Chapter 19

Authorities.—Walter Bagehot,Lombard Street(1873); Arthur Ellis,Rationale of MarketFluctuations; Robert Giffen,Stock Exchange Securities(1879); W. Stanley Jevons,Theory of Political Economy(2nd ed., 1879), pp. 91 seq., andInvestigations in Currency and Finance; Henry Sidgwick,Principles of Political Economy, book ii. ch. ii.; Augustin Cournot,Theory of Wealth(1838), translated by Nathaniel T. Bacon; George Clare,A Money Market Primer and Key to the Exchanges; John Stuart Mill,Principles of Political Economy, book iii. ch. i.-vi.; John Shield Nicholson,Bankers’ Money; Hartley Withers,The Meaning of Money(1909).

(W. Ho.)

MARKET BOSWORTH,a market town in the Bosworth parliamentary division of Leicestershire, England; 105 m. N.N.W. from London on a branch from Nuneaton of the London & North Western and Midland railways, near the Ashby-de-la-Zouch canal. Pop. (1901), 659. The church of St Peter is Perpendicular, with a lofty tower and spire. At the grammar school, founded in 1528, Dr Samuel Johnson was a master about 1732, but found the work unbearable. The trade of Market Bosworth is principally agricultural, and there are brickworks. Two miles south is the scene of the battle of Bosworth, in 1485, where Richard III. fell before Henry earl of Richmond, who thereupon assumed the crown as Henry VII.

MARKET DRAYTON,a market town in the Newport division of Shropshire, England, on the river Tern and the Shropshire Union canal, 178 m. N.W. from London. Pop. (civil parish of Drayton-in-Hales, 1901), 5167. The Wellington-Crewe line of the Great Western railway is here joined by a branch into Staffordshire of the North Staffordshire railway. The church of St Mary has Norman remains but is modernised by restoration. The town is a centre of agricultural trade, and there are large iron foundries. It is in the parish of Drayton-in-Hales, a name sometimes applied to it; and it is also known as Drayton Magna. It is an ancient town, of which the manor was held successively by the abbots of St Ebrulph in Normandy and Combermere in Cheshire. On Blore Heath, 3 m. east in Staffordshire, Audley Cross marks a great battle in the Wars of the Roses (1459), in which the Yorkists were successful and Lord Audley fell.

MARKET HARBOROUGH,a market town in the Harborough parliamentary division of Leicestershire, England; on the river Welland and the Grand Union Canal. Pop. of urban district (1901), 7735. It is 81 m. N.N.W. from London by the Midland railway, and is served by branches of the London & North Western and Great Northern railways. The church of St Dionysius is Decorated and Perpendicular, with a fine tower and spire. The grammar school was founded in 1614; it occupies modern buildings, but the original house remains, a picturesque half-timbered building, raised upon pillars of wood. Both British and Roman remains have been found in the vicinity. There are malt-houses and boot, shoe and stay factories. The town is also an important fox-hunting centre.

MARKHAM, SIR CLEMENTS ROBERT(1830- ), English traveller, geographer and author, son of the Rev. David F. Markham, canon of Windsor, and of Catherine, daughter of Sir W. Milner, Bart., of Nunappleton, Yorkshire, was born on the 20th of July 1830 at Stillingfleet, near York, and educated at Westminster School. He entered the navy in 1844, became midshipman in 1846, and passed for a lieutenant in 1851. In 1850-1851 he served on the Franklin search expedition in the Arctic regions, under Captain Austin. He retired from the navy in 1852, and in1852-1854 travelled in Peru and the forests of the eastern Andes. He visited South America again in 1860-1861, in order to arrange for the introduction of the cinchona plant into India, a service of the highest value to humanity. In 1865-1866 he visited Ceylon and India, to inspect and report upon the Tinnevelly pearl-fishery and the cinchona plantations. On the Abyssinian expedition of 1867-68 he served as geographer, and was present at the storming of Magdala. In 1874 he accompanied the Arctic expedition under Sir George Nares as far as Greenland. In later years Sir Clements Markham travelled extensively in western Asia and the United States. In 1855 he became a clerk in the Board of Control. From 1867-1877 he was in charge of the geographical department of the Indian Office. He was secretary to the Hakluyt Society from 1858-1887, and became its president in 1890. From 1863-1888 he acted as secretary to the Royal Geographical Society, and on his retirement received the society’s gold medal for his distinguished services to geography. He was elected president of the same society in 1893, and retained office for the unprecedented period of twelve years, taking an active share in the work of the society and in increasing its usefulness in various directions. It was almost entirely due to his exertions that funds were obtained for the National Antarctic Expedition under Captain Robert Scott, which left England in the summer of 1901. Sir Clements Markham was elected F.R.S. in 1873; was created C.B. in 1871, and K.C.B. in 1896; became an honorary member of the principal geographical societies; and was president of the International Geographical Congress which met in London in 1895.

Sir Clements Markham conducted theGeographical Magazinefrom 1872-1878, when it became merged in theProceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. Among his other publications may be mentioned the following:Franklin’s Footsteps(1852);Cuzco and Lima(1856);Travels in Peru and India(1862);A Quichua Grammar and Dictionary(1863);Spanish Irrigation(1867);A History of the Abyssinian Expedition(1869);A Life of the Great Lord Fairfax(1870);Ollanta, a Quichua Drama(1871);Memoir on the Indian Surveys(1871; 2nd ed., 1878);General Sketch of the History of Persia(1873);The Threshold of the Unknown Region(1874, 4 editions);A Memoir of the Countess of Chinchon, (1875);Missions to Thibet, (1877; 2nd ed., 1879);Memoir of the Indian Surveys;Peruvian Bark(1880);Peru(1880);The War between Chili and Peru(1879-81; 3rd ed., 1883);The Sea Fathers(1885);The Fighting Veres(1888);Paladins of King Edwin(1896);Life of John Davis the Navigator(1889); aLife of Richard III.(1906), in which he maintained that the king was not guilty of the murder of the two princes in the Tower; also lives ofAdmiral Fairfax,Admiral John Markham,ColumbusandMajor Rennel;A History of Peru; editions with introductions of twenty works for the Hakluyt Society, of which fourteen were also translations; about seventy papers in the Royal Geographical Society’sJournal; theReports on the Moral and Material Progress of Indiafor 1871-1872 and 1872-1873;Memoir of Sir John Haringtonfor the Roxburghe Club (1880); the Peruvian chapters for J. Winsor’sHistory of America, and the chapters on discovery and surveying for Clowes’sHistory of the Navy.

