in 1460, and grandfather of Sir William Locke, the greatest English merchant under Henry the Eighth.'

But his connection with this family of merchants cannot be clearly traced out. We only know that one branch of it settled in Dorsetshire, and, in the sixteenth century, owned Canning's or Canon's Court, nearly in the middle of the county, and that Edward Locke, a younger member of it, was our John Locke's great-grandfather."

3

Edward Locke lived at Brockhampton, a hamlet near to Canning's Court, in the parish of Buckland-Newton, of which he was churchwarden in 1573; but his son Nicholas, born in 1574,* migrated early in life from the Dorsetshire hamlet to a Somersetshire village. In 1603, Nicholas Locke married a Frances Lansdon, at Publow," " and there, or at Pensford, hard by, he established himself as a clothier. Bristol, being then a centre of the woollen trade in the west of England, like Hull and Leeds in the north, gathered in the cloths manufactured in the surrounding towns and villages for shipment to other parts of the country and to continental marts; and contributions were sent to it from Pensford, which

1 See a long and not very accurate article about the early Lockes in the Gentleman's Magazine, vol. lxii. (1792), p. 798.

2 "An Account of Mr. Locke's Birth and Pedigree," in the British Museum, Additional MSS., no. 4222, not signed, but in the handwriting of Locke's friend, Edward Clarke, of Chipley, and dated "Chipley, July the 6th, 1735."

3 Buckland Parish Register.

4 Ibid.

5 Publow Parish Register.

6 So stated in a long pedigree drawn up and inserted in the Family Bible -now or till lately in the pcssession of Mr. Tripp, of Winford, Somersetshire-by John at-Neale, whose family was connected with that of the Lockes. This record will in future be referred to as John at-Neale's Pedigree,

Leland, in 1540, termed "a pretty market town, occupied with clothing.". Nicholas Locke appears to have been a collector of the stuffs made by his neighbours, and thus a sort of merchant, rather than himself a manufacturer. His trade prospered, and he acquired money in other ways. His first wife died in 1612,' and in 1624 he married again-his second wife being a well-to-do widow living at Chew Magna, in the same neighbourhood, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Keene. After that, it would seem that he lived in the second wife's house. He was described as "of Sutton Wick, in the parish of, Chew Magna, clothier;" and when he died,. in 1648, he was buried in the churchyard of Chew Magna, "under" a goodly tomb opposite the belfry door."4 Besides other children, he left a daughter Frances, born on the 5th of October, 1604; a son John, born on the 29th of April, 1606; and another son, Peter, born on the 13th of July, 1607.5

1 Additional MSS., no. 28273, in the British Museum; a note-book kept by Locke's father, which will be described hereafter..

2 John at-Neale's Pedigree.

3 Additional MSS., no. 4222.

4 John at-Neale's Pedigree. 5 Additional MSS., no. 28273. Other sons of Nicholas Locke were Edward, born on the 7th of November, 1610, whose will was dated the 24th of April, 1663, and proved in the same year, and Thomas, born on the 12th of February, 1611-12, and whose will, dated the 23rd of November, 1663, was proved on the 4th of February, 1663-4. Peter Locke, who probably carried on his father's business, and became a man of substance, lived at Bishop's Sutton, and was buried in Chew Magna churchyard on the 20th December, 1686. Three of his children died before him. He bequeathed his property to two daughters,-Anne, born in 1641, who in 1670 married Jeremy King, a grocer of Exeter; their son, Peter King, Locke's protégé, and afterwards lord char cellor, being the founder of the family now represented by Earl Lovelace; and Elizabeth,

The elder of these two sons was the father of the John Locke whose life is to be recorded in these pages. On the 15th of July, 1630, at the age of twenty-three, his wife being ten years older, he married Agnes or Anne Keene, his step-mother's niece and sister of an Edmund Keene, who, probably, a year or two before, had married his sister Frances. He did not follow his father's trade in cloth,

who married twice, and had at any rate two sons, Peter Stratton, of Bristol, and John Bonville. Two other cousins of Locke's, Mary Doleman and Anne Hazel, were named by him in his will; but I have not been able to trace their parentage.

1 The date of her birth-the 14th of April, 1597+is given on a loose memorandum, in the handwriting of Locke's father, but endorsed by him, "Age," which I found among the Shaftesbury Papers, series viii., no. 30.

