This fine tudor building on the site of a 14th century priory was give by Henry VIII to Anne of Cleves, and then passed to the Hoby family, one of whom (Sir Thomas Hoby) died in 1566, at the relatively young age of 36. His widow, Lady Elizabeth Hoby, married again (her second husband being John, Lord Russell) and lived to be 81; like many aristocratic women of the period, she was learned in Latin, Greek and theology, and is remembered as a stern, forceful character. Her portrait can be seen in the Great Hall of BIsham Abbey (now a national sports centre); her tomb, with marble effigy, is in Bisham church. But according to a legend with arose in the 19th century, her tormented spirit has never ceased to roam the abbey and its grounds.
The story goes that Lady Hoby was not only a scholar herself but expected similar intelligence in her sons and daughters. The younger boy (whom most authors name ‘William’) distressed her by his stupidity; she was particularly enraged by his slovenly handwriting and ink-stained copybooks. One day, when his work was particularly dirty and full of errors, she gave him a severe whipping, as a result of which he died – as Jerome K. Jerome curtly notes in Three Men and a Boat (1889):
The ghost of the Lady Hoby, who beat her little boy to
Death, still walks there at night, trying to wash its ghostly
Hands clean in a ghostly basin.
Anne Mitchell’s more recent version (1972) is more elaborate: she says Lady Hoby, having whipped the child, locked him in a closet with his books and set off for London, forgetting to tell anyone where he was. The servants assumed the boy had gone to London too, and it was not till many days later that anyone looked for him, He was of course dead.
One writer who did much to publicize the legend was John Meade Falkner, in his Handbook for Berkshire (1902); he cites an alleged confirmation of the story which has also been much repeated:
It is certainly curious that about 1840, in altering the window shutters, a quantity of children’s copybooks was the time of Elizabeth were discovered, packed into the rubble between the joists of the floor, and that one of these was a copybook which answered exactly to the story, as if the child could not write a single line without a blot.
Falkner does not say that he himself saw these books, whose present whereabouts, if they ever existed, is not known. Moreover, records show there never was a ‘William Hoby’. The two sons of Thomas and Elizabeth Hoby, Edward and Thomas Posthumous, both lived to be adults; she did have a son by her second marriage who died as a baby, but his name is given by some authorities as Thomas, by others as Francis – never William – and he was too young for blotted copybooks to be an issue.
Lady Hoby’s ghost is generally said to appear in the upper corridors, wandering from one bedroom to another, weeping and washing its bloodstained hands in a spectral basin which glides before it mid-air. According to Falkner’s account, its face and hands are inky black, but its dress is white. He notes that the portrait of Lady Hoby is notable for the extreme whiteness of the face, hands and coif, contrasting with her black widow’s weeds; it has a distinctly spectral air, which may have contributed to the growth of the tale. Anne Mitchell’s modern account includes mention of an occasion when Admiral Vansittart, owner of the house in the 1920s, became aware that Lady Hoby was standing in the library behind him – and that where her portrait hung there was only an empty frame.
The church booklet mentions the floating bowl in the 1967 revision but not in the 1990 revision. Both revisions remark of the murdered son: ‘Who this child was, whether a Hoby or a Russell, history does not record.