This surname is derived from an official title. A house-steward, one who, strictly speaking, had charge of the buttery or spence. In the Sumner's Tale the glutton is well described as: 'All vinolent as botel in the spence.' while Mr. Halliwell quotes: 'Yet had I lever she and I Were both together secretly In some corner in the spence.' In an inventory of household goods, dated 1574, I find the furniture of the hall first described, and this begins: 'A cupboard and a spence' (Richmondshire Wills). The office of 'la despencer' or 'la spencer' was amongst the highest in the king's household, and proportionately great among the barons. Practically such a name as 'Thomas de la Spence' was as official as 'Thomas la Spencer,' but, as in similar instances elsewhere, I have set it down as local.

John le Spencer, Southamptonshire, 1273. Hundred Rolls.

Henry le Spenser, Cambridgeshire, ibid.

Henry del Spens, 1292: Hodgson's History of Northumberland.

Thomas del Spens: Patent Rolls, 4 Edward III. pt.

Nicholas de la Despense, Close Rolls, 4 Edward III.

Thomas Spenser, 1379: Poll Tax of Yorkshire.

Agnes Spenser, 1379: ibid.

(Anglo-French-Latin) Dispenser (of provisions), Buttery or Larder Keeper [Middle English spencer, spenser(e, Old French despender, dispensier, Low Latin dispensari-us; from Latin dispendere, to weigh out] John le Spencer.—Hund. Rolls, A.D.1274.

Henry le Spenser.— do.

Roger le Spenser.—Lanc. Fines, A.D. 1384.

The spensere and the botillere [butler] bothe, The kyng with hem was ful wrothe.— Cursor Mundi, 4447-8.

Syr Hugh the spencer that was the kynges chamberlayne.—Caxton, Citron. English, cxc. iii.

The spenser come with keyis in his hand, Opinit the dure, and thame at denner fand.—Henryson, The Uplandis Mous, 132-3.

“Steward” or “Butler” in Old French. Compare Dispense.

(English) One who dispensed, or had charge of, the provisions in a household.

Or Steward. “This name includes various families who held the office of Dispensarius to the King or the great barons.” Two Dispensators are to be found in Domesday: William, an under-tenant in Kent; and Robert, Steward to the Conqueror, who held a great barony in Leicester, Warwick, Worcester, and Lincoln. It is with the latter only that we have here to do, and the little that is known of him may be told in a very few words. He was of the great house of Tancarville — a brother of Urso d’Abitot, and, like him, a despoiler of the monks of Worcester, from whom he took the manor of Elmley, which they could never afterwards regain. His name is appended as a witness to some of the Conqueror’s most important charters. But whether or no he had a wife and children is left in doubt; if he had, they are passed over in silence. His office was probably hereditary; and thus his two successors, William and Thurstan Le Despencer “Those names which had Le set before them were not at all local, but given in other respects as Le Marshall, Le Dispencer, Le Latimer, Le Scroop, Le Savage, Le Vavasar, Le Blund (or fair), Le Molineux. As they also which were never noted with De or Le, as Giffard, Basset, Arundel, Talbot, Fortescue, Howard, Tirell, &c. And these distinctions with De, or other with Le, were religiously observed until about the time of Ed. IV.”—Sir E. Brydges. (each in turn Steward to Henry I.), may be presumed to have been his sons. Thurstan had certainly two sons (Sir Egerton Brydges gives him four), Walter, Lord of King’s Stanley in Gloucestershire, and Almaric, who succeeded to his brother’s inheritance, and was Steward to Cœur de Lion. He married Amabel de Cheney, and was the father of a second Thurstan and Almaric, who were both in arms against King John. According to Sir Egerton, it was Thurstan’s son Geoffrey, who died about 1251, that was the father of Hugh the Justiciary; but in this he runs counter to the authority of Dugdale, who supposes this Hugh to be the grandson of another Hugh, “contemporary (for some time) with the last-mentioned Thurstan,” who was Sheriff of Shropshire and Stafford­shire in 1223, and Constable of the Royal castles of Shrewsbury, Bruges (now Bridgnorth), and Bolsover. He does not give us his lineage; but if, as Sir Egerton asserts, this elder Hugh was Thurstan’s uncle, his account is chrono­logically more correct than the former, which crowds four generations into a space of about eighty years. The pedigree is involved and difficult, and the author of the ‘Norman People’ discards it from beginning to end, and derives the Justiciary from a common ancestor with the Cheshire Duttons, who bore similar arms.

