remain invaluable to the department in its maintenance work : some of them are its only guide to the location of drains laid long ago ! A number relate to projects that never came to fruition ( Fig . 8 ). There is material here for an entertaining survey of ‘ Unbuilt Winchester ’ that could make a nice if modest Wiccamical companion piece to Sir Howard Colvin ’ s splendid book on Unbuilt Oxford .
THE ESTATE RECORDS
Winchester College ’ s landed endowment has a history that is interesting in its own right . William of Wykeham , even before he sealed the College ’ s foundation charter in 1382 , had begun to set about acquiring the estates which would assure it a regular income from land . His first acquisition for this purpose , in 1380 , was the Church ( that is to say the rectory , the glebe lands and the greater tithe ) of Downton , Wilts . To Downton , over the years following , he added the manors of Eling ( Hants .) and Durrington ( Wilts .), moieties of the manors of Coombe Bissett ( Wilts .) and Fernhamsdean ( Hants .), and a number of smaller properties . His largest coup , though , for the purposes of the endowment , came through the purchase of substantial estates ( with the licence both of the king and the pope ) from three ‘ alien priories ’ ( monasteries situated abroad ): Tiron , St Valéry-sur-mer , and the Holy Trinity on Mont St Cathérine , Rouen . England and France being at war at the time of the foundation , these French monasteries were happy to part for cash with English lands whose revenues they were unable to touch in the circumstances . Taken all together , these estates of Wykeham ’ s original endowment secured to his College , by the time of his death , an adequate and regular but by no means ample income .
Over the 150 years following Wykeham ’ s death , the College itself added to the endowment a number of small properties , by purchase and through benefactions ( eg under the will of John Fromond ). Some important exchanges were advantageous from the point of view of the College ’ s landholding . Among the estates that Wykeham acquired from St Catherine ’ s at Rouen was Harmondsworth in Middlesex ( with Tingewick , Bucks ): in 1543 Henry VIII , wishing to enlarge his hunting ground from Hampton Court , acquired this manor by exchange for lands in Hampshire , Dorset , Gloucestershire and the Isle of Wight that had been seized into the crown ’ s hands at the Dissolution
22 of the monasteries . Some further former monastic lands were added by Edward VI in 1551 in compensation for the loss of Enford , Wilts ( among the estates conveyed to the College by Henry VIII , but with a title that proved inadequate ). This brought in Ash in Surrey ( from Chertsey Abbey ), Minterne , Dorset ( from Cerne Abbey ), Salperton in Gloucestershire ( from Cirencester ), Seavington and Longload , both in Somerset ( from Glastonbury and from the Hospitallers Preceptory at Templecombe ).
Since Winchester College was an ecclesiastical foundation , all the College ’ s properties were in law held in ‘ mortmain ’ ( under the ‘ dead hand ’ of the church ). This meant that they could not legally be sold or disposed of ( except by exchange ), until this limitation was lifted by an Act of Parliament of 1858 . From 1551 down to the later nineteenth century the same estates were consequently for the most part continuously in the College ’ s hands . This is why the College ’ s muniments supply such a splendidly unbroken set of records of estate management . Since 1858 a number of estates have been sold ( and new ones purchased ); the older documents relating to them have however in virtually all cases remained with the College Archives .
Wykeham was concerned that the title to the lands with which he endowed his College should be sure : the deeds deposited in the ‘ Treasury ’ in the Muniment Tower therefore included many documents dating from long before his foundation , which traced back the descent of the title of those from whom he acquired estates . This is for instance why there survives , among the Harmondsworth muniments , a charter of Ilbert de Lacy of c . 1090 , granting the church of Tingewick to St Catherine ’ s monastery at Rouen , witnessed with a rather crude cross by way of attestation by William II - William Rufus his mark ! ( Fig . 9 ). A happy accident added early to these very ancient College muniments . One of the manors that the College acquired
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( Fig 9 ).