commissioners, and summarily hung, drawn, and quartered on the top of the
neighbouring Tor Hill. Sharpham thereupon "devolved" upon the crown; but
the old house remained, standing in peaceful seclusion where the pleasant
slope of Polden Hill overlooks the Somersetshire moors, till the birth of
the 'father of the English Novel' brought a lasting distinction to the
domestic buildings of Abbot Beere. In the accompanying print, published
in 1826, the little window of the Harlequin Chamber may be seen, above
the low roofs of the abbots' chapel.

That Henry Fielding should have been born among buildings raised by
Benedictine hands is not incongruous; for no man ever more heartily
preached and practised the virtue of open-handed charity; none was more
ready to scourge the vices of arrogance, cruelty and avarice; no English
novelist has left us brighter pictures of innocence and goodness. And it
was surely a happy stroke of that capricious Fortune to whom Fielding so
often refers, to allot a Harlequin Chamber for the birth of the author of
nineteen comedies; and yet more appropriate to the robust genius of the
Comic Epic was the accident that placed on the wall, beneath the window
of his birth-room, a jovial jest in stone. For here some
sixteenth-century humorist had displayed the arms of Abbot Beere in the
form of a convivial rebus or riddle--to wit, a cross and two beer flagons.

Soon after the Civil Wars, Sharpham passed into the hands of the
'respectable family' of Gould. By the Goulds the house was considerably
enlarged; and, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was in the
possession of a distinguished member of the family, Sir Henry Gould,
Knight, and Judge of the King's Bench. Sir Henry had but two children, a
son Davidge Gould, and a daughter Sarah. This only daughter married a
well-born young soldier, the Hon. Edmund Fielding; a marriage which,
according to family assertions, was without the consent of her parents and