A Lady's Last Words

In the great manor house of Alresford, Hants, one spring day 797 years ago, a gentle-hearted lady lay sick unto death. Outside her chamber windows yeomen's ploughs bit deep into her rich husband's acres, preparing them for the crops that would make him even richer by summer's end. But all Lady Tichborne could think of were the poor villagers in Alresford with little or no land or wheat of their own.

As she had many times before, once again Lady Tichborne begged her husband to give them some of his land. The Master of Tichborne gazed coldly at his bedridden lady. "Very well," he said at last. "An you're so generous, you may give my land away--all that you yourself can walk around." With a grim laugh, he left the room. But Lady Tichborne, even her dying womanpower not to be underestimated, crept from her bed and down the stairs. By the end of the day, moving painfully on hands & knees, she had encircled 23 acres, known to this day in Hampshire as "The Crawls."

The effort took her last breath, and as she died Lady Tichborne uttered a great curse. Unless each year, on Lady Day, the Tichbornes gave to every adult in the village one gallon of flour, and to every child one half-gallon, the manor house would crumble; there would be a generation of seven sons, a generation of seven daughters, and then the Tichborne name would die.

For some 600 years the family fended off her threat--and survived. Then, the Tichbornes went to France and the gift was forgotten. In their absence the manor house was destroyed. Two generations of seven sons and seven daughters came & went, and the Tichborne lands and title passed to one Edward Doughty. Born a Tichborne, Edward--by a fluke of fate--had changed his name earlier. The curse was only technically fulfilled, but since then every Tichborne has been careful to make the annual presentation of flour to the villagers of Alresford.

Last week, as Lady Day approached once again in wheat-short Britain, dark, handsome Sir Anthony Doughty-Tichborne, the latest in the line, hied himself to Britain's Food Ministry to ask permission to buy flour for his tenants with 14,000 ration coupons he had collected from them. He needed the flour, he said, to hold off the family curse imposed by his resolute ancestress. In Britain, where curses have a longer history than rationing, the request was granted.

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