Space does not allow us to romance on the part that this great warrior played in the history of those times; Lord Lytton has done that for us in his splendid book, “The Last of the Barons.”  Suffice it to say that he left an undying fame to future generations, and fell in the Wars of the Roses when fighting at the battle of Barnet against the very man he had set on the throne.  The almshouses he built for Burford are still to be seen hard by the grand old church.

     “For who lived king, but I could dig his grave? 
      And who durst smile, when Warwick bent his brow? 
      Lo, now my glory’s smear’d in dust and blood! 
      My parks, my walks, my manors that I had,
      Even now forsake me; and of all my lands,
      Is nothing left me, but my body’s length!”

      3 King Henry VI., V. ii.

In the reign of Henry VIII. this manor, having lapsed to the Crown, was granted to Edmund Harman, the royal surgeon.  Then in later days Sir John Fortescue, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Queen Elizabeth, got hold of it, and eventually sold it to Sir Lawrence Tanfield, a great judge in those times.  The latter was buried “at twelve o’clock in the Night” in the church of Burford; and there is a very handsome aisle there and an immense monument to his memory.  The Tanfield monument, though somewhat ugly and grotesque, is a wonderful example of alabaster work.  The cost of erecting it and the labour bestowed must have been immense.  It was this knight who built the great house of which the present ruins form part, and the date would probably be about 1600.  But in 1808 nearly half the original building is supposed to have been pulled down, and what was allowed to remain, with the exception of the chapel, has been very much altered.

It was in the time of Lucius Carey’s (second Lord Falkland) ownership of this manor that the place was in the zenith of its fame.  This accomplished man, whose father had married Chief Justice Tanfield’s only daughter, succeeded his grandfather in the year 1625.  He gathered together, either here or at Great Tew, a few miles away, half the literary celebrities of the day.  Ben Jonson, Cowley, and Chillingworth all visited Falkland from time to time.  Lucius Carey afterwards became the ill-fated King Charles’s Secretary of State, an office which he conscientiously filled until his untimely death.

Falkland left little literary work behind him of any mark, yet of no other man of those times may it be said that so great a reputation for ability and character has been handed down to us.  Novelists and authors delight in dwelling on his good qualities.  Even in this jubilee year of 1897 the author of “Sir Kenelm Digby” has written a book about the Falklands.  Whyte Melville, too, made him the hero of one of his novels, describing him as a man in whose outward appearance there were no indications of the intellectual superiority he enjoyed over his fellow men.  Indeed, as with Arthur Hallam in our own times, so it was with Falkland in the mediaeval age.  Neither left behind them any work of their own by which future generations could realise their abilities and almost godlike charm, yet each has earned a kind of immortality through being honoured and sung by the pens of the greatest writers of his respective age.