A dean and ten prebendaries or secular canons, with two vicars choral, under the patronage of the Bishop of Lichfield, are stated to have been placed here at a very remote period. Under the Anglo-Saxon monarchs this college possessed twelve hides of arable land, or as much as paid for 1440 acres to what would be now called the land-tax; which, by proper cultivation, appears from the Survey of Domesday to have increased more than double. Other estates were subsequently added, which form now only insulated districts of the parish. By the act of 1 Edward VI. 1547, the College was dissolved, the tythes and profits at that time being of the clear yearly value of about £50. The buildings and estates were leased out, reserving only the small stipend of £4. 6s. 8d. for the parish minister, charged on the dean’s prebendal estate at Onslow. Although a lease was granted of the tythes, yet only two years afterwards the greater portion of them were appropriated by Edward VI. in aid of the Free Grammar School. In 1579 Queen Elizabeth granted the remaining possessions of the deanery to Sir Christopher Hatton; but the corporation and parish seem to have presented to the living from 1583 until 1658–9, from which time the patronage has rested with the crown. SAINT ALKMUND’S CHURCH owes its foundation to the piety of Ethelfleda, daughter of Alfred the Great, soon after she succeeded to the sovereignty of the Mercian territory in 912. Her great nephew, King Edgar, being of the race of the Northumbrian Prince Alkmund, increased the original endowment, and (under the direction of Archbishop Dunstan) appointed a dean and ten prebends. In the reign of Edward the Confessor, this College possessed eleven manors, nine of which, containing upwards of 4000 acres, it retained at the Norman survey. After experiencing many of the fluctuations common to property, sacred or otherwise, during the dark ages and under lawless government, these estates were at length alienated in 1147, at the particular request of the Dean, Richard de Belemis, and with the consent of King Stephen and Pope Eugenius III. to the monastery of Lilleshull, which the dean’s brother, Philip de Belemis, had just commenced, the Prebendaries however taking care to reserve to themselves a life interest in their several stipends. The college being thus early dissolved and deprived of its valuable estates, fell into a humble vicarage, which remained in the patronage of the monks of Lilleshull until the dissolution, when it lapsed to the crown, in whose hands it continued until 1628, when Rowland Heylin, Esq. {23} of Pentreheylin, Montgomeryshire, purchased the advowson for the “feoffees of St. Antholines,” a society instituted for founding lectureships and augmenting small livings in populous towns. This society having been publicly denounced, and the orthodoxy of its principles questioned, the ministers of King James, in 1663, directed its suppression, when the living again reverted to the crown.