on the borders of Shotover Forest. The next Hundred to Bullington is Thame, in which, at no great distance from any of the above places, is Great Milton. A family radiating from Great Mil

1 Milton Gleanings, p. 6.

2 Ibid.

3 Hunter: Milton Gleanings, pp. 9, 10.