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Bourne Abbey Church.

BOURNE

FAMOUS NATIVES

Six generations later, Margaret de Wake married Edmund Plantagenet of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, the sixth son of Edward I., and their daughter, born 1328, was Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, who was finally married to Edward the Black Prince. Their son was the unfortunate Richard II., and through them the manor of Bourn, which is said to have been bestowed on Baldwin, Count of Brienne, by William Rufus, passed back to the Crown. Hereward is supposed to have been buried in the abbey in which only a little of the early building remains. Certainly he was one of Bourn’s famous natives, Cecil Lord Burleigh, the great Lord Treasurer, being another, of whom it was said that “his very enemies sorrowed for his death.” Job Hartop, born 1550, who sailed with Sir John Hawkins and spent ten years in the galleys, and thirteen more in a Spanish prison, but came at last safe home to Bourn, deserves honourable mention, and Worth, the Parisian costumier, was also a native who has made himself a name; but one of the most noteworthy of all Bourn’s residents was Robert Manning, born at Malton, and canon of the Gilbertine Priory of Six Hills. He is best known as Robert de Brunne, from his long residence in Bourn, where he wrote his “Chronicle of the History of England.” This is a Saxon or English metrical version of Wace’s Norman-French translation of the “Chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth,” and of Peter Langtoft’s “History of England,” which was also written in French. This work he finished in 1338, on the 200th anniversary of the founding of the abbey; and in 1303, when he was appointed “Magister” in Bourn Abbey, he wrote his “Handlynge of Sin,” also a translation from the French, in the preface to which he has the following lines:—