73 PLUMSTEAD COMMONS. 



near Canterbury, and in part to the Bishop of Bayeux; but 

 the latter portion appears to have been merged, at some 

 subsequent period, in the former; and the united Manor 

 remained in the hands of the Monastery till its dis- 

 solution by Henry VIII., when it passed into the 

 possession of the King. In 1539, the King granted 

 the Manor to Sir Edward Boughton, in whose family 

 it remained till 1GS5, when it was sold to Mr. John 

 Michel, who, dying, in 1756, left it by will to the 

 Provost and Scholars of Queen's College, Oxford, in 

 whose hands it has remained to the present day. There 

 were no copyhold tenants of the Manor. The Manor 

 consisted, therefore, wholly of freehold tenants, and of 

 demesne lands. The Manorial Rolls, which existed in 

 a perfect state from 1G85, showed tha.t the freehold 

 tenants had exercised and enjoyed from the earliest 

 times the right of common for cattle and for estovers, 

 and the right to take turf, gravel, and loam in the 

 waste of the Manor, and that all moneys derived from 

 dealings with the waste, and from fines in the 

 Manorial Court, were divided between the Lord of the 

 Manor and the poor of the parish of Plumstead. The 

 Courts ceased to be held in 1853. 



From the year 1859, on the appointment of an 

 eminent Solicitor of London as Steward of the Manor, 

 a course of action was commenced and actively pursued, 

 based on the denial of the existence of any rights over 

 the Commons by the freeholders in the Manor, and on 

 the assertion that the Fellows of the College were prac- 

 tically owners of the soil of the waste, with power to do 



