86 Some Account of the Parish of Monkton Farleigh. 



dispersed, their ecclesiastical buildings were pulled down, their 

 manor, their farmsteads, and probably their domestic buildings, 

 were made over to the Earl of Hertford, afterwards the Protector 

 Somerset. 



The history of the manor thereafter merges into that of the manor 

 house, and this will form the subject of my next chapter. 



In appendices A. to F. will be found some further details of the 

 manor and its people in Clugniac times which perhaps may be of 

 interest. 



CHAPTER IV. 

 The Manor House. 



Our manor house, like most other buildings of equal antiquity, 

 bears, upon the face of it, the signs of various ages and many 

 changes, but I am persuaded that it stands upon the exact site and 

 to some extent upon the very foundations of the domestic buildings 

 of the Priory. 



The stone of which it is built was brought, I have ascertained, 

 out of the now disused quarries on Farleigh Down, and corresponds 

 in that respect with the stone of which the Priory was built. Fur- 

 thermore the position of the house relatively to what was the position 

 of the ecclesiastical buildings of the Priory, places it, as I have 

 elsewhere explained, exactly where the domestic buildings of the 

 Priory might be expected to be. 



And, again, the west side of the main body of the house belongs, 

 according to Mr. Talbot, undoubtedly to the Elizabethan period. 



These facts would not, of course, be at all conclusive, nor would 

 they take us necessarily to the Priory times, but, through the kind- 

 ness of Mr. Henry Hancock, I have had access to the records of 

 the manor, and amongst them is a lease of A.D. 1638, which recites 

 in detail a previous lease of the year 1547-48. 



By this deed the then Bishop of Salisbury leased our manor house 

 to one Henry Breton, styling it " the house, sight, circuit, premises 

 and grounds of the late dissolved monastery of Monkton Farleigh." 



Now it was in 1535-36 that the bill for the dissolution of the 

 lesser monasteries, i.e., of monasteries where " the congregation of 

 lelygyous persones is under the number of xij/' and where the 



