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English Catholic Charity and the Irish Poor in London
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2017
Extract
‘It was merry Christmas at St. Geneviève. There was a Yule log blazing on every hearth in that wide domain, from the hall of the squire to the peasant's roof. The Buttery Hatch was open for the whole week from noon to sunset; all comers might take their fill, and each carry away as much bold beef, white bread, and jolly ale as a strong man could bear in a basket with one hand. For every woman a red cloak, and a coat of broadcloth for every man. All day long, carts laden with fuel and warm raiment were traversing the various districts, distributing comfort and dispensing cheer. For a Christian gentleman of high degree was Eustace Lyle. (Disraeli, 1844.)
The English priest had to serve the Irish in England, by virtue of his priesthood. But the English Catholic layman could stand aloof, and it has usually been alleged that the English laity in their cliquish callousness shunned and despised immigrant Catholic Irishmen, and refused to help the Church provide them with chapels and schools. The notorious Monsignor George Talbot's strictures upon their selfishness were especially fierce; indeed his letters have a social dimension which his detractors have conspired to ignore, for he assailed English Papists in the name of the Papist poor.
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References
Notes
1. Coningsby (London, 1904), Book 9, Chapter 1, p. 529. Lyle is a portrait of Ambrose Lisle March Phillipps de Lisle, on whom see below.
2. Talbot to Wiseman, 20/2/1854, i(23) T.P., B.A.
3. See Serjeant Bellasis's reply to a friend's query ‘about poor Catholic children in London … . How is it that they are so neglected?’ Bellasis, Edward: Memorials of Mr. Serjeant Bellasis 1800-1873 (London, 1893), p. 136.Google Scholar
4. Letter from Lord John Russell to the Bishop of Durham: Original Version (a Catholic satire on the noble lord's past generosity to Catholics) (London, 1850); also Todd, William Gouan: ‘The Irish in England’; a review of Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, Parts 1-9, Dublin Review, December 1856, Vol. 41, p. 109.
5. Talbot to Wiseman, Feast of the Nativity of the B.V.M., 1854 (27), T.P., B.A.
6. Ward, Wilfrid: The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman (London, 1897), Vol. 2, p. 241.Google Scholar
7. Tablet, 17/6/1854.
8. The Earl of Arundel and Surrey to Charles Langdale, 27/2/1854, A.A.
9. Rambler, March 1850, Vol. 5, p. 209.
10. Ibid., pp. 205-6.
1. An appeal for the ‘truly heart-rending wants’ of St. Mary's, Southwark: Catholic Directory 1860, p. 55.
12. Tablet, 26/6/1847.
13. Tablet, 20/2/1847.
14. ‘The prince of beggars’, ‘the leviathan of beggars’: Bogan, Bernard: The Great Link (London, 1948), p. 82.Google Scholar
15. But see Thomas Doyle on the Irish Famine: ‘Look at the dead man thrown like a dog in the ditch; his teeth seem to grin at you in reproach and rage, thou rich worldling who suffered him to die! Your flesh shall not suffer and decompose like his under the open air, but it shall turn to dust in despite of all the protection that riches throw around you.’ Tablet, 20/2/1847.
16. Thus Mgr. Talbot: ‘I have always taken the greatest interest in the poor of London, but always in order to save their souls, not merely to make them more respectable members of society, which is the Protestant view of such matters, with which I am sorry to think many Catholics sympathize’: Purcell, E. S.: Life of Cardinal Manning Archbishop of Westminster (London, 1895), Vol. 2, p. 359 Google Scholar. And so the St. Anselm's Total Abstinence Society aspired to give each member not so much ‘a good coat and money in the savings bank’ as a ‘humble distrust of himself, and a firm reliance on the grace of the Sacraments …’ Universe, 3/1/1863.
17. Thus of Mother Margaret Hallahan, foundress of the English Dominican Third Order of nuns, a woman of lifelong and boundless generosity, it was said that she ‘would have lavished the wealth of an empire … in the decoration of His temple and tabernacle … . She always impressed on her religious that care for the service of God must come before charity to the poor, or the supply of their own necessities. It would be better that we should want bread, she would say, than that our Lord should be neglected; as to the poor, there are many to help them, but few people think of our hidden God …’ Drane, Mother F.R., O.P.: Life of Mother Mary Margaret Hallahan (London, 1934), p. 293.