With this second Hugh commences the epoch of the family’s importance and power in the State. He received the great office of Justice of England in 1259 from the insurgent barons with whom he was in arms; and after the victory of Lewes, had the custody of five of the strongest castles in the kingdom: Oxford, Nottingham, Devizes in Wilts, Orford in Suffolk, and Barnard Castle in the Bishopric of Durham. He was summoned to parliament as Hugh le Despencer Justic' Angliæ in 1264, and was one of the Council of twenty-four barons appointed to govern the realm. Though, owing to some grudge or discontent, he fell off for a time from “the haughty-spirited Montfort,” the breach was of short continuance, and he died loyally by his side at Evesham. When the Earl saw that the day was lost, “he bade Hugh Despencer and all the rest of his comrades fly from the field. ‘If he died,’ was the noble answer, ‘they had no will to live.’”—Green. By his wife, Aliva Basset, the widowed Countess of Norfolk, he was the father of another Hugh, styled Hugh Senior, to distinguish him from a son of the same name, who was the celebrated favourite of Edward II. The father basked in the sunshine of the son’s prosperity; shared with him the Royal bounty, and governed with him the Royal councils; for the two Despencers held fast together, and “acted jointly in all their affairs.” Both were equally greedy of power and gain, and both equally detested by all classes of the commonwealth. But the elder Hugh had at least honourable antecedents. He had fought under the eye of Edward I. in the Scottish wars, and is praised as a good soldier at Caerlaverock: “Du bon Hue le Despensier, Ki vassaument sur le coursier Savait desrompre une niellée, Fu la baniere esquartelée De un noir bastoun sur blanc getté, E de vermeil jaune fretté.

He had been employed to treat of peace with France, and sent on an embassy to the Pope in 1300. His son was the mere minion of the feeble King, and took the vacant place of Piers Gaveston when that luckless favourite “felt the teeth” of the Black Dog of Arden. Edward bestowed upon him in 1313 the whole county of Glamorgan with the hand of its heiress, Alianor de Clare, the eldest daughter of the last Earl of Gloucester of that puissant house; and in 1317, when “great animosities” had arisen between him and Humphrey de Bohun Earl of Hereford, and they were about to settle their quarrel by force of arms, the King interposed on his favourite’s behalf, and laid his commands on the Earl to desist Emboldened by this protection, Hugh next seized upon Gower-land, then disputed by John de Mowbray and this same Earl, and added the whole territory to his own adjacent lands. This filled up the measure of De Bohun’s wrath; and he and some other malcontent barons, similarly angered by the “insolencie, pride, and excessive covetousness of both these Despencers,” banded themselves together under the leadership of the Earl of Lancaster, the most powerful noble in England, and marched with banners displayed to London, demanding the expulsion of the favourites. The unwilling King was forced to comply; a parliament was summoned by writ; and by a sentence solemnly proclaimed in Westminster Hall, both father and son were banished out of the kingdom. “Whereupon,” says Dugdale, “this Hugh the elder went away, cursing the time that ever he begot that Son;” but Hugh the younger, “not willing to be gone, lurked in divers places, sometimes by Sea and some­times by Land, and took two Dromonds about Sandwich, laden with merchandize.” This piracy was one of the indictments brought against him at his trial. The King, meanwhile, soon found himself strong enough to recall them; and with their help raised an army that routed the barons at Boroughbridge, and sent their leader to the scaffold. Hugh Senior sat in judgment upon him; and Lancaster was not allowed to defend himself, but hurried away to execution, and put to death in front of his own castle. The ordinances against the Despencers were instantly annulled; the father was created Earl of Winchester, and a rapid succession of grants from the rich harvest of forfeitures followed to him and to his son. The list of those obtained by the latter alone fills three closely-printed columns of the Baronetage. But no amount of gifts could content him; and in his unappeasable thirst for plunder, he proceeded to open and shameless extortion; “seizing by violence upon Elizabeth Comyn, a great Heir, and wife of Richard Talbot, in her house of Kenninton in Surrey, and keeping her in prison, with hard usage, for a whole twelvemonth,” till she had signed away to him, with other manors, her Welsh castle of Goderich. In the same summary fashion he wrested Dudley Castle from John Sutton, and Malpas in Cheshire from Oliver Ingham.

