" Knight of the Garter. Lord President of the North. Member of Parliament for Yorkshire, 1614; privy councilor from 1629. Male heir born 1626. Brother-in-law of Clifford. Created Baron in Jul 1628, Viscount in Dec 1628. Opposed the King's forced loan. Later supported him. Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Impeached for high treason and beheaded. "

" Raimond : "Giraldus Raimundus" appears in Domesday as a mesne-lord in Essex: and the name continued there till about 1272, when John Reimund is found in the Rotuli Hundredorum.
At the same date the family was numerous in Kent. Their original seat was at Raymond's, near Rye.

They "were for a great length of time Stewards to the Abbot and Convent of Battel for their lands near this place; and it is probable that it was once the original stock from which the Raymonds of Essex, Norfolk and other counties, derived their extraction.
The family was extinct here before the thirty-sixth year of King Henry VIII."—Hasted's Kent. They probably removed from their old home when they lost the hereditary Stewardship of Wye at the dissolution of the monasteries.

It was a post of great dignity and trust; for the Royal manor of Wye was by far the most splendid of the gifts conferred by the Conqueror upon his Abbey.

According to Lambarde, it comprised the fifth part of the whole county of Kent; "appertaining to it were twenty hundreds and a half": and it was held from the Crown "with all its liberties and Royal customs, as freely and entirely as the King himself held them, or as a King could give them. " It enjoyed all the "maritime customs" owned by the Crown at Dengemarsh, which formed part of the soke of Wye, including the right of wreck; and no Royal edict was ever issued to the sheriffs and justiciars of Kent respecting the affairs of the Abbey without an especial direction that "they should preserve all the Royal liberties and customs of the manor of Wye."

From this Kentish stock Philipots, in his Villare Cantianum, concurs with Hasted in deriving the Raymonds of Essex. Their first move, however, appears to have been to Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, where we find Philip Raymond, in the sixteenth century, married to a county heiress who brought him Essendon.

Their great-grandson John (who was living in 1627) bought Belchamp-Walter of the Wentworths, and transplanted the Raymonds to this new home in Essex, where they still flourish. No doubt it was unwittingly that they thus returned to the county in which the name had originally taken root at the Conquest.

The next heir, Oliver, served as knight of the shire in the two parliaments summoned by Cromwell in 1653 and 1656, and was the happy father of twenty-one children. His eldest son, St. Clere, married against his consent, was cut out of the succession, and became "a haberdasher of hats in London" : but the inheritance was restored to his grandson.

The direct line failed in the next following generation, and Belchamp-Walter passed to a collateral branch that is still represented.

Another was seated at Little Coggeshall Hall in the same county; of whom James Raymond is mentioned by Morant in 1768. They bear Sable a chevron between three eagles displayed Argent; on a chief of the second, three martlets of the first. "

" Family portraits by well-known artists hang on the walls. One by Cornelius Janssen depicts the first John ஓaymond who bought the house and estate from Sir John Wentworth in 1611.

Elizabethan portraits of Sir William and Lady Harris, whose daughter Frances married Oliver Raymond, M.P. for Essex in the two Protectorate parliaments, hang each side of the door.

Sir William commanded a ship in the battle against the Spanish Armada and relics which he captured then, including an iron Treasure Chest with its original huge key, are still in the house. "

" As well as the accidental or deliberate damage to churches in the course of the fighting and due to purely military factors, many parliamentarians also sought for ideological and religious reasons to alter the fabric and fittings of churches, to remove and destroy physical elements and symbols which they associated with Roman Catholicism or with the high church, Laudian policies pursued by Charles I and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, during the pre-war period; for many opponents of these policies, Laudianism was effectively creeping Catholicism.

Targets of this ‘iconoclasm’ included altar rails (many of them very recently installed), altars, stained glass, paintings on screens, the screens themselves, religious statues and carvings, crosses, vestments, prayer books and organs; around the same time, though not principally for religious reasons, royal arms and the tombs and effigies of some elite families were also sometimes damaged or defaced.

Some of this religiously-motivated destruction was undertaken in a fairly methodical way, with campaigns of purification run during the mid 1640s in line with parliamentary policies and ordinances and overseen by mayors and aldermen or by semi-official commissioners – the best known and best recorded example of this type of iconoclasm is the work of William Dowsing in East Anglia.

However, much of it was far more ad hoc and spontaneous, undertaken by members of local communities, especially in the early 1640s, beginning at the time of the Scots wars and thus before the English civil war itself had broken out. "

" William Dowsing (1596–1668) was an English puritan, notable as an iconoclast during the English Civil War. "

" The nave was rebuilt circa 1330; it is of unusual width for a single span and very lofty. A Chantry Chapel was added at the North – East end, all that remains is what must have been a very beautiful canopied entrance. The body of the chapel evidently extended outside the North wall, and would have incorporated the tomb of the Botetourt family – Sir John de Botetourt having been buried in 1324. Prior to that date he occupied the Manor as under lord of the de Veres – Earls of Oxford, at Hedingham Castle, and Priory of Earls Colne, to whom the Church at that time belonged. The chapel was removed during the 16th century, and the remaining memorial was apparently defaced during the Civil War, at which time memorial brasses were also removed from tombs under the Centre Aisle. "