18. Charles Langdale, in the Tablet, 23/1/1847; on Langdale, see below.
19. Tablet, 19/6/1847.
20. Purcell, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 89.
21. ‘The influential “Old Catholics” were living a narrow, isolated life, withdrawn from and uninterested in their humbler Irish brethren. Manning's lifelong problem was how to make the “Old Catholics” socially conscious, and “to bring them out of the sacristy” … He was only partly successful. The “Old Catholics” were determined to resist, and looking for a rallying point for their cause they found it in John Henry Newman … .’ McClelland, Vincent Alan: Cardinal Manning: his Public Life and Influence 1865-92 (London, 1962), p. 216, pp. 161-2Google Scholar; see also his review of Claud Leetham's Luigi Gentili: a Sower of the Second Spring (London, 1965), in Pax, Spring 1966, no. 16, p. 57, wherein he cites Altholz, Josef: The Liberal Catholic Movement in England: the ‘Rambler’ and its Contributors 1848-64 (London, 1960), p. 9 Google Scholar, in support of the same point of view.
22. Inglis, K. S.: Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1964), pp. 131-6.Google Scholar
23. Ibid., pp. 136-7. See below.
24. Charlton, L. E. O. (ed.): The Recollections of a Northumbrian Lady 1815- 1866: being the memoirs of Barbara Charlton (London, 1949), p. 244.Google Scholar
25. Ibid., p. 228.
26. Ibid., p. 181.
27. Ibid., p. 187.
28. Ibid., p. 221.
29. Ibid., p. 286.
30. Ibid., p. 221.
31. Ibid., pp. 43-7.
32. Ibid., p. 185
33. Ibid., p. 255.
34. Ibid., pp. 196, 248.
35. On the care of the poor, see Husenbeth, F. C: Discourse pronounced at the Funeral of the Rt. Hon. Frances Xavieria Stafford-Ierningham, Baroness Stafford (Norwich, 1832), pp. 11–13 Google Scholar; Snead-Cox, J. G.: The Life of Cardinal Vaughan (London, 1910), Vol. 1, pp. 17, 27Google Scholar; Martindale, C. C, S.J., : Bernard Vaughan, S.J. (London, 1923), pp. 7–8, 12-13Google Scholar.
36. See Duffy, Eamon: ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected. I (1779-1787)’, Recusant History, January 1970, Vol. 10, p. 195.Google Scholar
37. Gillow, Joseph: Biographical Dictionary of the English Catholics (London, 1886-1902), Vol. 4, p. 197.Google Scholar
38. Beales, A. C. F.: ‘The Beginning of Elementary Education in England in the Second Spring’, Dublin Review, October 1939, Vol. 205, p. 289 Google Scholar. The information on eighteenth-century background comes mainly from this article; the special emphasis and line of argument are my own. Beale's work is a missed opportunity: he noted the value of the Wapping archives destroyed by bombing not long after (p. 309), and as ihe went only to 1800, mentions, but did not use, the St. Patrick's and Associated Catholic Charities papers preserved at Westminster, St. Mary Moorfields, and St. Patrick's, Soho, and referred to below.
39. Gillow, op. cit., Vol. 5, pp. 291-2; Clarke, A. M.: Life of the Hon. Mrs. Edward Petre (Laura Stafford-jerningham) (London, 1899), pp. 115-23.Google Scholar
40. D.N.B.; Gallwey, Peter, S.J.: Salvage from the Wreck: a few memories of friends departed, preserved in funeral discourses (London, 1903), pp. 18–56 Google Scholar; Gillow, op. cit., Vol. 4, pp. 118-23.
41. Gallwey, op. cit., p. 82; on Vavasour's work, Kenelm Digby, Paris, to R.H., 17/1/1845, Cambridge County Record Office.
