thought proper to assign so spacious a spot for the sports and amusements of its young people.*
As soon as the prior became possessed of this piece of ground, he procured a charter for a market † from King Henry III., and began to erect houses and stalls, "seldas" around it. From this period Selborne became a market town; but how long it enjoyed that privilege does not appear. At the same time, Gurdon reserved to himself, and his heirs, a way through the said Plestor to a tenement and some crofts at the upper end, abutting on the south corner of the churchyard. This was in old days the manerial house of the street manor, though now a poor cottage, and is known at present by the modern name of Elliot’s. Sir Adam also did, for the health of his own soul and that of his wife Constantia, their predecessors and successors, grant to the prior and canons quiet possession of all the tenements and gardens, "curtillagia" which they had built and laid out on the lands in Selborne, on which he and his vassals, "homines" had undoubted right of common; and moreover did grant to the convent the full privilege of that right of common, and empowered the religious to build tenements and make gardens along the king’s highway in the village of Selborne.
From circumstances put together, it appears that the above were the first grants obtained by the Priory in the village of Selborne after it had subsisted about thirty-nine years; moreover, they explain the nature of the mixed manor still remaining in and about the village, where one field or tenement shall belong to Magdalen College in the University of Oxford, and the next to Norton Powlet, Esq., of Rotherfield House, and so down the whole street. The case was, that the whole was once the pro-
* For more circumstances respecting the Plestor, see Letter II. to Mr. Pennant.
† Bishop Tanner, in his “Notitia Monastica” has made a mistake respecting the market and fair at Selborne; for in his references to Dodsworth, cart. 54 Hen. III., m. 3., he says, "De mercatu, et feria de Seleburn.” But this reference is wrong; for, instead of Seleburn, it proves that the place there meant was Lekeborne, or Legeborne, in the county of Lincoln. This error was copied from the index of the Cat. MSS. Angl. It does not appear that there ever was a chartered fair at Selborne. For several particulars respecting the present fair at Selborne, see Letter XXVI. of these Antiquities.
