Talk:Oliver Le Neve

Lawyer and witness?
In writing this article I have searched extensively for any historic and modern reliable source that says Le Neve was a lawyer or that the duel was witnessed by a girl in a bush. These claims have been made on the web (and some Wikipedia articles), on blog and forum sites, and repeated in newspaper articles, all that provide no verifiable evidence for either; such as this one: The Duel. There appears no evidence he was lawyer; even if he studied law (we don't know) at Hart College, that wouldn't qualify him to be called a lawyer unless he practiced as one; being a magistrate doesn't make him de facto a lawyer. The girl in the bush idea is local legend, which is therefore completely unreliable for an encyclopedia unless this legend is repeated (with caveat that it is only legend) in a reliable source, as here, which I have included and qualified but without the ghost trivia.

Having said that about the duel, if there were no contemporary witnesses, how would we know what was supposed to have taken place, actually took place? It could be that Hobart and/or Le Neve told of it, the story being handed down verbally through family and friends. I can find no evidence for that. An author I use as one source, Adam Nicolson, Six Hundred Years of a Peculiarly English Class, seems to have done a lot of research and has more than likely seen actual contemporary first hand records. If the lawyer and witness thing was credible, I suspect he would have found it and alluded to it in his book.

If anyone can find cast iron reliable evidence for these claims being true I would be grateful; until then they should be left out of all Wikipedia articles which mention Oliver Le Neve and the duel. Thanks. Acabashi (talk) 13:42, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Use of article text
Text taken directly from this article was added word for word to a Wordpress website personal private blog article "The Last Norfolk Duel" (https://norfolktalesmyths.com/tag/great-witchingham-hall/ — Whois registration identified as at Beaverton, US, dated 3 October 2018, six months after this article was written. The blatant copy pasting was not credited to Wikipedia, therefore is copyright violation under Wikipedia's Creative Commons licencing, see WP:COPYRIGHT. Acabashi (talk) 17:05, 2 November 2020 (UTC)