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 1685, 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 1685, showed that 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 
