144 THE ELMLEYS.

grammar school, or rather the income is appropriated to paying off the mortgage on the church, and so the school is in abeyance; but this was done under the guidance of the Court of Chancery. Estates had been left for the threefold object of repairing the church, paying a schoolmaster, and relieving the poor, but the Elmley people of 1839 saved their pockets by sacrificing the school children and the poor of the parish. It is the duty of the trustees and the parishioners to find some means of paying off this church debt—disagreeable as it is to be answerable for the shortcomings of a past generation. The youth of Elmley, however, have not been left entirely without scholastic guidance, as in 1863 new schools were opened at Cutnal Green, which had been founded on Norris's charity for poor children at Elmbridge and Rnshock, but in which those of Hampton Lovett and Elmley Lovett also participate.

The annals of Elmley are noted for blots and misfortunes. At the close of the last century a poor girl who had given birth to an illegitimate child did penance in the parish church in a sheet and proceeding up the aisle to the seat where her seducer should have sat, in order that he also should be put to shame; but this part of the disgrace he avoided by staying away. The girl afterwards became a zealous Methodist. In the beginning of the present century "The squire" and "The parson" made the parish infamous infamous by their ruinous squabbles and lawsuits about the estate. Fifteen causes were tried at the County Assizes and fourteen at Sessions, besides suits in Chancery, King's Bench, the Ecclesiastical Court, and the Court of Exchequer, private commissions and references. Both parties were imprisoned repeatedly, and at length died in most evil odour, having ruined not only themselves but many others, whose fate, if narrated, would indeed be a deplorable tale. In February 1805, in the Court of King's Bench, an indictment was preferred by Mr. Forester, of Elmley, against Colonel Passingham and Mr. Edwards, both of whom had been