42. Beales, loc. cit., p. 289.
43. Ibid., pp. 290-1.
44. Catholic Directory 1840, pp. 75-7.
45. Beales, loc. cit., pp. 292-3.
46. Ibid., pp. 300-2.
47. Ibid., p. 307; Waugh, Rev. N.: These My Little Ones: the Origin, Progress and Development of … the Crusade of Rescue (London, 1911), pp. 1–34.Google Scholar
48. ‘The worship of God in spirit and in truth; obedience to the Divine law; and the necessity of cherishing the sentiments of charity for all mankind, without distinction of creed, colour, or country, are impressed on the children of St. Patrick's Charity with incessant assiduity’: St. Patrick's Charity Report, p. 9, A.A.W. Also Report of the Committee of the Spitalfields and North-East Catholic Free-Schools Association (London, 1828), p. 8. As it was on ‘the moral rectitude of the lower classes’ that ‘much of the comfort of their superiors essentially depends’, so it was the aim of the Schools ‘to secure good servants, docile, attentive and respectful domestics’, and to prevent ‘the evil which arises from the depraved and unprincipled habits of domestic servants, to whom … not only is our property entrusted, but the welfare of our children … .’ There was nothing on the need to keep the Catholic poor Catholic. Cf. the true note of grandiloquent philanthropy in the address ‘To the Chairman and Gentlemen met in celebration of the Birthday of Our Most Gracious Sovereign Queen Victoria’, General Committee Minute Book of the A.C.C., 19/5/1842, M.A.
49. A Short History of the Benevolent Society for the Relief of the Aged and Infirm Poor, p. 7 (typescript), M.A.
50. The Earls of Shrewsbury and Newburgh, the Lords Arundel, Dormer, and Clifford, three baronets, and a score of Catholic London and country gentlemen.
51. Catholic Directory 1840, p. 70: Finance Sub-Committee of the A.C.C. Minute Book, 14/4/1841, M.A.
52. (1778); Beales, loc. cit., p. 295.
53. (1799); ibid., pp. 307-8.
54. (1803).
55. See the Report of the Society of Charitable Sisters, for 1837, London and Dublin Orthodox Journal, 14/7/1838, Vol. 7, p. 29. Of its income £116 came from subscriptions, but it was virtually unendowed; though founded in 1817, investments brought in only six pounds a year. The balance for 1837 came from the chapels of Virginia Street and St. George in the Fields, which yielded forty pounds, and a steam-boat excursion which raised sixtyseven.
56. The A.C.C; the St. Patrick's Charity; the Southwark Charity Schools; the East London Catholic Institution (‘for Educating and Clothing Poor Catholic Children. Schools for 200 Boys and 150 Girls’, in Wapping); the St. Francis Catholic Free School, St. Giles's; the Whitechapel Catholic Sunday School; the Popular, Blackwall, and Limehouse Charity Schools; the Greenwich and Deptford Schools, and charity schools at Hammersmith, Tottenham, and Hampstead. See Catholic Directory 1840, pp. 70-5. On the Stratford charity schools, see Worrall, E. S.: ‘The Stratford Catholic Charity Schools’, Essex Recusant, April 1960, Vol. 2, pp. 38-43.
57. Catholic Magazine, October 1839, Vol. 3, p. 685.
58. See the Finance Sub-Committee of the A.C.C. Minute Book, 4/10/1836, M.A., for the returns of the A.C.C charity sermons preached in the principal London chapels:
| Bavarian | £128 | 11s | 10d. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spanish | 81 | 4s | 0d. |
| Sardinian | 46 | 17s | 3d. |
| Moorfields | 43 | 4s | 6d. |
| French | 32 | 17s | 3d. |
These collections showed a gradual decline through the ‘40s (ibid.) but their relative proportions remained the same, the Bavarian Chapel being the most generous, the French least; cf the Finance Sub-Committee of the A.C.C. Minute Book, 14/4/1841.
59. The Norfolk archives at Arundel, on which see my Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, Evangelical and Roman Catholic Missions to the Irish in London, 1830-1870 (1971) p. 226. On the Huddlestons of Cambridgeshire, see below.
