60 BREDON.

place. The church was restored in 1842, and was one of the first in which open seats were introduced.

A monastery existed here in Saxon days, having been founded by the grandfather of King Offa, and greatly patronized by the latter. It was dedicated to St. Peter, but the present church is under the guardianship of St. Giles. Before the Conquest it became part of the possessions of the Bishop of Worcester, and so remained till the fourth of Elizabeth, when it passed to the Crown, and soon after, with the appurtenances and the advowson, to T. Knowles, who alienated it to Thomas Copley and George Hornihold; since which time it has been in the possession of various families. Nathan Nathaniel Dyer, Esq., is now the lord of the manor, and he, the rector, Earl Coventry, and the Martin family, are the chief landowners. The Bishop had a house and park here, with fisheries, &c., and the present rectory is supposed to have been the site of the ancient episcopal manor-house. Poor Bishop Prideaux, who had the misfortune to live at the time of the civil wars, was obliged to retire to this village on the handsome allowance of 4s. 6d. a week. Being reduced to great distress he was one day going down the village to sell some old iron to procure himself food, when he was met by a friend who asked him how he did. " Never better in my life (was the reply), only I have too great a stomach, for I have eaten the little plate which the seqnestrators left me; I have eaten a great library of excellent books; I have eaten a great deal of linen, much of my brass, some of my pewter, and now I am become an ostrich and forced to eat my iron, and what will come next I know not." This same Bishop, who was born of poor parents, was in his youth a candidate for the office of parish clerk of Ugborow, and to his great grief lost it; but when he became advanced to the episcopal bench he would frequently console himself with this reflection: "If I could but have been clerk of Ugborow I had never been Bishop of Worcester."

Bredon also contains the chapelries of Norton, Mitton,