f 16 (of ff 1–73)
...
...Elizabeth the Eldest Daughtor of John: Dinglye, marryed Sir John Leygh (they beinge first Lord and Lady at at maypole togeather by which you may See ye Coustome of those times), whoe succeded him in his Lyftennantess place, he Bwylt ye Newe howse at Wooluerton, by which you may Iudge of his wisdome....
The Oglander family was resident at Nunwell House.
This event is also mentioned in another of Oglander's notebooks, OG/AA/28, f 7 (see Sir John Oglander's Notes and Accounts, 1630). This passage occurs in a set of histories of manors and houses on the Isle of Wight, and the families that owned them. The text continues with the fact that John Dingley was deputy lieutenant of the island to Sir George Carey (1547–1603), later 2nd Baron Hunsdon, but that 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, and that 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 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 that 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 1628 account of the dancing of Mistress Worseley and Mistress Milles, of which he says that 'In those dayes there wase moore innocent mirth then now.'
Record title: Sir John Oglander's Notes and
Accounts
Repository: Isle of Wight Record Office and Archive
Shelfmark: OG/AA/29
Repository location: Newport
Sir John Oglander (1585–1655) was deputy governor of the Isle of Wight and represented the island borough of Yarmouth in parliament. He lived at Nunwell House near Brading. This is one of a series of notebooks in which he entered accounts, memories, maxims, quotations, and observations on people and things of the Isle of Wight.
This manuscript was formerly identified by the shelfmark OG/90/4.
December 1631–21 December 1633; English; paper; i + 118 + i; 288mm x 192mm; modern pencil foliation from both ends (no clear indication which end is the front, except that counting from the end with a crest on cover the foliation runs from 1 to 73; from the other end of the MS the foliation runs from 1 to 45, and the text is written upside down from that at the 'crest' end); good condition; brown leather cover with gold lines on front, back, and spine and gold crest in the middle of front and back, cloth ties have been cut off very short, so no longer usable, cover damaged at corners.
