520 
THE ANTIQUITIES 
[LETT. 
LETTEE XVJI. 
Information being sent to Eome respecting the havoc and 
spoil that was carrying on among the revenues and lands of 
the Priory of Selborne, as we may suppose by the Bishop of 
Winchester, its visitor, Pope Martin/ as soon as the news of 
these proceedings came before him, issued forth a bull, in 
which he enjoins his commissary immediately to revoke all the 
property that had been alienated. 
In this instrument his holiness accuses the prior and canons 
of having granted away (they themselves and their predecessors) 
to certain clerks and laymen their tithes, lands, rents, tenements, 
and possessions, to some of them for their lives, to others for an 
undue term of years, and to some again for a perpetuity, to the 
great and heavy detriment of the monastery : and these leases 
were granted, he continues to add, under their own hands, with 
the sanction of an oatli and the renunciation of all rights and 
claims, and under penalties, if the right was not made good. 
But it will be best to give an abstract from the bull. 
N. 298. Pope Martin's bull, touching the revoking of cer- 
tain things alienated from the Priory of Seleburne. Pontif. 
sui ann. 1. 
"Martinus Eps. servus servorum Dei. Dilecto filio Priori 
de Suthvale ^ Wyntonien. dioc. Salutem & apostolicam ben. Ad 
audientiam nostram pervenit quam tam dilecti filii prior et con- 
ventus monasterii de Seleburn per Priorem soliti gubernari 
ordinis S*\ Augustini Winton. dioc. quam de predecessores eorum 
decimas, terras, redditus, domos, possessiones, vineas,^ et quedam 
alia bona ad monasterium ipsum spectantia, datis super hoc 
1 Pope Martin V. chosen about 1417. He attempted to reform the Church, 
but died in 1431, just as he had summoned the council of Basil. 
2 Should have been no doubt South wick, a priory under Portsdown. 
^ Mr. Barrington is of opinion that anciently the English vinea was in 
almost every instance an orchard ; not perhaps always of apples merely, but 
of other fruits ; as cherries, plums, and currants. We still say a plum or 
cherry-orchard. — See Vol. iii. of Archselogia. 
In the instance above the pope's secretary might insert vineas merely 
because they were a species of cultivation familar to him in Italy. 