MARKHAM, GERVASE(orJervis) (1568?-1637), English poet and miscellaneous writer, third son of Sir Robert Markham of Cotham, Nottinghamshire, was born probably in 1568. He was a soldier of fortune in the Low Countries, and later was a captain under the earl of Essex’s command in Ireland. He was acquainted with Latin and several modern languages, and had an exhaustive practical acquaintance with the arts of forestry and agriculture. He was a noted horse-breeder, and is said to have imported the first Arab. Very little is known of the events of his life. The story of the murderous quarrel between Gervase Markham and Sir John Holles related in theBiographia Britannica(s.v.Holles) has been generally connected with him, but in theDictionary of National Biography, Sir Clements R. Markham, a descendant from the same family, refers it to another contemporary of the same name, whose monument is still to be seen in Laneham church. Gervase Markham was buried at St Giles’s, Cripplegate, London, on the 3rd of February 1637. He was a voluminous writer on many subjects, but he repeated himself considerably in his works, sometimes reprinting the same books under other titles. His booksellers procured a declaration from him in 1617 that he would produce no more on certain topics.

Markham’s writings include:The Teares of the Beloved(1600) andMarie Magdalene’s Teares(1601) long and rather commonplace poems on the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, both reprinted by Dr A. B. Grosart in theMiscellanies of the Fuller Worthies Library(1871);The most Honorable Tragedy of Sir Richard Grinvile(1595), reprinted (1871) by Professor E. Arber, a prolix and euphuistic poem in eight-lined stanzas which was no doubt in Tennyson’s mind when he wrote his stirring ballad;The Poem of Poems, or Syon’s Muse(1595), dedicated to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Philip Sidney;Devoreux, Vertues Teares(1597).Herod and Antipater, a Tragedy(1622) was written in conjunction with William Sampson, and with Henry Machin he wrote a comedy calledThe Dumbe Knight(1608).A Discourse of Horsemanshippe(1593) was followed by other popular treatises on horsemanship and farriery.Honour in his Perfection(1624) is in praise of the earls of Oxford, Southampton and Essex, and theSouldier’s Accidence(1625) turns his military experiences to account. He edited Juliana Berners’sBoke of Saint Albansunder the title ofThe Gentleman’s Academie(1595), and produced numerous books on husbandry, many of which are catalogued in Lowndes’sBibliographer’s Manual(Bohn’s ed., 1857-1864).

MARKHAM, MRS,the pseudonym of Elizabeth Penrose (1780-1837), English writer, daughter of Edmund Cartwright, the inventor of the power-loom. She was born at her father’s rectory at Goadby Marwood, Leicestershire, on the 3rd of August 1780. In 1804 she married the Rev. John Penrose, a country clergyman in Lincolnshire and a voluminous theological writer. During her girlhood Mrs Penrose had frequently stayed with relatives at Markham, a village in Nottinghamshire, and from this place she took thenom de plumeof “Mrs Markham,” under which she gained celebrity as a writer of history and other books for the young. The best known of her books wasA History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans to the End of the Reign of George III.(1823), which went through numerous editions. In 1828 she published aHistory of France. Both these works enjoyed a wide popularity in America as well as in England. The distinctive characteristic of “Mrs Markham’s” histories was the elimination of all the “horrors” of history, and of the complications of modern party politics, as being unsuitable for the youthful mind; and the addition to each chapter of “Conversations” between a fictitious group consisting of teacher and pupils bearing upon the subject matter. Her less well-known works wereAmusements of Westernheath, or Moral Stories for Children(2 vols., 1824);A Visit to the Zoological Gardens(1829); two volumes of stories entitledThe New Children’s Friend(1832);Historical Conversations for Young People(1836);Sermons for Children(1837). Mrs Markham died at Lincoln on the 24th of January 1837.

See Samuel Smiles,A Publisher and his Friends(2 vols., London, 1891); G. C. Boase and W. P. Courtney,Bibliotheca Cornubiensis(3 vols., London, 1874-1882).

MARKHAM, WILLIAM(1719-1807), archbishop of York, was educated at Westminster and at Christ Church, Oxford. He was one of the best scholars of his day, and attained to the headship of his old school and college in 1753 and 1767 respectively. He held from time to time a number of livings, and in 1771 was made bishop of Chester and tutor to George prince of Wales. In 1777 he became archbishop of York, and also lord high almoner and privy councillor. He was for some time a close friend of Edmund Burke, but his strong championship of Warren Hastings caused a breach. He was accused by Lord Chatham of preaching pernicious doctrines, and was a victim of the Gordon riots in 1780. He died in 1807.

MARKHOR(“snake-eater”), the Pushtu name of a large Himalayan wild goat (Capra falconeri), characterized by its spirally twisted horns, and long shaggy winter coat. From the Pir-Panjal range of Kashmir the markhor extends westwards into Baltistan, Astor, Hunza, Afghanistan and the trans-Indus ranges of the Punjab. The twist of the horns varies to a great extent locally, the spiral being most open and corkscrew-like in the typical Astor animal, and closest and most screw-like in the race (C. falconeri jerdoni) inhabiting the Suleiman and adjacent ranges.