These Keenes were descended from Edmund Keene, a plumber, of Wrington, who, as it is recorded in John at-Neale's pedigree, owned "the house where he dwelt, by the hatch on the north side "-which is interesting to us as being afterwards the birth-place of John Locke-and whose widow, living on till 1636, or later, was the owner of much property at Wrington. The Edmund Keene who married Frances Locke was a tanner by trade. Among other evidences of his good social position, we hear of his purchasing land at Wrington worth 3301. under a deed that was executed by John Keene, his brother, and John Locke, his brother-in-law, as attorneys. This information, derived from family documents, has been kindly communicated to me by Charles Jackson, Esq., of Doncaster, to whom I am also indebted for the following correct copy of a quaint postscript-of which an incorrect version appeared in Notes and Queries for 27th May, 1854,-appended to a letter addressed in 1754, by Mrs. Frances Watkins, the second Edmund Keene's granddaughter, then about eighty years old, to her son Joseph Watkins of Clapton. It will be noticed that the old lady wrote "Peter" when she should have written "John" in the first line:

"I am allied to Mr. Locke thus: His father, Mr. Peter Locke, and my grandmother was brother and sister, consequently my father and the great Locke first cousins. My grandfather's sister and Mr. Locke's father produced this wonder of the world. To make you more sensible of it, a Keene married a Locke, and a Locke married a Keene. My aunt Keene was a most beautiful woman, as was the family, and my uncle Locke an extreme

but was educated for the law, and made for himself a good position as a country attorney, though we are told that "he inherited from his father a much better estate than he left to his son."1 He was clerk to the justices of the peace for the district of Somersetshire in which he resided, the chief of whom were Francis Baber, of Chew Magna, who died in 1643, and Alexander Popham, of Houndstreet, who died in 1669. Popham owned considerable property in Somersetshire, especially about Pensford and eastward of it towards Bath. With him. the young attorney was connected, during at least twenty years, as agent and general adviser; and in this work, as well as in the performance of his other avocations, he seems to have had large and useful occupation throughout the chief part of his life.*

3

wise man. So much for genealogy. My Lord Chancellor King was allied thus near. I forget whether his mother was a Keene or a Locke. I had all my information from my aunt Darby. Mr. Locke had no advantage in his person, but a very fine gentleman. From foreign courts they use to write, For John Locke, Esq., in England.'"

1 MSS. in the Remonstrants' Library at Amsterdam; Lady Masham to Jean le Clerc, 12th Jan., 1704-5.

2 In Additional MSS., no. 4222, Edward Clarke speaks of him as "clerk to Mr. Baber; but from the note-book presently to be referred to it is evident that his employment was more general.

3 Anthony Wood says that he was Popham's "steward or court-keeper "-Athenæ Oxonienses' (ed. Bliss, 1820), vol. iv., col. 638.

4 Of the varied nature of his occupations some welcome illustrations are extant in a limp vellum-covered volume, in which he was in the habit of entering all sorts of business details, precedents and other memoranda between the years 1629 and 1655, which is now in the British Museum, Additional MSS., no. 28273. It contains, for instance, forms of the oaths requisite to be taken in courts of law on different occasions, and notes likely to be helpful to a young attorney and land-agent. We find in it entries of bailments and bindings over of prosecutors in cases of felony which occurred in the neighbourhood of Pensford, for the assizes of 1630,

His quiet pursuits as a lawyer were disturbed, however, and his prosperity was permanently impaired, by the outburst of the civil war between Charles the First and the Long Parliament. "In the year 1634 the writs for ship! money began," says the old chronicler of Bristol;1 in that sentence pithily indicating the commencement of those quarrels which were nowhere more vigorous--as regards ship-money at any rate-than in the great western. sea-port of England and in the neighbouring towns that throve by its enterprise. The new and unjust imposts at first gave the elder Locke some work to do in the way of his own calling. He had to assist either in levying the taxes, or in showing what were the amounts claimed proportionately from all the inhabitants of his district.?

at Bath, Taunton, Bridgewater, and Wells. We have notices of the appointment at Bath, in 1631, of overseers of the cloth trade for Chew, Kainsham, Publow, Weston, Frome, and other places. We have an enumeration of the tithings in the hundreds of Chew, Chewton and Kainsham, and a statement of sums paid by each of these tithings, on the occasion of James the First's subsidy, which had for pretext the proposed war with Spain in 1623. We have the particulars of other rates and assessments, some evidently quoted as precedents for certain proceedings in which he was to take part, others being records of proceedings in which he had been himself concerned. We have also a list of the justices and of the grand-jurymen employed at the Bath assizes in July, 1637; and, as entries of a more personal nature, we have a statement of "Rent to my landlord, Colonel Alexander Popham, out of the three tenements I hold in Publow, and the lives thereon at the time of their obtaining," and "A receipt for rent at Publow, 3 October, and 11 December, 1638." Most of the entries are evidently in the elder Locke's own lawyer-like handwriting. Others, especially those of a miscellaneous nature, near the end of the book, are in other handwritings, some in that of his famous son.

Ricart's 'Calendar,' quoted by Seyer, Memoirs of Bristol' (1821), vol. ii., p. 289.

2 In his memorandum book he entered a precise statement of the number and proportion of the shipping belonging to Bristol and all other parts