"She Ancient Jfvcc &upd of €ovton. 



Head before the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club on 

 Wednesday, August 9th, 1893. 



By the Rev. W. MILES BARNES. 



II fZORTON CHAPEL, a higlily interesting iDuikling, was 

 II a free chapel. A free chapel Avas so called because 



it was exempt from the jurisdiction of the Diocesan. 

 Those chapels are properly free chapels which are 

 of the King's foundation and by him exempt from 

 the Ordinary's Visitation. Also chapels founded 

 within a parish for the service of God by the 

 devotion and liberality of pious men, over and above the mother 

 church, and endowed with maintenance by the founders, which was 

 free for the inhabitants of the parish to come to, were therefore 

 called free chapels (Jacob's Law Dictionary, a.d. 1744). Free 

 chapels, possibly through fear of the abuse of their freedom, were 

 generally on lands which belonged, or had belonged, to the Royal 

 demesnes. I do not find Gorton amongst the "terrse regis" in 

 Doomsday, though it appears to have been held of the King after 

 the Gonquest by Roger de Gurcelle. There is mention of the 

 chapel in 1341, when Hugh Gourtney, Earl of Devon, held both 

 the manor and the chapel, but the chapel must have existed long 



