86 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
The amount of rent which the Bishop received under his 
lease in 1523 does not appear; but a few years later, namely, 
about 1547, two acres of meadow given by a benefactor to the 
poor of the parish of Fulham were valued at 13s. 4d. per acre.* 
The value of land here improved but slowly ; a century or more 
later, namely, in 1665, an entry in the churchwardens’ books 
shows that, at a vestry meeting held on May 15th in that year, it 
was ordered that ail arable land be rated and assessed at 20s. per 
acre, and all pasture land at 30s. per acre.t 
It would be interesting if the visitor to Fulham Palace at the 
present day could identify the trees (if still existing) in which the 
Spoonbills formerly had their nests. To point out the precise 
spot, however, would now perhaps be impossible, unless any 
tradition on the subject still survives, which is unlikely, or unless 
any old map or plan of the estate has been preserved on which 
the site of the heronry may be marked. The ground on which it 
stood is described in the report of the action above quoted as 
‘‘a park containing twenty acres of land.” 
In Lyson’s account of the parish (vol. ii., p. 853), we find the 
following description of the Bishop’s palace:—‘‘The house, 
gardens, and a large grass field called the warren, containing in 
the whole about 87 acres, are surrounded by a moat over which 
are two bridges. There belong also to the demesne about 
17 acres of meadow by the water side, the western part of which 
[separated by a creek from Craven Cottage when Faulkner wrote 
in 1813] being a singularly beautiful spot was much improved by 
Bishop Porteus, who made secure embankments towards the 
river and ornamented it with a shrubbery and plantations.” 
I incline to think that this ‘17 acres of meadow by the water 
side”’ represents the “park of 20 acres’? which was let for 
erazing in 1523, for it is not likely that any land within the still 
existing moat, and consequently so near the palace, would be let 
for such a purpose. 
One thing seems certain, there were formerly many more 
trees around the palace than are now to be found there. When 
Queen Elizabeth visited Bishop Aylmer there previous to his 
death in 1594, she ‘“ misliked nothing but that her lodgings were 
* Lyson’s ‘Environs of London,’ vol. ii. p. 895 (1795). 
} Faulkner, ‘ Hist. and Topog. Acct. Fulham,’ p. 150 (1818). 
