Edward Knight's Family
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John Morland Rice continued.
... following year. This Fellowship he held for seventeen years, and they were certainly among the happiest of his life – he made many friends, and was wont to tell many a story of the good fellowship that existed.
In 1848 he took Holy Orders, being ordained Priest in 1849; five years later he left Oxford to become 'Perpetual Curate of Wye', near to his home in Kent. The climate and work did not suit him however, and a knock on his head entering a low cottage further incapacitated him. After four years he resigned, and 'for years', so his niece, Evelyn Templetown, once wrote to me, 'lived with us at Haverholme'. It cannot have been so long really, as in 1860 he was Bursar of Magdalen – and there he remained in residence until his marriage in 1864 obliged him to resign his Fellowship.
The Archbishop of Armagh, Archbishop Alexander, 'one of the lights of his day', who was at Oxford with Morland, described him to Lady Templetown as 'the most brilliantly clever delightful fellow he had ever known'. He always spoke of him as 'dear Morland Rice'.
In the year of his marriage to Caroline York, daughter of Edward York of Wighill in Yorkshire; he was presented to the Magdalen living of Bramber cum Botolph. Bramber is an attractive rambling village lying at the foot of the Sussex Downs, not far from Brighton – and in this pleasant country, of which he became exceedingly fond, Morland settled down as Rector for thirty-three years. He ...
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