Sir John Oglander's Notes and Accounts

The Oglander family was resident at Nunwell House.

This record appears on f 7 of the section of the manuscript foliated in ink. This event is also mentioned in another of Oglander's notebooks, OG/AA/29, f 16 (see Sir John Oglander's Notes and Accounts, c 1570).

This biography of Sir John Leigh is the longest of a number of similar biographies of prominent members of the local aristocracy on the Isle of Wight. John Dingley was deputy lieutenant of the island to Sir George Carey (1547–1603), later 2nd Baron Hunsdon, but Dingley's son- in-law John Leigh lived with his father-in-law and was more active and so did most of the work, leading Carey to appoint Leigh his deputy when Dingley died. Leigh continued as deputy under the earl of Southampton after Carey's death in 1603. Thus the Sir John Leigh that Oglander has in mind here was some thirty-five years Oglander's senior. Oglander reports that Leigh died on 19 January 1629/30, when Oglander's reckoning would have put his age at about eighty, for 'Sir John wase taken with a ded palsy ... when he wase abowt 30 yeres of adge ... and he lived with that palsy ... 50 yeres' (Oglander, Oglander Memoirs, pp 142–7). Thus Oglander's story about John and Elizabeth serving as the lord and lady of the summer pole before they were married refers to an event that probably occurred some years before Oglander's own birth rather than an event he had himself witnessed. In calling the maypole or summer pole an 'honest recreation' he suggests the nostalgia of a royalist and traditionalist for the seasonal festivities of earlier generations, as he does in his account of the custom of the wood eves in Parkhurst Forest or in his account of the dancing of Mistress Worsley and Mistress Mills, of which he says, 'In those dayes there wase moore innocent mirth then now' (f 29v).