IN MEMORIAM PERCY MANNING came up to New College in 1888; and after taking his degree, he spent the rest of his life in Oxford or the neighbourhood. As he had no profession, as he did not marry, or write, or lecture, or interest himself in politics, local or national, it might be thought that he did nothing; and his mode of speaking, with hesitation and diffidence, might suggest that he knew little; but those who were familiar with him were aware that he had considerable abilities and very great knowledge about Oxford and Oxfordshire. He collected antiquarian objects throughout the county, whether prehistoric, Roman, Saxon, mediaeval, or post-mediaeval. He was the mainspring of the Oxford Brass-rubbing Society, and for some years took a prominent part in the Oxford Architectural Society; and having a working knowledge of architecture, numismatics, and mediaeval deeds, he had acquired by 1914 as much antiquarian information about Oxford and the county as any one has had for the last fifty years. In 1914, when the war broke out, Percy Manning, who had always been a keen volunteer, came forward, but he was considered to be too old for foreign service and was sent to Leafield to guard the wireless station, and afterwards to Southampton on similar duty. There on February 27, 1917, he died of pneumonia, aged 47. 'Some there be which have left no memorial, who are perished as though they had never been.' Such will not be the case with Percy Manning; his name will be remembered at Oxford by the collection of books, prints, and manuscripts which he bequeathed to the Bodleian, and by antiquarian objects given to the Ashmolean. But outside Oxford his name might soon be lost; beyond an article on the history of boating at Oxford, and another on Stokes and the school of vaulting, printed in the Oxford Magazine in 1904 and 1913, and two or three papers which he sent to the Folk-lore Journal, he wrote nothing by which he might be remembered; and therefore, that some record of him may remain, this article has been printed. He was working at it in the first half of 1914, and said that, though it was no pleasure to him to write, he felt he ought to produce something, to show that his life had not been entirely idle. Three drafts of this article are among his papers in the Bodleian, two of them in MS. Top. Oxon. c. 246 and one in d. 204, and it appears that he was revising it during the war, when he had any leisure, and he had brought it to a state that was fit for publication. He was interested in sport, and for years had been collecting material, which is now in the Bodleian,1 to illustrate the history of sport in Oxford during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and any one who wished to continue this article would find good material there. Had he lived, he might have expanded the account of the taverns, the coffee houses, and the drama, which is less full than the earlier part of the article; but as it stands, it is worth printing, and the treatment of the tennis-courts, the cock-pit, and the dancing schools is a great advance on anything that has been known. His premature death meant the loss to Oxford of much antiquarian information, some of which will never be recovered, while to those who were intimate with him it was the loss of a kindly, natural, and unassuming friend. 1 MS. Top. Oxon. d. 201-3. H. E. SALTER. SPORT AND PASTIME IN STUART OXFORD 'OXFORDSHIRE', says Camden,' 'is a fertile country, and plentifull ; wherein the plaines are garnished with cornefields and meddowes, the hilles beset with woods, stored in every place not only with corne and fruites, but also with all kinds of game for hound or hauke, and well stored with fishful rivers.' These natural characteristics determined the kind of sports which were available. We must begin by dismissing from our minds the familiar aspect of the Oxfordshire that we know to-day. Within a very short distance of Magdalen Bridge' was the royal forest of Shotover, which, now represented only by a few pollarded oaks, or stray patches of gorse, on the slopes of Shotover Hill, formerly reached from Cowley Marsh to Stow Wood, a distance of some four miles, and afforded a plentiful supply of timber, not only for the buildings of Oxford, but also for the Royal Navy. Here Milton's grandfather was ranger, and here abode the famous wild boar, whose sudden death by a strenuous application of the Aristotelian Method is still commemorated yearly at Queen's College. On the other side of Oxford was the forest of Wychwood, not the shrunken remnant which is now included within the Cornbury Park estate, but a range of coppice, open down, and woodland, which reached at one time from Bladon to Burford, a distance of twelve miles." Outside these forests, a great deal of the countryside consisted of 1 Britannia, ed. 1610, p. 373. 2 The boundaries of the forest actually reached the end of Magdalen Bridge; see Eynsham Cartulary (O.H.S.), vol. ii, p. 97. Ed. 3 Wood, Hist. and Antiquities of the Colleges and Halls of Oxford, p. 548 ; Laud's Works, iii. 214; Athenae Oxon., ed. 1815, ii. 894. • Laud's Works, v. 85. So Aubrey says (Brief Lives, ii. 61), but it was probably some subordinate post that he held. J. Y. Akerman in Archaeologia, xxxvii. 424; and Eynsham Cartulary (O.H.S.), ii. 92-6. |