MARKIRCH(French,Ste-Marie-aux-Mines), a town of Germany, in Upper Alsace, prettily situated in the valley of the Leber, an affluent of the Rhine, near the French frontier. Pop. (1900), 12,372. The once productive silver, copper and leadmines of the neighbourhood were practically unworked during the whole of the 19th century, but have recently been reopened. The main industries of the place are, however, weaving and dyeing, and it is estimated that there are about 40,000 work-people in the industrial district of which Markirch is the centre. The small river Leber, which intersects the town, was at one time the boundary between the German and French languages, and traces of this separation still exist. The German-speaking inhabitants on the right bank were Protestants, and subject to the counts of Rappoltstein, while the French inhabitants were Roman Catholics, and under the rule of the dukes of Lorraine.

See Mühlenbeck,Documents historiques concernant Ste-Marie aux Mines(Markirch, 1876-1877); Hauser,Das Bergbaugebiet von Markirch(Strass., 1900).

MARKLAND, JEREMIAH(1693-1776), English classical scholar, was born at Childwall in Lancashire on the 29th (or 18th) of October 1693. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He died at Milton, near Dorking, on the 7th of July 1776.

His most important works areEpistola critica(1723), theSylvaeof Statius (1728), notes to the editions of Lysias by Taylor, of Maximus of Tyre by Davies, of Euripides’Hippolytusby Musgrave, editions of Euripides’Supplices,Iphigenia in Taurideandin Aulide(ed. T. Gaisford, 1811); andRemarks on the Epistles of Cicero to Brutus(1745).See J. Nichols’sLiterary Anecdotes(1812), iv. 272; also biography by F. A. Wolf,Literarische Analekten, ii. 370 (1818).

See J. Nichols’sLiterary Anecdotes(1812), iv. 272; also biography by F. A. Wolf,Literarische Analekten, ii. 370 (1818).

MARKO KRALYEVICH,Servian hero, was a son of the Servian king or prince, Vukashin (d. 1371). Chagrined at not himself becoming king after his father’s death, he headed a revolt against the new ruler of the Servians. Later he passed into the service of the sultan of Turkey, and was killed in battle about 1394. Marko, however, is more celebrated in legend than in history. He is regarded as the personification of the Servian race, and stories of strength and wonder have gathered round his name. He is supposed to have lived for 300 years, to have ridden a horse 150 years old, and to have used his enormous physical strength against oppressors, especially against the Turks. He is a great figure in Servian poetry, and his deeds are also told in the epic poems of the Rumanians and the Bulgarians. One tradition relates how he retired from the world owing to the advent of firearms, which, he held, made strength and valour of no account in battle. Goethe regards Marko as the counterpart of Hercules and of the Persian Rustem.

The Servian poems about him were published in 1878; a German translation by Gröber (Marko, der Königssohn) appeared at Vienna in 1883.

MARK SYSTEM,the name given to a social organization which rests on the common tenure and common cultivation of the land by small groups of freemen. Both politically and economically the mark was an independent community, and its earliest members were doubtless blood relatives. In its origin the word is the same as mark or march (q.v.), a boundary. First used in this sense, it was then applied to the land cleared by the settlers in the forest areas of Germany, and later it was used for the system which prevailed—to what extent or for how long is uncertain—in that country. It is generally assumed that the lands of the mark were divided into three portions, forest, meadow and arable, and as in the manorial system which was later in vogue elsewhere, a system of rotation of crops in two, three or even six fields was adopted, each member of the community having rights of pasture in the forest and the meadow, and a certain share of the arable. The mark was a self-governing community. Its affairs were ordered by the markmen who met together at stated times in the markmoot. Soon, however, their freedom was encroached upon, and in the course of a very short time it disappeared altogether.

The extent and nature of the mark system has been, and still is, a subject of controversy among historians. One school holds that it was almost universal in Germany; that it was, in fact, the typical Teutonic method of holding and cultivating the land. From Germany, it is argued, it was introduced by the Angle and Saxon invaders into England, where it was extensively adopted, being the foundation upon which the prevailing land system in early England was built. An opposing school denies entirely the existence of the mark system, and a French writer, Fustel de Coulanges, refers to it contemptuously as “a figment of the Teutonic imagination.” This view is based largely upon the supposition that common ownership of the land was practically unknown among the early Germans, and was by no means general among the early English. The truth will doubtless be found to lie somewhere between the two extremes. The complete mark system was certainly not prevalent in Anglo-Saxon England, nor did it exist very widely, or for any very long period in Germany, but the system which did prevail in these two countries contained elements which are also found in the mark system.

The chief authority on the mark system is G. L. von Maurer, who has writtenEinleitung zur Geschichte der Mark- Hof- Dorf- und Stadtverfassung und der öffentlichen Gewalt(Munich, 1854; new ed., Vienna, 1896), andGeschichte der Markenverfassung in Deutschland(Erlangen, 1856). See also N. D. Fustel de Coulanges,Recherches sur quelques problèmes de l’histoire(1885); and a translation from the same writer’s works calledThe Origin of Property in Land, by M. Ashley. This contains an introductory chapter by Professor W. J. Ashley. Other authorities are K. Lamprecht,Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter(Leipzig, 1886); R. Schröder,Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte(Leipzig, 1902); and W. Stubbs,Constitutional History of England, vol. i. (1891).

