.... Appleton of Hampshire. She had during her
life a pension from King Henry VIII.: she was 140 yeares old when she
dyed. She was great-great-aunt to Mr. Child, Rector of Yatton Keynell;
from whom I had this information. Mr. Child, the eminent banker in
Fleet Street, is Parson Child's cosen-german. [The name of the last
Abbess of Amesbury was Joan Darell, who surrendered to the King, 4
Dec. 1540. Hoare's Modern Wiltshire, Amesbury Hundred, p. 73. J. B.]
When King Charles II. was at Salisbury, 1665, a piper of Stratford sub
Castro playd on his tabor and pipe before him, who was a piper in
Queen Elizabeth's time, and aged then more than 100.
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One goodwife Mills of Yatton Keynel, a tenant of my father's, did
dentire in the 88 yeare of her age, which was about the yeare 1645.
The Lord Chancellour Bacon speakes of the like of the old Countesse of
Desmond, in Ireland.
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Mr. William Gauntlett, of Netherhampton, born at Amesbury, told me
that since his remembrance there were digged up in the churchyard at
Amesbury, which is very spacious, a great number of huge bones,
exceeding, as he sayes, the size of those of our dayes. At Highworth,
at the signe of the Bull, at one Hartwells, I have been credibly
enformed is to be seen a scull of-a vast bignesse, scilicet half as
big again as an ordinary one. From Mr. Kich. Brown, Rector of
Somerford Magna, (At Wotton in Surrey, where my brother enlarged the
vault in which our family are buried, digging away the earth for the
foundations, they found a complete skeleton neer nine foot in length,
the skull of an extraordinary size.
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