1804.

LIFE OF OOBDEN.

[oHAP.

hollows, where the shepherd finds a shelter from the noontide
 sun, or from the showers that are borne along in the
driving flight of the south-west wind.
Here, in an old farmhouse, known as Dunford, Richard
Cobden was born on June 8, 1804. He was the fourth of a
family of eleven children. His ancestors were yeomen of the
soil, and it is said, with every appearance of truth, that the
name can be traced in the annals of the district as far back
as the fourteenth century. The antiquarians of the county
have found out that one Adam de Coppdene was sent to
parliament by the borough of Chichester in 1314. There is
talk of a manor of Cobden in the ninth of Edward IV. (1470).
In 1562 there is a record of William Cobden devising lands
on the downs in Westdean. Thomas Cobden of Midhurst
was a contributor of twenty-five pounds to the fund raised
for resisting the Spanish Armada. When hearth-money
was levied in 1670, Richard Cobden, junior, is entered as
paying for seven out of the seventy-six hearths of the district.
 In the Sussex election poll-book for 1734 a later
Richard Cobden is put down ss a voter for the parish of
Midhurst, and four or five others are entered as freeholders
in other parts of West Sussex. The best opinion seems to
be that the settlement of the Cobdens at Midhurst took
place sometime in the seventeenth century, and that they
were lineal descendants of Sir Adem and Sir Ralph of
former ages.
However all this may be, the five hundred years that intervened
 had nursed no great prosperity. Cobden’s grandfather
and namesake was a maltster and farmer, and filled for
several years the principal office of bailiff for the borough
of Midhurst. When he died in 1809, he left a very
modest property behind him. Dunford was gold, and
William Cobden, the only son of Richard the elder, and
the father of the Richard Cobden with whom we are