MARL(from O. Fr.marle, Late Lat.margila, dim. ofmarga; cf. Du. and Ger.Mergel), a calcareous clay, or a mixture of carbonate of lime with argillaceous matter. It is impossible to give a strict definition of a marl, for the term is applied to a great variety of rocks and soils with a considerable range of composition. On the one hand, the marls graduate into clays by diminution in the amount of lime that they contain, and on the other hand they pass into argillaceous limestones (seeLimestone). From 25-75% of carbonate of lime may be regarded as characteristic of the marls. But in popular usage many substances are called marls which would not be included under the definition given here. The practice formerly much in vogue of top-dressing land with marls, and the use of many different kinds of earth and clay for that purpose, has led to a very general misapplication of the term; for all sorts of rotted rock, some being of igneous origin while others are rain-wash, loams, and various superficial deposits, have been called “marls” in different parts of Britain, if only it was believed that an application of them to the surface of the fields would result in increased fertility.

The typical marls are soft, earthy, and of a white, grey or brownish colour. Many of them disintegrate in water; and they are readily attacked by dilute hydrochloric acid, which dissolves the carbonate of lime rapidly, giving off bubbles of carbon dioxide. The lime of some marls is present in the form of shells, whole or broken; in others it is a fine impalpable powder mixed with the clay. In many marls there is organic matter (plant fragments or humus). Sand is usually not abundant but is rarely absent. Gypsum occurs in some marls, occasionally in large simple crystals with the form of lozenge-shaped plates or in twinned groups resembling an arrow-head; fine examples of these are obtained in the marls of Montmartre near Paris, where celestine (strontium sulphate) occurs also in nodular or concretionary masses. Large crystals of calcite or of dolomite, lumps of iron pyrites or radiate nodules of marcasite, and small crystals of quartz are found in certain marl deposits; and in Westphalia the marls of the Senonian (part of the Cretaceous system) at Hamm yield masses of strontianite up to two feet in length. A very large variety of accessory minerals may be proved to exist in marls by microscopic examination.

The rocks known as shell marls are found in many parts of Britain and other northern countries, and are much valued by farmers as a source of carbonate of lime, though rarely burned to produce quicklime. They are generally obtained by digging pits in marshy spots or meadows, and often occur below considerable thicknesses of peat. Large numbers of shells of fresh-water mollusca are scattered through a matrix of clay; usually retaining their shapes though they are in a friable and semi-decomposed state. The species represented are very few, and from their unbroken state it is obvious that theyhave not been transported but lived in the place where their remains are found. As mollusca of this kind thrive best in open stretches of clear water, the sites of the marl deposits must have been shallow lakes and open pools.Among the older strata it is not uncommon to find beds which have the same composition and in many cases the same origin as shell marl. While some of them are fresh-water deposits, others are of marine origin. The “crag beds” of the Pliocene formation in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex are essentially sand and gravel, which are often rich in shells; with them occur clays such as the Chillesford clay; and many of these beds have actually been used as marls for dressing the surface of agricultural land. Better examples occur among the Oligocene beds of the Hampshire basin and the Isle of Wight, where the Steadon, Bembridge and Hempstead marls are clays, more or less sandy, containing fresh-water shells. In the Cretaceous rocks of the south of England soft argillaceous limestones of marine origin, which may be described as marls, occur on several horizons. At its base the white chalk is often mixed with clay, and the “chalk marl” is a rock of this kind; it is known in Cambridgeshire, at Folkestone, in the Isle of Wight, &c. The chloritic marl, which underlies the chalk and is well developed in the Isle of Wight, is a greenish argillaceous limestone, the colour being due to the presence of glauconite, not of chlorite; it is often very fossiliferous. The Gault, an argillaceous type of the Upper Greensand, is a stiff greyish calcareous clay, beneath the white chalk, well known for the excellent preservation of its fossils. It outcrops along the base of the escarpment of the North and South Downs; the original name given to it by William Smith was “the blue marl.” In the Jurassic rocks of England there are marls or shelly fresh-water clays in the Purbeck series and also in the estuarine beds of the Great Oolite, but the name “marlstone” has long been reserved for the argillaceous limestone of the Middle Lias. It ranges from the Dorset coast, through Edge Hill in Warwickshire and Lincolnshire, and thence to the sea in the north of Yorkshire, presenting many variations in this long extent of country and often accompanied by, or converted into, beds of clay ironstone. The marlstone is typically a firm, greyish limestone weathering to a rusty brown colour, and is always more or less argillaceous.In the Triassic rocks of Britain there is a very important series of red, green and mottled clays, over a thousand feet thick in some places, which have been called the New Red marls. They belong to the Keuper or uppermost division of the system, and in Cheshire contain valuable deposits of rock salt, the principal sources of that mineral in Great Britain. In the strict sense these rocks are not marls, being ferruginous clays rather than calcareous clays. Most of them appear to have been laid down in saline lakes in desert regions. As a rule they contain very few fossils, and often they have little or no carbonate of lime, but beds and veins of fibrous gypsum occur in them in considerable profusion. These rocks cover a wide area in the midland counties extending to the south coast near Exmouth, and reappear in the north in the Vale of Eden and a few places in southern Scotland. The clays are used for brick-making, and yield a stiff soil, mostly devoted to pasture and dairy farming. In the Rhaetic beds which immediately overlie the Triassic rocks there are three seams of calcareous clay, often only a few feet thick, which have been called the “grey marls” and the “tea-green marls.”To rocks older than these the name marl has not often been given, probably because, though argillaceous limestones are often common in the Carboniferous and Silurian rocks, they are usually firm and compact, while marls usually comprise rocks which are more or less soft and friable. In other countries, and especially in Germany, many different kinds of marl and of marl-slate are described. Two of these are of especial importance—the dark copper-bearing marl slate of the Permian rocks near Mansfeld in Germany, which has been long and extensively worked as sources of copper, and the white or creamy Solenhofen limestone, much quarried in Bavaria, and used as a lithographic stone.