60. In England jn 1877, there were 21,032 non-Catholic subscribers to poor schools, who gave more than five pounds a year; there were 11,057 Catholic subscribers of more than five pounds. Catholics were also well represented among subscribers of less than one pound—10,089 as opposed to 118, 916 non-Catholics. These were fractions of a twentieth and a twelfth—good proportions, considering the Catholic strength at a twentieth to a tenth in the total population. Catholics were weakest in the middle range of donors of one pound to five—reflecting their under-representation within the middle rank of the population. Bishop, M. C: ‘The Social Methods of Roman Catholicism in England’. Contemporary Review, March 1877, Vol. 29, p. 628.Google Scholar
61. ‘The Catholic Servants’ Register Office’, Tablet, 16/3/1844, and the ‘Institution for Domestic Servants’, founded under ecclesiastical patronage in 1846: Catholic Directory 1862, p. 247. There was contiuing Irish complaint that Irish servants could not obtain employment in English Catholic families—provoking the wrath of O'Connell: Tablet, 24/1/1846.
62. Disraeli, Sybil, op. cit., pp. 208-20.
63. Thus the Irish parents of children in the school, who were to be organized for the collection of pence, were told not to ‘presume to interfere in any way whatever, with the legitimate and acknowledged authority of the Gentlemen of the School Committee… .’: Finance Sub-Committee of the A.C.C. Minute Book, 5/8/1841, M.A.
64. See Gormon, W. Gordon: Converts to Rome: a Biographical List (London, 1910), p. 56.Google Scholar
65. Reports of the Spitalfields Catholic Free Schools for Educating and Clothing Poor Children (London, 1825, 1842), M.A.
66. Where Baron Clifford of Chudleigh restored and refurnished the school in 1840, and bought the freehold, in expectation of a Government subsidy: General Committee Minute Book of the A.C.C, 19/5/1840, 12/12/1842, M.A.
67. Tablet, 31/1/1852.
68. Report, London and Dublin Orthodox Journal, 3/3/1838, Vol. 2, pp. 142-3; Tablet, 11/4/1846.
69. Catholic Directory 1841, p. 94.
70. J. Picquot of the Spanish Embassy Chapel, and William O'Connor of Lincoln's Inn Fields, 9/12/1843, to the A.C.C; General Committee Minute Book of the A.C.C, M.A.; Rules of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine St. John's Wood 1843, pp. 3-4, C.P., A.A.W.; and on the Confraternity of the Sacred Heart, Woolwich, Cornelius Coles to Bishop Thomas Griffiths, 21/1/1845, G.P., A.A.W.
71. Report of Inspector Marshall, Catholic School, October 1853, Vol. 1, p. 20; Arundel to Langdale, loc. cit.. A.A.; Wiseman to Langdale, 4/2/1854, W.P., A.A.W.
72. See Wiseman's list below, footnote 75.
73. Though one finds Henry Wilberforce, who as Vicar of East Farleigh, Kent, had nursed the Irish hop-picking victims of the cholera of 1849, planning a mission for the hop-pickers of Maidstone; ‘but it came to nought, through the want of money, and through the want of priests’: Todd, loc. cit., p. 509. But Bishop Thomas Grant of Southwark in a pastoral acknowledged ‘the generosity of a benefactor’ for the means to enable the clergy to visit the Irish families in the same districts during other years: Tablet, 11/10/1856.
74. Tablet, 28/1/1854.
75. Gorman, op. cit., p. 283.
76. Wiseman, N. Cardinal: ‘Review, The Rambler, October and November 1856’, Dublin Review, December 1856, Vol. 41, pp. 455-6. They were the church built (1847) by Mrs. Elizabeth Bowden, confidante of John Henry Newman, and mother of an Oratorian priest, for the Irish market-gardeners of Fulham Fields; and Miss Charlotte White's Westminster Poor Schools.
77. Miss White's chapel and poor schools near Regent's Park, on which she spent £15,000. Miss White, a wealthy penitent of the Oratorians, and a former member of the London house of Priscilla Lydia Sellon's Sisterhood of Mercy, gave £10,000 towards the site of the Brompton Oratory, and had money left to pay her dowry when she entered the Parisian Carmel: Williams, Thomas Jay: Priscilla Lydia Sellon (London, 1960), p. 19.Google Scholar
78. e.g. W. W. Wardell's votive chapel in Poplar: Tablet, 9/10/1852; and the chapel of Our Lady of Graces raised to revive the fame of a medieval miracle, by Miss Susannah Walker, for the Irish population of Tower Hill: Church of the English Martyrs, Tower Hill (parish history), p. 3. On Wardell, an architect and civil engineer, see Gorman, op. cit., p. 285; on the Walkers, ibid., p. 283.
