the near neighbourhood of Rye, a cheerless marshland, numbering about a hundred and fifty inhabitants, gave its name to this ancient house—a name which has almost perished as a patronymic, while it survives in that of the parish, which forms thus a "magni nominis umbra." I do not find any mention of it in Domesday; and, if a conjecture may be hazarded in regard to its derivation, I might suggest that it marked the limit of the jurisdiction of the guilds connected with the Cinque port of Rye. Or, it might represent to us the ford at which a toll or payment was exacted, from those travelling from Kent into Sussex; an early form of the name being Geldeforde, which occurs in 1347.* In this case, its origin would be analogous to that of the village which gave name to the illustrious family of Zintzendorf, and to the castle which gave a still higher title to the imperial house of Hohenzollern.

   I shall not attempt to carry up the pedigree, of the family, to that period which every herald vaguely assumes to be the only possible starting-point, of every house which has made itself famous in English history; whether, in Shakespeare's words, it was "born great, achieved greatness, or had greatness thrust upon it."
   The origin of the family is, fortunately, sufficiently remote, and venerable, to enable us to dispense with a reference to the fabulous list of the followers of the Conqueror. From Richard Guldeford, its earliest ascertained ancestor, who, according to the ordinary reckoning of descents, must have been born about the year 1186, the pedigree merely records the names of its successive links, until we reach the first member of it who gave it celebrity and a distinguished rank in the county—that of William de Guldeford, who
* Arch. Cant., Vol. X., p. 122.