pute with the Abbot of Tavistock, or that he was refused burial until absolution could be procured from Rome. The assertion of his being disallowed burial within the cathedral is also erroneous, for he was interred in the chapel he had erected in Exeter Cathedral. He was a liberal benefactor to Corpus Christi and Brazen Nose Colleges, and to the Church of Exeter, and he also founded and endowed the Free Grammar School of Manchester, now one of the principal institutions of its class in the kingdom. Having held the Bishopric of Exeter rather more than fifteen years, he died on the 25th June, 1519. The Bishop was a relative of Bernard Oldham, Archdeacon of Cornwall, in 1509, and had an elder brother John, whose son Ralph succeeded to the personal property of his uncle, consisting of a moiety ofthe manor of Botyllers, in Shopland, in Essex, and other estates in that county. The descendants of Ralph Oldham are said to have settled in Gloucestershire, and to have become the ancestors of John OIdham, a celebated poet,who was born at Shipton, near Northleach, in 1653; he was greatly patronised by the Earls of Dorset and Kingston, and died of the small pox in 1683. His poems (the principle of which "Four Satires upon the Jesuits," was published in 1679) contain much force and spirit, but partake too much of the licentious sentiments which disgraced the age in which he lived. James Oldham Oldham, Esq., of Missenden Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, is alleged to have been descended from the Oldhams, of Oldham: this gentleman whose personal property amounted to £400,000, was an opulent ironmonger, in Holborn, London, and died June 22nd, 1822.

The armorial bearing of the Oldham family was, sable, a chevron, or between three owls proper, on a chief of the second, three roses gules seeded or. As there seems to be no authentic motto relating to the arms, a military officer of a local corps, inclined to be waggish, imparted a jocular motto, namely, Haud

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