But this state of things could not last: and the long-brooding storm of popular fury at length burst in terrible earnest on the hated heads of the King and his minions. The Queen and her son, “having perfect information how the hearts of the people stood,” landed at Harwich, collected a large following, and marched in triumph across the country to Bristol, where the deserted and fugitive King had sought refuge. Here, again, she was joyfully received; and “in testimony of her welcome,” his own garrison delivered Hugh Senior—then an old man of ninety—into her hands. He was allowed no trial and short shrift, being at once sentenced to the cruel death of a traitor; and his body, after hanging for four days on the gibbet, “was then cut in pieces, and given to the Dogs to eat.” The King and the younger Hugh had stolen away “betimes in the morning” to a little craft lying behind the Castle that was to take them to the Isle of Lundy, or else to Ireland; but the wind drove them ashore on the coast of Wales, and there, after some weary months of wandering and concealment, they were discovered and captured by Sir Henry Beaumont, who carried them to the Queen at Hereford. The wretched favourite “was bound on an Horse, with a Tabard over him, such as Traytors and Theeves use to wear; and in that manner carried in scorn, after the Queen’s Troops, through all the Towns, with Trumps and Canairs, till they came thither, where the Queen then kept the Feast of All Saints with much Royalty; great multitudes of people flocking to see him, and making such a horrid noise, by shouting and opprobrious exclamations, that the like was never heard; Others say, that the more to disgrace him, they put on his Surcoat of Arms reversed, and a Crown of Nettles on his head; and that upon his Vestment, six Verses of that Psalm beginning thus, Quid gloriaris in malitiâ? was written.” He was brought before William Trussell the Speaker, arraigned as a traitor, and, without being suffered to open his lips in his own defence, sentenced “to be drawn on a hurdle, with Trumps and Trumpets, through the city of Hereford, to the market place,” and there put to death. It was a death of lingering torment, too sickening to describe: amongst other horrors his heart was torn from his breast, thrust into the fire, and burnt before his face—and he was tied on a high ladder, that every man might see his agony. When vengeance had been fully wreaked on his miserable body, he was hung upon a gallows fifty feet high. His life may have been lawless, but its end was terrible.

His widow and sons were thrown into the Tower, where Alianor remained only a few months; but his eldest son Hugh was imprisoned till 1333, when “the Beams of the King’s Favour” began to shine upon him, and he was permitted to join the expedition to Gascony. On his mother’s death, he inherited her great possessions, and was summoned to parliament in 1338, but died s. p. The summons was, however, renewed in 1357 to his nephew and successor Edward (“a great Baron and a good Knight, quoth Froissart”), who attended the Black Prince into France, and fought by his side at Poitiers. He married Elizabeth de Burghersh, the heiress of Bartholomew, Lord Burghersh, and was the father of Thomas, known as Lord Despencer of Glamorgan, who on his marriage with a princess of the blood royal, obtained from Richard II. the reversal of his great­grandfather’s attainder. In the petition he presented to the King on that occasion, he gives an account of all his possessions, which is curious as a record of the fortune of a great nobleman in those days. He owned “59 Lordships in sundry Counties, 28,000 Sheep, 1000 Oxen and Steers, 1200 Kine, with their Calves; 40 Mares, with their Colts of two years; 160 Draught Horses; 2000 Hogs; 3000 Bullocks; 40 Tuns of Wine; 600 Bacons; fourscore Carcasses of Martinmass Beef: 600 Muttons in his Larder; 10 Tuns of Cider; Armor, Plate, Jewels, and ready Money, better than ten thousand pound; 36 Sacks of Wooll, and a Library of Books.” In the same year (1397) he was created Earl of Gloucester, in honour of his descent from the De Clares, with a grant of Elmley Castle and some of the forfeited Warwick estates. But on the accession of Henry IV. in 1399, he was degraded from his Earldom as an adherent of the dethroned King, despoiled of a great part of his lands, and the rest left “at the King’s mercy.” He is believed to have been concerned in the plot of the three Earls to murder the King at Windsor, and in 1400 attempted to fly the country, but was taken at Bristol, and beheaded by the town rabble on the market place. His wife was Constance Plantagenet, the daughter of Edmund Langley, Duke of York, to whom he had been in ward; and he had by her three children: Elizabeth, who died in childhood; Richard, who died in 1414, being then but fourteen years of age, yet already the husband of Lady Elizabeth Nevill, daughter of Ralph, Earl of Westmorland; and Isabel, born seven months after her father’s death, who thus became his sole heir. She was, by special dispensation of the Pope, successively married to two De Beauchamps, Richard Earl of Worcester, and Richard Earl of Warwick, and by her first marriage had an only child, Lady Elizabeth Beauchamp, who became the wife of Edward Nevill, Lord Westmorland’s youngest son. She brought him the baronies of Abergavenny, Le Despencer, and Burghersh, and he was summoned to parliament by the former title in 1450. (See Nevill.) The barony of Le Despencer remained with the Nevills till 1587, when the heiress general of the fourth Lord Abergavenny carried it to the Fanes, and it was held by the first seven Earls of Westmorland; it then passed to some other families, and, by the marriage of the present Baroness to Viscount Falmouth, is now vested in the Boscawens.