Among the older strata it is not uncommon to find beds which have the same composition and in many cases the same origin as shell marl. While some of them are fresh-water deposits, others are of marine origin. The “crag beds” of the Pliocene formation in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex are essentially sand and gravel, which are often rich in shells; with them occur clays such as the Chillesford clay; and many of these beds have actually been used as marls for dressing the surface of agricultural land. Better examples occur among the Oligocene beds of the Hampshire basin and the Isle of Wight, where the Steadon, Bembridge and Hempstead marls are clays, more or less sandy, containing fresh-water shells. In the Cretaceous rocks of the south of England soft argillaceous limestones of marine origin, which may be described as marls, occur on several horizons. At its base the white chalk is often mixed with clay, and the “chalk marl” is a rock of this kind; it is known in Cambridgeshire, at Folkestone, in the Isle of Wight, &c. The chloritic marl, which underlies the chalk and is well developed in the Isle of Wight, is a greenish argillaceous limestone, the colour being due to the presence of glauconite, not of chlorite; it is often very fossiliferous. The Gault, an argillaceous type of the Upper Greensand, is a stiff greyish calcareous clay, beneath the white chalk, well known for the excellent preservation of its fossils. It outcrops along the base of the escarpment of the North and South Downs; the original name given to it by William Smith was “the blue marl.” In the Jurassic rocks of England there are marls or shelly fresh-water clays in the Purbeck series and also in the estuarine beds of the Great Oolite, but the name “marlstone” has long been reserved for the argillaceous limestone of the Middle Lias. It ranges from the Dorset coast, through Edge Hill in Warwickshire and Lincolnshire, and thence to the sea in the north of Yorkshire, presenting many variations in this long extent of country and often accompanied by, or converted into, beds of clay ironstone. The marlstone is typically a firm, greyish limestone weathering to a rusty brown colour, and is always more or less argillaceous.

In the Triassic rocks of Britain there is a very important series of red, green and mottled clays, over a thousand feet thick in some places, which have been called the New Red marls. They belong to the Keuper or uppermost division of the system, and in Cheshire contain valuable deposits of rock salt, the principal sources of that mineral in Great Britain. In the strict sense these rocks are not marls, being ferruginous clays rather than calcareous clays. Most of them appear to have been laid down in saline lakes in desert regions. As a rule they contain very few fossils, and often they have little or no carbonate of lime, but beds and veins of fibrous gypsum occur in them in considerable profusion. These rocks cover a wide area in the midland counties extending to the south coast near Exmouth, and reappear in the north in the Vale of Eden and a few places in southern Scotland. The clays are used for brick-making, and yield a stiff soil, mostly devoted to pasture and dairy farming. In the Rhaetic beds which immediately overlie the Triassic rocks there are three seams of calcareous clay, often only a few feet thick, which have been called the “grey marls” and the “tea-green marls.”

To rocks older than these the name marl has not often been given, probably because, though argillaceous limestones are often common in the Carboniferous and Silurian rocks, they are usually firm and compact, while marls usually comprise rocks which are more or less soft and friable. In other countries, and especially in Germany, many different kinds of marl and of marl-slate are described. Two of these are of especial importance—the dark copper-bearing marl slate of the Permian rocks near Mansfeld in Germany, which has been long and extensively worked as sources of copper, and the white or creamy Solenhofen limestone, much quarried in Bavaria, and used as a lithographic stone.

(J. S. F.)

MARLBOROUGH, EARLS AND DUKES OF.The earldom of Marlborough was held by the family of Ley from 1626 to 1679. James Ley, the 1st earl (c.1550-1629), was lord chief justice of the King’s Bench in Ireland and then in England; he was an English member of parliament and was lord high treasurer from 1624 to 1628. In 1624 he was created Baron Ley and in 1626 earl of Marlborough. The 3rd earl was his grandson James (1618-1665), a naval officer who was killed in action with the Dutch. James was succeeded by his uncle William, a younger son of the 1st earl, on whose death in 1679 the earldom became extinct.

In 1689 John Churchill was created earl and in 1702 duke of Marlborough (see below). After the death of his only son Charles in 1703 an act of parliament was passed in 1706 settling the duke’s titles upon his daughters and their issue. Consequently when he died in June 1722 his eldest daughter Henrietta (1681-1733), wife of Francis Godolphin, 2nd earl of Godolphin, became duchess of Marlborough. She died without sons and was succeeded by her nephew Charles Spencer, 5th earl of Sunderland (1706-1758), a son of the great duke’s second daughter Anne (d. 1716). Although at this time Charles handed over the Sunderland estates to his younger brother John, the ancestor of the earls Spencer, he did not obtain Blenheim until Sarah, the dowager duchess, died in 1744. His eldest son George Spencer, the 4th duke (1739-1817), left three sons. The eldest, George Spencer, the 5th duke (1766-1840), was summoned to the House of Lords as Baron Spencer of Wormleighton in 1806, and in 1817, after succeeding to the dukedom, he took the name of Spencer-Churchill. The 4th duke’s second son was Lord Henry John Spencer (1770-1795), envoy to Sweden and to Prussia; and his third son was Lord Francis Almeric Spencer (1779-1845), who was created a peer as Baron Churchill of Whichwood in 1815. His grandson Victor Albert Francis Charles Spencer (b. 1864) succeeded his father as 3rd Baron Churchill in 1886, and was raised to the rank of a viscount in 1902.

The 7th duke of Marlborough, John Winston Spencer-Churchill (1822-1883), a prominent Conservative politician, was lord-lieutenant of Ireland 1876-1880, and when marquess of Blandford (the courtesy title borne by the duke’s eldest son in his father’s lifetime) was responsible for the act of 1856 called the “Blandford Act,” enabling populous parishes to be divided for purposes of Church work. In 1892 his grandson Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill (b. 1871) became 9th duke of Marlborough.

