LETTER XVII.
Information being sent to Rome 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 oath and the renunciation of all right 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 certaine things alienated from the Priory of Seleburne. Pontif. sui ann. i.
“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 conventus monasterii de Seleburn per Priorem soliti gubernari ordinis Sti. Augustini Winton, dioc. quam de predecessores eorum decimas, terras, redditus, domes, possessiones, vineas,‡ et quedam alia bona
* 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.
† Should have been no doubt Southwick, 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 Archæologia, vol. iii.
In the instance above, the Pope’s secretary might insert vineas merely because they were a species of cultivation familiar to him in Italy.