80. Converted in 1852, he was a familiar figure in London artistic circles from 1857 as an architect and designer, an intimate of Thackeray's and from 1863 director of the art and industrial departments of the South Kensington Museum. For forty years from 1858 he was Vice-President of the Bayswater Conference of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul; ‘through his influence’ as private secretary to the convert Marquis of Ripon from 1876, the Marquis became branch president. Pollen was also a sometime member of the Aged Poor Society, of the Catholic Poor School Committee, and of anumber of other Catholic charities; ‘to enumerate them would be tedious’, his daughter and biographer continues, in her brief survey of these works: Pollen, Anne: John Hungerford Pollen 1820-1902 (London, 1912), p. 364 Google Scholar; see also D.N.B.
81. Serjeant Edward Bellasis was for twenty-three years resident in London as a Catholic lawyer of large practice; on his generosity to the London Church, see Bellasis, op. cit., pp. 142-6.
82. George Bowyer was a well-known and abrasive London baronet-lawyer, converted in 1850, and Cardinal Wiseman's mouthpiece in Parliament during the 1850s, as member for the Irish constituency of Dundalk. He founded the Berkshire mission of Abingdon, but also the Great Ormond Street Hospital for the Sisters of Mercy, and subscribed to the church and charities which served the Irish tenements on his estate of Bowyer's Lane, Camberwell: Burke, Charles: History of the Camberwell Catholic Mission, 1860-1910 (London, 1910)Google Scholar; Gorman, op. cit., p. 29.
83. Hope-Scott was best known in his lifetime as Gladstone's closest friend until his conversion in 1851, and in Scotland as a public figure by his marriage to Sir Walter Scott's granddaughter, Charlotte Lockhart, in appropriate fulfilment of his medievalism. As a young man he had planned with Gladstone a brotherhood for the redemption of London prostitutes ( Magnus, Philip: Gladstone (London, 1963), pp. 104-5Google Scholar). As a Catholic, he ‘felt it Ms duty to do more for Westminster’—in the way of charity—‘than [for] other places, because it was there that he earned his money’—as an advocate at the English Bar. As a lay trustee of the Society of Jesus, he gave the ground for its Westminster Poor Schools, and ‘great assistance’ to the French nuns who staffed them. His first wife was a patron and benefactor of the Norwood orphanage, and whenever in London, visited the sick Catholics in a Southwark hospital. Hope-Scott founded and supported three missions in Scotland—one a chapel in Selkirk, which he had to rebuild after its destruction by a Protestant mob. Between 1859 and 1872 he gave away £40,000, but despite his Scottish commitments his charity extended to London too: Ornsby, Robert: Memoirs of James Robert Hope- Scott of Abbotsford (London, 1884), Vol. 2, pp. 136-7, 200, 210-19.Google Scholar
84. Holland, Bernard: Memoir of Kenelm Digby (London, 1919)Google Scholar.
85. Bishop Milner, Oscott, to R.H., 21/2/1821; H.P., Cambridge County Record Office (henceforth cited simply as H.P.).
86. Bishop Walsh, Portman Square, to R.H., 12/4/1837, H.P.: these episcopal gifts continued through the ’40s; see Bishop Wareing, Northampton, to R.H., 9/12/1845, H.P.