A junior branch, whose descent has been variously given, and sometimes doubted,“The Spencers claim a collateral descent from this ancient baronial house, a claim which, without being irreconcileable perhaps with the early pedigrees of that family, admits of very grave doubts, and considerable difficulties.”—E. P. Shirley. survives of this famous house. It separated from the parent stock in early times, for its ancestor, Geoffrey Le Despencer, though unnoticed by Dugdale, was probably a brother of the Justiciary. From him came, it is said, Sir John Spencer, described by envious tongues as “the great Warwickshire grazier,” a wealthy and prosperous knight, who acquired much land by marriage and purchase during the reign of Henry VIII. His wife brought him Snitterfield in Warwickshire; and he bought, among other estates, the great lordship of Wormleighton in the same county, where he built a “faire mansion”; and Althorpe in Northamptonshire—still the seat of his posterity—from the Catesbys.

By his will he desired his executors to proclaim once a month for two successive years, that he required them “to recompense any one who can prove or will take oath that he has hurt him in any wise (tho’ he has none in his remembrance); but he had rather charge their souls, than his own should be in danger.” His descendants, like himself, were substantial country gentlemen, Sheriffs and Knights of the Shire for Northampton, living on their estates, glorying in their flocks and herds, and keeping open house in true old English fashion. One of them even directed in his will that “hospitality be kept up in his houses at Althorpe and Wormleighton as he had done;” and another, who built a house at Claverdon in Warwickshire, “was,” says Dugdale, “the mirror of that county” for his liberality to his neighbours. Yet they went on steadily increasing their fortune, till at the accession of James I., Sir Robert, the fifth knight in succession, “was reported to have by him the most money of any person in the kingdom,” and was created Lord Spencer of Wormleighton in 1603. Camden calls him “a worthy encourager of virtue and learning’; and he took an active part on the popular side in the House of Lords, “as vigilant to preserve the people’s liberties from the encroaching power of monarchy as his lambs from foxes and ravenous creatures.” Once, when he stood up boldly to defend them during a debate on the King’s prerogative in 1621, and appealed to the peers to remember the deeds of their ancestors, the Earl of Arundel haughtily interrupted him— “My Lord,” he cried, “when these things were doing, your ancestors were keeping sheep!” Spencer retorted, “When my ancestors were, as you say, keeping sheep, yours, my Lord, were plotting treason.”

Second in descent from him was Henry, third Lord Spencer, created Earl of Sunderland only three months before his untimely death in 1643. He had served in the Royal body-guard during the Civil War as a volunteer; bringing with him, according to Lloyd, twelve hundred men, and ₤15,000 in money; but “held no command in the army, attending the King’s person,” says Lord Clarendon, “under the obligation of honour:” and fell in a cavalry charge at Newbury. Though he was then scarcely twenty-three, he had been married five years before to Lady Dorothy Sidney, a daughter of the Earl of Leicester, “The matchless Sidney, that immortal frame Of perfect beauty,”

