heraldryofyorkmi01custuoft

138 THE HERALDRY OF YORK MINSTER.
England, and by ravage and plunder did more damage than their invaders
could have done had they burned all Scotland from the Border to Aberdeen.
After this disastrous expedition Sir Ralph was frequently employed
by the King in matters requiring sagacity and tact rather than courage.
He it was who was appointed to settle some disputed rights as to prisoners
taken at the battle of Hambledon ;
to treat with the Kings of Scotland
for a truce on three separate occasions, 1404, 1405, 1407
; and, in 1415, to
treat for the ransom of Murdoc, son of Robert, Duke of Albany, in exchange
for Henry Percy, the renowned " Hotspur." Murdoc returned to Scotland
for what a chequered career In four years he succeeded his father as
!
regent and then, after having accomplished the restoration of James, who
;
had been taken captive as a child and imprisoned in the Tower of London
since 1405, as soon as the young King and his wife (Joan, daughter of the
Earl of Somerset) had been crowned at Scone, he was beheaded with his
two sons on the castle hill at Stirling, on the pretext of abusing the
King's authority.
Sir Ralph probably died soon after his mission, as he must then
have been sixty-five. By his first wife he had one daughter, Katherine,
who married Sir John Pudsey of Bolton.
In 1410 he had license from Langley, Bishop of Durham, to fortify
his castle at Witton in Durham. Nothing remains of that stronghold now,
and what little interest lingers in the village centres in the ruins of the
house of the Derwentwaters, so intimately associated with the last rising
in England in favour of the Pretender ;
and the secret chamber is still
shewn where the luckless Lord Lovat was taken. If the dimensions given
are correct eight feet long, by three feet broad, and ten feet high he must
have been cruelly squeezed, as he was very corpulent, and death itself
would, I should think, be preferable to life under such circumstances.
Sir William Eure, his eldest son, when a lad of fifteen, in his father's
lifetime, married Matilda, daughter of Henry, Lord FitzHugh, of
Ravensworth,
in whose retinue he went to the battle of Agincourt four years
after, October 25th, 1415, and died about 1460.
There is something more than quaint and curious in these old wills
they seem to bring us into very close communion with the personal feelings
and family
life of days gone by something very touching in the disposition
;
of cherished articles of family plate to beloved relations, not long to tarry
after them ;
and quaint illustrations of the simple family
life in those
days, partly agricultural, partly sylvan, when the household was dependent
not only on their own labours in the farm, but on the chase in the forests
and wild country around. I shall quote a few of them from the Test. Ebor.,
Surtees Society First, that of the widow of Sir William, Maude de Eure,
dated the same year.