MARLBOROUGH, JOHN CHURCHILL,1st Duke of(1650-1722), English soldier, was born in the small manor house of Ash, in Musbury, Devonshire, near Axminster, in May or June 1650. Arabella Churchill, his eldest sister, and the mother of the duke of Berwick, was born in the same house on the 28th of February 1648. They were the children of Winston Churchill of Glanville Wotton in Dorset and Elizabeth the fourth daughter of Sir John Drake, who died in 1636; his widow, after the close of the civil war, received her son-in-law into her own house. From 1663 to 1665 John Churchill went to St Paul’s school, and there is a tradition that during this period he showed the bent of his taste by reading and re-reading VegetiusDe re militari. When fifteen years old he became page of honour to the duke of York, and about the same time his sister Arabella became maid of honour to the duchess, two events which contributed greatly to the advancement of the Churchills. On the 14th of September 1667 he received through the influence of his master a commission in the Guards, and left England for service at Tangier but returned home in the winter of 1670-1671. For a short interval Churchill remained in attendance at the court, and it was during this period that the natural carefulness of his disposition was shown by his investing in an annuity a present of £5,000 given him by the duchess of Cleveland.

In June 1672, when England to her shame sent six thousand troops to aid Louis XIV. in his attempt to subdue the Dutch, Churchill was made a captain in the company of which the duke of York was colonel, and soon attracted the attention of Turenne, by whose profound military genius the whole army was directed. At the siege of Nimeguen Churchill acquitted himself with such success that the French commander predicted his ultimate rise to distinction. When Maestricht was besieged in June 1673 he saved the life of the duke of Monmouth, and received the thanks of Louis XIV. for his services. In 1678 he was married to Sarah Jennings (b. June 5, 1660), the favourite attendant on the Princess Anne, younger daughter of the duke of York. Her father, Richard Jennings of Sandridge, near St Albans, had twenty-two brothers and sisters; one of the latter married a London tradesman named Francis Hill, and their daughter Abigail Hill afterwards succeeded her cousin the duchess of Marlborough as favourite to Queen Anne.

On the accession of James II. the Churchills received a great increase in fortune. Colonel Churchill had been created a Scotch peer as Lord Churchill of Eyemouth on the 21st of December 1682; and as a reward for his services in going on a special mission from the new monarch to Louis XIV. he wasadvanced on the 14th of May 1685 to the English peerage under the title of Baron Churchill of Sandridge in Hertfordshire. When the duke of Monmouth attempted his ill-fated enterprise in the western counties, the second position in command of the king’s army was bestowed on Lord Churchill, and on the 3rd of July 1685 he was raised to the rank of major-general. Through his vigilance and energy at the battle of Sedgemoor (July 6) victory declared itself on the king’s side. After the death of Monmouth he withdrew as far as possible from the administration of public business, but both he and his wife remained the favourite attendants of the princess Anne. Whilst on his embassy to the French court he had declared with emphasis that if the king of England should change the religion of the state he should at once leave his service, and it was not long before the design of James became apparent to the world. Churchill was one of the first to send overtures of obedience to the prince of Orange, to whom he had gone on a commission in 1678. Although he continued in a high position under James and drew the emoluments of his places, he promised William of Orange to use every exertion to bring over the troops to his side. James had been warned against putting any trust in the loyalty of the man on whom he had showered so many favours, but the warnings were in vain, and on the landing of the Dutch prince at Brixham Churchill was promoted to be lieutenant-general (Nov. 7, 1688) and was sent against him with five thousand men. When the royal army had advanced to the downs of Wiltshire and a battle seemed imminent, James was dismayed at finding that in the dead of night his general had stolen away like a thief into the opposite camp.

Churchill was sworn as a privy councillor on the 14th of February 1688/9 and on the 9th of April became earl of Marlborough. William felt, however, that he could not place implicit reliance in his friend’s integrity; and, with a clear sense of the manner in which Marlborough’s talents might be employed without any detriment to the stability of his throne, he sent him in June 1689 with the army into the Netherlands, and in the autumn of 1690 into Ireland, where owing to his generalship Cork and Kinsale fell into his hands after short sieges. For some time there was no open avowal of any distrust in Marlborough’s loyalty, but in May 1692 he was thrown into the Tower on an accusation of treason. Though the evidence which could be brought against him was slight, and he was soon set at liberty, there is no doubt that Marlborough was in close relations with the exiled king at St Germains, and that he even went so far as to disclose, in May 1694, to his late master the intention of the English to attack the town of Brest. The talents of the statesmen of this reign were chiefly displayed in their attempts to convince both the exiled and the reigning king of England of their attachment to his fortunes. The sin of Marlborough lay in the fact that he had been favoured above his fellows by each in turn, and that he betrayed both alike apparently without scruple or without shame. Once again during the Fenwick plot of 1696 he was charged with treason, but William, knowing that if he pushed Marlborough and his friends to extremities there were no other statesmen on whom he could rely, contented himself with ignoring the accusation of Sir John Fenwick, and with executing that conspirator himself. In 1698 the forgiven traitor was made governor to the young duke of Gloucester, the only one of Anne’s numerous children who gave promise of attaining to manhood. During the last years of William’s reign Marlborough once more was placed in positions of responsibility. His daughters were married into the most prominent families of the land; Henrietta, the eldest, became the wife of Francis, the eldest son of Lord Godolphin; the second, the loveliest woman at the court, with her father’s tact and temper and her mother’s beauty, married Charles, Lord Spencer, the only surviving son of the earl of Sunderland. Higher honours came on the accession of Queen Anne in March 1702. He was at once appointed a Knight of the Garter, captain-general of the English troops both at home and abroad, and master-general of the ordnance. The new queen did not forget the life-long service of his wife; three positions at the court by which she was enabled to continue by the side of the sovereign were united in her person. The queen showed her devotion to her friend by another signal mark of favour. The rangership of Windsor Park was granted her for life, with the especial object of enabling Lady Marlborough to live in the Great Lodge. These were the opening days of many years of fame and power. A week or two after the death of William it was agreed by the three great powers, England, Holland and Austria, which formed the grand alliance, that war should be declared against France on the same day, and on the 4th of May 1702 the War of the Spanish Succession was declared by the three countries. Marlborough was made commander-in-chief of the united armies of England and Holland, but throughout the war his plans were impeded by the jealousy of the commanders who were nominally his inferiors, and by the opposite aims of the various countries that were striving to break the power of France. He himself wished to penetrate into the French lines; the anxiety of the Dutch was for the maintenance of their frontier and for an augmentation of their territory; the desire of the Austrian emperor was to secure that his son the Archduke Charles should rule over Spain. To secure concerted action by these different powers taxed all the diplomacy of Marlborough, but he succeeded for the most part in his desires. In the first year of the campaign it was shown that the armies of the French were not invincible. Several fortresses which Louis XIV. had seized upon surrendered to the allies. Kaiserswerth on the Rhine surrendered on the 15th of June, and Venlo on the Meuse on the 23rd of September. The prosperous commercial town of Liége with its commanding citadel capitulated on the 29th of October. The successes of Marlborough caused much rejoicing in his own country, and for these brilliant exploits he was raised (Dec. 14, 1702) to be duke of Marlborough, and received a grant of £5000 per annum for the queen’s life. In the spring of the following year a crushing blow fell upon the duke and duchess. Their eldest and only surviving son, the marquess of Blandford, was seized whilst at King’s College, Cambridge (under the care of Francis Hare, afterwards bishop of Chichester), with the small-pox, and died on the 20th of February 1703, in his seventeenth year. His talents had already justified the prediction that he would rise to the highest position in the state.