sung by Waller as his “Cruel Saccharissa.” The marriage had proved a for­tunate one. “I know,” writes her father to the widowed Countess, “that you lived happily, and so as nobody but yourself could measure the contentment of it. I did thank God for making me one of the means to procure it for you.” Their son Robert, second Earl, a man of some talent, and unusual power of fascination, broke away altogether from the honest and honourable traditions of his house. Devoid either of religious or political principle, he was, as an inveterate gambler, constantly in need of money, and “his leading impulses were the greed of wealth and power, and the fear of personal danger.”—Lord Macaulay. He courted the patronage of the Duchess of Portsmouth, and held office both under Charles II. and James II., while pocketing a yearly pension of ₤5500 from the King of France “for promoting his interests,” and professing himself a zealous Roman Catholic convert. Then—at first secretly—he veered round to the Prince of Orange, again changed his religion, and was high in favour with the new Protestant King, who paid him a visit at Althorpe in 1695. “All Northamptonshire crowded to kiss the Royal hand in that fine gallery, which had been embellished by the pencil of Vandyke, and made classical by the muse of Waller; and the Earl tried to conciliate his neighbours by feasting them at eight tables, all blazing with gold plate.”—Ibid. He died in 1702, leaving behind him a successor of almost entirely different character. “The father was,” says Lord Stanhope, “a subtle, pliant, and unscrupulous candidate for royal favour; the son carried his love of popular rights to the verge of republican doctrines.” In fact, he had in early life refused to be called “My lord,” saying he trusted soon to see the end of that order. Though somewhat tainted with his father’s love of play and genius for cabal, “he was a man of great quickness, discernment, and skill, of persevering ambition, of ready eloquence;” and soon took his place in the House of Lords as one of the leaders of the Whig party. From 1706 to 1710 he was Secretary of State, then Lord Privy Seal and Vice-Treasurer of Ireland; and lastly came into office as Earl Stanhope’s principal supporter in the Government he formed in 1717. He had materially assisted his fortunes by becoming Lord Marlborough’s son-in-law in 1699, when he married Lady Anne Churchill, the second of the four daughters of the great Duke, and in the end his sole heir. Her only brother, Lord Blandford, died while yet at college, in 1705; and in the following year the Duke and his all-powerful Duchess obtained a special Act of Parliament entailing his honours on his daughters and their heirs-male. Accordingly, on his death in 1722, the eldest, Lady Henrietta, Countess of Godolphin, succeeded as Duchess of Marlborough in her own right; and the hopes of the family were centred on her one surviving son. But this second Marquess of Blandford was again destined to disappoint them, for he died in 1731, leaving no children, and within two years his mother had followed him to the grave. The Dukedom then devolved upon the son of her next sister, Charles, fifth Earl of Sunderland, who took the name and arms of Churchill, and was the immediate ancestor of the present Duke.

Lady Anne Churchill had been the mother of four sons. The eldest, Robert, only lived a year; the second, another Robert, fourth Earl, died of a fever at Paris, unmarried; the third, Charles, became, as I have just said, Duke of Marlborough; and the fourth, John, inherited a very great fortune on the death of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. He was her favourite grandson, and she bequeathed to him nearly the whole of her patrimonial estates, including the Wimbledon property, sold only a few years ago by the present Lord Spencer, and all the money she had been sedulously accumulating during her long life. In addition to this, his elder brother, in accordance to their grandfather’s will, made over to him Althorpe and the Spencer patrimony on succeeding to the Dukedom. This wealthy junior branch is now represented by Earl Spencer, for John Spencer’s only son was created first Viscount Spencer in 1761, and then Earl Spencer and Viscount Althorpe in 1765.

Two other peerages have been granted to the family. The first—a Scottish one—was held by a brother of the gallant young Earl who fell at Newbury, Robert Spencer, who was created Viscount of Teviot by James II., but left no heir. The other was conferred on Lord Francis Almaric, the second son of the fourth Duke, who received the title of Baron Churchill in 1815, and transmitted it to his grandson, the present Lord.

It was to a branch of this Northamptonshire house, settled near Pendle Forest in Lancashire, that Edmund Spencer belonged; and several of his poems are inscribed to the daughters of Sir John Spencer of Althorpe: Lady Compton and Monteagle, Lady Carey, and Lady Strange: “The honour of the noble familie Of which I meanest boast myself to be.”

In his dedication of the “Teares of the Muses” to Lady Strange (for whom Milton afterwards wrote his Arcades) he speaks of “some private bands of affinitie, which it hath pleased your Ladiship to acknowledge:” and to another sister (Lady Compton and Monteagle) expresses “the humble affection and faithfull duetie, which I have alwaies professed and am bound to beare to that house from which yee spring.”

