Feyth-fully-serve

is inscribed in black-letter.  This motto is assigned by some to the family of Norreys and by others as that of the Royal Wardrobe.  The quarries in each light have the same badge, namely, three golden distaffs, one in pale and two in saltire, banded with a golden and tasselled ribbon, which badge some again assign to the family of Norreys and others to the Royal Wardrobe.  If, however, the Norreys arms are correctly set forth in a compartment of a door-head remaining in the north wall, and also in one of the windows—­namely, argent a chevron between three ravens’ heads erased sable, with a beaver for a dexter supporter—­the second conjecture is doubtless correct.

These shields represent the arms of Sir John Norreys, the builder of Ockwells Manor House, and of his sovereign, patrons, and kinsfolk.  It is a liber amicorum in glass, a not unpleasant way for light to come to us, as Mr. Everard Green pleasantly remarks.  By means of heraldry Sir John Norreys recorded his friendships, thereby adding to the pleasures of memory as well as to the splendour of his great hall.  His eye saw the shield, his memory supplied the story, and to him the lines of George Eliot,

        O memories,
        O Past that IS,

were made possible by heraldry.

The names of his friends and patrons so recorded in glass by their arms are:  Sir Henry Beauchamp, sixth Earl of Warwick; Sir Edmund Beaufort, K.G.; Margaret of Anjou, Queen of Henry VI, “the dauntless queen of tears, who headed councils, led armies, and ruled both king and people”; Sir John de la Pole, K.G.; Henry VI; Sir James Butler; the Abbey of Abingdon; Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury from 1450 to 1481; Sir John Norreys himself; Sir John Wenlock, of Wenlock, Shropshire; Sir William Lacon, of Stow, Kent, buried at Bray; the arms and crest of a member of the Mortimer family; Sir Richard Nanfan, of Birtsmorton Court, Worcestershire; Sir John Norreys with his arms quartered with those of Alice Merbury, of Yattendon, his first wife; Sir John Langford, who married Sir John Norreys’s granddaughter; a member of the De la Beche family (?); John Purye, of Thatcham, Bray, and Cookham; Richard Bulstrode, of Upton, Buckinghamshire, Keeper of the Great Wardrobe to Queen Margaret of Anjou, and afterwards Comptroller of the Household to Edward IV.  These are the worthies whose arms are recorded in the windows of Ockwells.  Nash gave a drawing of the house in his Mansions of England in the Olden Time, showing the interior of the hall, the porch and corridor, and the east front; and from the hospitable door is issuing a crowd of gaily dressed people in Elizabethan costume, such as was doubtless often witnessed in days of yore.  It is a happy and fortunate event that this noble house should in its old age have found such a loving master and mistress, in whose family we hope it may remain for many long years.