The result of the campaign of 1703 inspired the French king with fresh hopes of ultimate victory. The dashing plans of Marlborough were frustrated by the opposition of his Dutch colleagues. When he wished to invade the French territory they urged him to besiege Bonn, and he was compelled to accede to their wishes. It surrendered on the 15th of May, whereupon he returned to his original plan of attacking Antwerp; but, in consequence of the incapacity of the Dutch leaders, the generals (Villeroi and Boufflers) of the French army surprised the Dutch division on the 30th of June and inflicted on it a loss of many thousands of men. Marlborough was forced to abandon his enterprise, and all the compensation which he received was the capture of the insignificant forts of Huy and Limburg. After a year of comparative failure for the allies, Louis XIV. was emboldened to enter upon an offensive movement against Austria; and Marlborough, smarting under the misadventures of 1703, was eager to meet him. A magnificent army was sent by the French king, under the command of Marshal Tallard, to join the forces of the elector of Bavaria and to march by the Danube so as to seize Vienna itself. Marlborough divined the intention of the expedition, and while making a feint of marching into Alsace led his troops into Bavaria. The two armies (that under Marlborough and Prince Eugène numbering more than fifty thousand men, whilst Tallard’s forces were nearly four thousand stronger) met in battle near the village of Blenheim on the left bank of the Danube. The French commander made the mistake of supposing that the enemy’s attack would be directed against his position in the village, and he concentrated an excessive number of his troops at that point. The early part of the fight was in favour of the French. Three times were the troops led by Prince Eugène, which were attacking the Bavarians, the enemy’s left wing, driven back in confusion; Marlborough’s cavalryfailed on their first attack in breaking the line of the enemy’s centre. But in the end the victory of the allies was conclusive. Nearly thirty thousand of the French and Bavarians were killed and wounded, and eleven thousand of the French who had been driven down to the Danube were forced to surrender. Bavaria fell into the hands of the allies. Never was a victory more eagerly welcomed than this, and never was a conquering leader more rewarded than Marlborough. Poets and prose writers were employed to do him honour, and the lines of Addison comparing the English commander to the angel who passed over “pale Britannia” in the storm of 1703 have been famous for over two centuries. The manor of Woodstock, which was transferred by act of parliament from the crown to the duke, was a reward more after his own heart. The gift even in that form was noble, but the queen heightened it by instructing Sir John Vanbrugh to build a palace in the park at the royal expense, and £240,000 of public money was spent on the buildings. He was also created a prince of the empire and the principality of Mindelheim was formed in his honour.