Time has completely turned the tables. The boasting is now on the other side; it is “the house of auncient fame” from which the poor scholar gloried to take his name, that is proud of claiming kinship with him. “The nobility of the Spensers,” writes Gibbon, “has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider the ‘Faerie Queene’ as the most precious jewel of their coronet.”

In the eighteenth year of William the Conqueror lived Robertus Dispensator, otherwise called Le Despencer, because he was steward to the king. In the reign of Henry I. there were a William le Despencer and a Thurstan Dispencer, but whether these last were only successors in office, or actual descendants of Robert is not known, and the like uncertainty prevails as to subsequent bearers of the name. The unpopular Spencers of the time of Edward II. are traced by genealogists only to the reign of Henry III., though they may have been of much older date. Earl Spencer's family "claim a collateral descent from the baronial house, a claim which, without being irreconcileable perhaps with the early pedigrees of that family, admits of very grave doubts and considerable difficulties." Shirley's Noble and Gentle Men. The Earl's pedigree is, however, clearly traced to the reign of Henry VI. in Northamptonshire.

(Northen French) Le Despenser, a steward. The ancestor of the family assumed the name Le Despenser (Latin, dispensator), from being steward to the household of William the Conqueror.

From French dispensier, a dispenser, steward, literally one having the care of the spence or buttery. The ancestor of the noble family of Spencer was Robert de Spencer, steward, i. e. dispenser, to William the Conqueror.

Includes various families who held the office of Dispensarius to the king or the great barons. The Spencers so famous in English history appear to have derived from Odard, a Baron of Chester, who with Nigel, Baron of Halton and Constable of Chester, and other brothers, came with Earl Hugh Lupus, being probably of the house of Avranches. This may be inferred from the ancient arms, which were preserved by the Warburtons, descendants of Odard, who bore two chevrons, like the St. Maurs; the house of Avranches also bearing chevrons. The Spencers, however, and the Duttons adopted the arms borne by the Constables of Chester, the Claverings, Eures, Lacys, and other branches of the house of Vesci or Burgh. Odard seems to have had two sons: 1. Hugh of Dutton, ancestor of the great house of D. of Cheshire, and of the Warburtons, baronets; 2. Thomas Fitz-Odard (Mon. Angl. ii. 799), who appears in Cheshire c. 1130 as Thomas ‘Dispensarius,’ having been created Dispencer or Steward in fee by Rufus or Henry I., to which office was attached the manor of Rollright, with other estates, Oxfordshire. He had issue-1. Thomas, ancestor of the Earls of Winchester, father of Fulco of Cheshire 1178 (Mon. i. 897), and of Thomas, who gave Bollington, Cheshire, with his daughter to Hugh de Dutton (Ormerod, i. 479). Thomas had Hugh, father of Hugh the Justiciary, father of Hugh, Earl of Winchester; 2. Geofrry, who appears in Cheshire 1150 (Mon. i. 987), and who was Joint-Dispencer. Gerold his son occurs 1200 (Hunter, Fines). Geoffry his son held Stanton, Oxford, also estates in Worcester from De Stuteville, and elsewhere (Testa de Neville). John Despencer, his son, a minor 1251 (Roberts, Excerpta, ii. 108), died 1274, seized of lands held from Hugh the Justiciary, and of estates in Worcester. William Despencer, of Worcester, d. 1328 (Nash, i. 82), and had William, whose son William was living 1428 in Worcester (Ibid. ii. 106). In the next generation John D., who possessed estates in Worcester, with Henry his brother or kinsman, became seated in Northants. The latter bore the arms of the Spencers and Duttons; and from the former descended the Lords Spencer, Earls of Sunderland, Earls Spencer, Dukes of Marlborough, and Barons Churchill. Spenser the poet appears to have claimed descent from this family, but there were so many other families of the name, and the data in his case are so limited, that it is not possible for the writer to form an opinion on the matter.

(English), Steward, Butler. (variant: Kellermann.)

From Despenser (Lat. Dispensator); a steward Dispensator, a tenant in chief in the Domesday Book.

Spencer. —Absent or rare in the north and south of England. Most numerous in the midlands, especially Warwickshire, and afterwards in Northamptonshire, Derbyshire, and Notts.