87. Digby, Nottingham, to R.H., 3/7/1833, H.P.
88. Digby, Paris, to R.H., 6/11/1837; John Tilt, Paris, to R.H., 26/8/1838, H.P.
89. Bishop Walsh, Wolverhampton, to R.H., 9/5/1841, H.P.
90. Fr. John Moore, Commercial Road, London E., to Edward Huddleston. Sawston, 17/11/1849, H.P.
91. Francis King, Lambeth, to R.H., 21/3/1843, H.P.
92. Thomas Henry Ewart, Tottenham, to R.H., 1/8/1844, H.P.
93. Rev. Hardinge Ivers, Kentish Town, to R.H., 184(7?), H.P.
94. Fr. Magee, Westminster, to R.H., 9/6/1841, H.P.
95. John Nerinckx, Somen Town, to R.H., 31/5/1847, H.P.
96. William Jones, Clytha, Monmouth, to E.H., 17/5/1850, H.P.
97. Father M. Reardon, Spanish Place (to RJL ?), 184(7’), H.P.
98. Jane Canning, London, to R.H., 7/9/1846, 30/4/1847, 21/5/1847, H.P.
99. C. J. Pagliano, London, to R.H., 11/2/1847, H.P.
100. J. Smith to Jane Canning, 11/2/1842, H.P.
101. Charles Nasmith Stokes, London, to Ferdinand Huddleston, 4/7/1849, H.P.
102. Catherine Keene, St. John's Wood, to R.H., 29/4/1844, H.P.
103. William Amherst, Kenilworth, to R.H., 10/1/1846, H.P.
104. See, for example, George Eyston to R.H., 10/4/1842, for the mission of Overbury, Worcestershire; Thomas Brogan to R.H., 29/10/1845, for the Aylesbury mission; E. M. Howard to R.H., 4/3/1846, for the mission of Wigton, Cumberland; the Rev. A. M. Fotheringham, Southampton, 17/6/1846, for the mission of Southampton; the Rev. Joseph Mahé, 21/11/1846, for a mission to the Welsh; William Jones and Frances English, 30/4/1847, for the Aberystwyth mission.
105. Denis Shine Lawlor, Castlelough, Killarney, to R.H., Trinity Sunday 1847, 17/5/1847; Thomas O'Connor, French Park, to R.H., 6/2/1847, H.P.
106. Archbishop MacHale, SUgo, to R.H., 11/3/1837, 22/7/1837, 15/7/1842, 10/8/1842; Archbishop Murray, Dublin, to R.H., 22/12/1846, 12/1/1847; for Irish relief; see also Fr. Edward Huddleston, S.J., St. Austin's, Stafford, to R.H., 23/3/1847; Mother Mary Tucker, Presentation Convent, Tuam, to R.H., 21/4/1847; Jane Canning, London, to Edward Huddleston, 17/1/1849, H.P.
107. Catherine Bagshawe, London, to Jane Canning, circa 1840, H.P.
108. Digby, Southampton, to R.H., 31/8/1841, H.P.
109. Sophie Girard, Bruges, to R.H., 2/6/1843-21/12/1846, H.P.
110. Michael Hamilton, London, to R.H., Sawston, franked 1/11/1841; Hannah Chapman, Willingham, Cambs., to R.H., 1/8/1845, H.P.
111. Captain Thomas Vachell, London, to R.H., 25/6/1846, H.P.
112. Jane Canning, London, to R.H., 27/4/1847, 30/4/1847, H.P.
113. Mother Juliana Hardman, St. Marie's Convent, Birmingham, to R.H. 27/5/184(7), H.P.
114. Gwynn, Denis: Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin and the Catholic Revival (London, 1946), pp. 36–40)Google Scholar.
115. Ferry, Benjamin: Recollections of A. W. N. Pugin (London, 1861), pp. 179, 181Google Scholar; and on his contribution to the Catholic charitable tradition, see Rope, H. E.: Pugin (Ditchling, 1935), p. 6.Google Scholar
116. Cf. the funeral of Edward Petre at St. George's, Southwark ( Camm, Dom Bede: Sister Mary of St. Francis S.N.D. (Hon. Laura Petre) (London, 1913), p. 117 Google Scholar); and of Thomas Molineux at St. Mary's Hammersmith (Tablet, 17/11/1855).
117. Built by Monsignor Gilbert, Provost of Westminster: Gilbert, John William: Monsignor Gilbert: a Memoir (London, 1897), p. 67.Google Scholar
118. Tablet, 21/2/1852.
119. Anderson, William James: A History of the Catholic Parish of St. Mary's, Chelsea (Chelsea, 1938)Google Scholar: ‘The Rev. Mr. Sisk', pp. 37-43; ‘The Benefactions of Joseph and Mary Knight’, pp. 41-51. Appropriately, Sisk was to become responsible for a time in the ‘50s for two hundred juvenile delinquents from the Anglo-Hibernian slums, as the ‘Prior Ignatius’ of the Cistercian Abbey of St. Bernard, built by Phillips de Lisle in Leicestershire.