Rambles about Portsmouth. Sketches of persons, localities, and incidents of two centuries: principally from tradition and unpublished documents. By Charles W. Brewster.

SHEEBURNE AND LANGDON FAMILIES. 55
Henry was so perseveringly their leading christian name
here, it is only found once in a great many Sherburnes of
Stonihurst. The estates went rightfully to the heirs of
Maria WinifredaFrancisca Sherburne, duchess of Norfolk,
(here is a sounding name for the magazines,) and we can't
drive them off.
There is a certain enticing plausibility to the business in
the extreme possibility that Henry Sherburne of Piscataway
may have been a papist: he was the church-warden of our
church of England chapel, 1640, spoken of' by Winthrop,
broken up by the Bay puritans, the document about which is
the only thing, if we remember rightly, left of our early
town records, which were burnt by the Bay puritans in the
civil wars, when they re-annexed Maine and New Hampshire
to their empire: it would look as if he turned puritan though,
in the civil wars, and went to meeting,, and wouldn't again
after the king was brought back. His son-in-law, Tobias
Langdon, is said to be of the ancient house of the Langdons of Keverel in Cornwall, near Saint German's, which
whether he was we cannot say, but his son didn't call
either of his seven sons by the family name of Walter.
The antiquity of those Langdons is indisputable, whose
name at the conquest was the Cornish one of Lizard: for
Carew of Anthony, the poet and scholar, speaks of them
as his neighbors of ancient lineage, rather gone to decay in
the days of Elizabeth. That they may have continued
papists very late may be too, for a Walter Langdon of
Keverel was fined on his estate during the rebellion, taken
in arms for the king, when he and other gentlemen of the
county held out with their wives aid children in Pendenis
Castle under an Arundel of Trerice, one of the heroic
actions of the civil wars. This Cornish Arundel was not
an open papist, but the other great Cornish Arundels of Lan.
hearne, as the lords Arundel of Wardour, are still, the lords
Arundel of Trerice being gone. Arundel and Sherburne