The persons named in the tract of 1635--three years after Howell's letter--are also four, but they are of Zeal Monachorum. But the name of Oxenham does not occur at all in the registers of that parish, and in the tract, apparently, South Zeal has been mistaken for Zeal Monachorum.[23] In the first edition of Howell's epistles there is no date to the letter; that was supplied later, probably by the publisher. Now it is curious that in 1635 the name John Oxenham does occur as having been buried at South Tawton on July 31st, aged twenty-one. He was baptised July 10th, 1614. But there are no entries of Thomasine, wife of James, nor of Rebecca, aged eight, either baptised or buried; nor of Thomasine the babe.
[23] The author of the tract could not find any _parish_ of Zeal in Devonshire except Zeal Monachorum, where, as he did _not_ know, there were no Oxenhams, and so he converted the hamlet of Zeal in South Tawton, where the Oxenhams _were_ at home, into the Zeal where they were not.
In the tract we are informed that the white-breasted bird appeared when Grace, the grandmother of John Oxenham, died, in 1618.
And in fact we do find in the South Tawton registers for that date, September 2nd, 1618, Grace, the wife of John Oxenham, was buried.
That Howell's quotation from memory refers to the same four as are named in the tract is, I think, probable. He had not seen the tract, or he would have quoted the names correctly. The letter was not written at the date added to it at a later period, but in the same year as the tract appeared, when he was a prisoner in the Fleet for debt. Whether he ever saw the monument may be doubted, and he may have merely written for publication with mention of the story which he had from hearsay. As to the tract, it was one of those pious frauds by no means uncommon among the "goody-goody" writers of that and other days, and the incident of the white-breasted bird was an invention employed to "catch" the attention of readers, and lead on to the moral and pious sentiments that stuff the remainder of the tract. The trick of giving a list of witnesses was one resorted to by the ballad and tract mongers of the period, and it is noticeable that those whose names are appended as witnesses never existed at South Zeal, in South Tawton parish.