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Margaret daughter of Sir William
Coningsby married Robert Alyngton, they had five sons and six daughters.
Robert died in 1552 at the age of 31. Margaret then married Thomas
Pledger of Ashdon Essex. On the north wall of the Alyngton Chapel
there is a large Elizabethan memorial enclosed by a contemporary
wrought iron grille with a fiuer-de-lis finials at the corners. There is
a kneeling man in Greenwich armour (Thomas Pledger) with a lady wearing
a ruff, kneeling at a prayer desk, behind him (Margaret).
Margaret died aged 78 in 1598. Thomas died in
1599 aged 70, four years before the death of Queen Elizabeth I.
The lives of these two devout Christians
coincided with the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth
I. Thomas and Margaret lived in troubled times. During the reign of
Mary, they must have been aware of the burning of several well-known
Bishops, and hundreds of other victims, including the disinterment and
burning of the bodies of two foreign reformers in Cambridge on the
orders of Cardinal Pole. The Pledger monument carries three shields of
arms – for Pledger, a second shield of ten coats over Margaret’s
head, and a third over the figure of Thomas Pledger.
Although
the name is spelt Pledger on the monument, there are documents of the
sixteenth century with the spelling Pledgard or Plergerde.
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