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""The ARMS and CREST of Edmund Moodye otherwise Moody of Bury St. Edmunds in the County of Suffolk, A Gentleman, granted by letters patent under the hand and seal of THOMAS HAWLEY, CLARENCEUX KING OF ARMS on the sixth day of October 1541 in the thirty second year of His Majesty KING HENRY VIII for miraculously saving his life at Hitchin, County of Herts, when leaping over a ditch with a pole which brake; that if the said Edmund, a footman in the King's retinue, had not leapt into ye water and lifted up the King's head, he had drowned; for which he was rewarded. "The Reward of Valor"
"If Will Somers had dared, he could probably have made his audience see the comic aspects of an accident that befell the King in 1525. But in fact this was no laughing matter, for, once again, Henry was nearly killed. When he was "following of his hawk" near Hitchin, he tried to pole-vault over a ditch, but the pole snapped and he landed headfirst in the muddy water. Stuck fast in the clay, he would have drowned had it not been for a footman, Edmund Mody, who leapt into the stream and hauled him out. This accident (or the one in the tiltyard a year before) might have accounted for the headaches he suffered later on, but its immediate effect was to bring home to the king, more forcibly than ever, the fact that the problem of the succession must be solved as a matter of urgency."
"In this yere the kyng folowyng of his hauke, lept over a diche beside Hychyn, with a polle and the polle brake, so that if one Edmond Mody, a foteman, had not lept into the water, and lift up his hed, whiche was fast in the clay, he had drowned: but God of his goodness preserved him."
'Richard purchased land in Moulton in 1572, acquiring a considerable landed estate in Western Suffolk and lived in a house called Fryette's in Moulton, which he bought from the executors of Roger Fryette. He owned a flock of 400 sheep at Isleham, Cambridgeshire'.
