monasteries, in 1536, though it
enjoyed an income corresponding to about L6000 a year of our money,
and of course very much more than L6000 a year in our modern way of
looking at incomes. It was thus a wealthy place, and how it came to be
included in the smaller monasteries is not quite clear. At any rate it
was restored immediately after. The monks of Chertsey were housed in
it, as we have already seen, and the revenues of several of the
smaller dissolved houses were added to it; so that it was at the
moment of its refoundation about three times as wealthy as it had been
before. The prior who had surrendered in 1536, one Barlow, was made
Bishop of St Asaphs, and in turn of St. Davids, Bath and Wells, and
Chichester; he is that famous Barlow who took the opportunity of the
Reformation to marry, and whose five daughters all in turn married the
Protestant bishops of the new Church of England. But this is by the
way. The fate of the land is what is interesting. From Anne of Cleves,
whose portion it had been, and to whom the Government of the great
nobles under Edward VI. confirmed it after Henry VIII.'s death, it
passed, upon her surrendering it in 1552, to a certain Sir Philip
Hoby. He had been of the Privy Council of Henry VIII. Upon his death
it passed to his nephew, Edward Hoby; Edward was a Parliamentarian
under Elizabeth, wrote on Divinity, and left an illegitimate son,
Peregrine, to whom he bequeathed Bisham upon his death in 1617. It
need hardly be said that before 100 years were over the son was
already legitimatised in the county traditions; his son, Edward, was
created Baron just after the Restoration, in 1666. The succession was
kept up for just 100 years more, when the last male heir of the family
died in 1766. He was not only a baron but a parson as well, and on his
death the estate went to relatives by the name of Mill, or, as we
might imagine, "Hoby" Mill. It did not long remain with them. They
died out in 1780 and the Van Sittarts bought it of the widow.

Consider Chertsey, from which Bisham sprang. The utter dispersion of
the whole tradition of Chertsey is more violent than that perhaps of
any other historical site in England. The Crown maintained, as we have
seen to be the case elsewhere, its nominal hold upon the foundations
of the abbey and of what was left of the buildings, though that hold
was only nominal, and it maintained such a position until 1610--that
is, for a full lifetime after the communit