The following year was not marked by any stirring incident. Marlborough was hampered by tedious formalities at the Hague and by jealousies at the German courts. The armies of the French were again brought up to their full standard, but the generals of Louis were instructed to entrench themselves behind earthworks and to act on the defensive. In the darkness of a July night these lines were broken through near Tirlemont, and the French were forced to take shelter under the walls of Louvain. Marlborough in vain urged an attack upon them in their new position, and when 1705 had passed away the forces of the French king had suffered no diminution. This immunity from disaster tempted Villeroi in the next spring into meeting the allied forces in an open fight, but his assurance proved his ruin. Through the superior tactics of Marlborough the battle of Ramillies (May 23, 1706) ended in the total rout of the French, and caused the transference of nearly the whole of Brabant and Flanders to the allies. Five days afterwards the victor entered Brussels in state, and the inhabitants acknowledged the rule of the archduke. Antwerp and Ostend surrendered themselves with slight loss. Menin held out until three thousand of the soldiers of the allies were laid low around its walls, but Dendermonde, which Louis had forty years previously besieged in vain, quickly gave itself up to the resistless Marlborough. Again a year of activity and triumph was succeeded by a period of languor and depression. During the whole of 1707 fortune inclined to the other side, with the result that in July 1708 Ghent and Bruges returned to the allegiance of the French, and Marlborough, fearing that their example might be followed by the other cities, advanced with his whole army towards Oudenarde. Had the counsels of Vendôme, one of the ablest of the French generals, prevailed, the fight might have had a different issue, but his suggestions were disregarded by the duke of Burgundy, the grandson of Louis, and the battle, which raged on the high ground above Oudenarde, ended in their defeat (July 11, 1708). After this victory Marlborough, ever anxious for decisive measures, wished to advance on Paris, but he was overruled. The allied army invested the town of Lille, on the fortifications of which Vauban had expended an immensity of thought; and after a struggle of nearly four months, and the loss to the combatants of thirty thousand men, the citadel was surrendered by Marshal Boufflers on the 9th of December. By the end of the year Brabant was again subject to the rule of the allies. The suffering in France at this time weighed so heavily upon the people that its proud king humbled himself to sue for peace. Each of the allies in turn did he supplicate, and Torcy his minister endeavoured by promises of large sums of money to obtain the support of Marlborough to his proposals. These attempts were in vain, and when the winter passed away a French army of one hundred and ten thousand, under the command of Villars, took the field. On the 3rd of September 1709 Tournay capitulated, and the two leaders, Marlborough and Eugène, led their forces to Mons, in spite of the attempt of Villars to prevent them. For the last time during the protracted war the two armies met in fair fight at Malplaquet, on the south of Mons (Sept. 11, 1709), where the French leader had strengthened his position by extensive earthworks. The fight was long and doubtful, and although the French ultimately retreated under the direction of Boufflers, for Villars had been wounded on the knee, it was in good order, and their losses were less than those of their opponents. The campaign lasted for a year or two after this indecisive contest, but it was not signalized by any such “glorious victory” as Blenheim. All that the English could plume themselves on was the acquisition of a few such fortresses as Douai and Bethune, and all that the French had to fear was the gradual tightening of the enemy’s chain until it reached the walls of Paris. The energies of the French were concentrated in the construction of fresh lines of defence, until their commander boasted that his position was impregnable. In this way the war dragged on until the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht in June 1712.

These victorious campaigns had not prevented the position of Marlborough from being undermined by party intrigues at home. In the early part of Queen Anne’s reign his political friends were to be found among the Tories, and the ministry under Sidney Godolphin was chiefly composed of members of that party. After a year or two, however, the more ardent Tories withdrew, and two younger adherents of the same cause, Harley and St John, were introduced in May 1704 into the ministry. The duchess, partly through the influence of her son-in-law, the earl of Sunderland, who came into office against the queen’s wish on the 3rd of December 1706, and partly through the opposition of the Tories to the French war, had gone over to the Whig cause, and she pressed her views on the sovereign with more vehemence than discretion. She had obtained for her indigent cousin, Abigail Hill, a small position at court, and the poor relation very soon began to injure the benefactor who had befriended her. With Hill’s assistance Harley and St John widened the breach with the queen which was commenced by the imperious manner of the duchess. The love of the two friends changed into hate, and no opportunity for humiliating the family of Marlborough was allowed to pass neglected. Sunderland and Godolphin were the first to fall (July-Aug. 1710); a few months later the duchess was dismissed from her offices; and, although Marlborough himself was permitted to continue in his position a short time longer, his fall was only delayed until the last day of 1711. Life in England had become so unpleasant that he went to the Continent in November 1712 and remained abroad until the death of Anne (Aug. 1, 1714).

Then he once more returned to England and resumed his old military posts, but he took little part in public affairs. Even if he had wished to regain his commanding position in the country, ill health would have prevented him from obtaining his desires. Johnson indeed says, in theVanity of Human Wishes, that “the streams of dotage” flowed from his eyes; but this is a poetical exaggeration. It is certain that at the time of his death he was able to understand the remarks of others and to express his own wishes. At four o’clock on the morning of the 16th of June 1722 he died at Cranbourn Lodge, near Windsor. His remains were at first deposited in Westminster Abbey, in the vault at the east end of King Henry VII.’s chapel, but they now rest in a mausoleum in the chapel at Blenheim.

His widow, to whom must be assigned a considerable share both in his rise and in his fall, survived till the 18th of October 1744. Those years were spent in bitter animosity with many within and without her own family. Left by her husband with the command of boundless wealth, she used it for the vindication of his memory and for the justification of her own resentment. Two of the leading opponents of the Whig ministry, Chesterfield and Pitt, were especially honoured by her attentions. To Pitt she left ten thousand pounds, to the other statesman twice that sum and a reversionary interest in her landed property at Wimbledon. Whilst a widow she received numerous offers of marriage from titled suitors. She refused them all: from her marriage to her death her heart had no other inmate than the man as whose wife she had become almost a rival to royalty.

The rapid rise of Marlborough to the highest position in the State was due to his singular tact and his diplomatic skill in the management of men. In an age remarkable for grace of manner and for adroitness of compliment, his courteous demeanour and the art with which he refused or granted a favour extorted the admiration of every one with whom he came in contact. Through his consideration for the welfare of his soldiers he held together for years an army drawn from every nation in Christendom. His talents may not have been profound (he possessed “an excellent plain understanding and sound judgment” is the opinion of Lord Chesterfield), but they were such as Englishmen love. Alike in planning and in executing, he took infinite pains in all points of detail. Nothing escaped his observation, and in the hottest moment of the fight the coolness of his intellect shone conspicuous. His enemies indeed affected to attribute his uniform success in the field to fortune, and they magnified his love of money by drawing up balance sheets which included every penny which he had received, but omitted the pounds which he had spent in the cause he had sincerely at heart. All that can be alleged in excuse of his attempts to serve two masters, the king whom he had deserted and the king who had received him into favour, is that not one of his associates was without sin in this respect.

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