We have already referred to the house as a grange belonging to the Abbots of Abingdon. It came into the private possession of Thomas Pentecost, _alias_ Rowland, the last of them, by deed of gift from Henry the Eighth in 1538. The Abbot, in consideration of his having peaceably and willingly surrendered the Abbey and all its belongings to the King, was given Cumnor Place for his life; but as he died the following year, he derived little benefit from the compact. Seven years later, October 8th, 1546, the King conferred Cumnor Place, with the manor of Cumnor, and greater tithes, upon his physician, George Owen, in consideration of some lands at Oxford, including the site of Rewley Abbey; and a cash payment of £310 12_s._ 9_d._ William Owen, son of this George, married in 1558 one of the Fettiplace family, his father then settling upon him the Cumnor property. William Owen, however, elected to live elsewhere, and let Cumnor Place to Anthony Forster. Who, then, was this Anthony Forster? He was the friend and factor of a very great man in those times: a man by no means great from force of character, but from sheer opportunism, good luck, and the favour of a comely person: none other, indeed, than Lord Robert Dudley, later to become, by the ennobling hands of Queen Elizabeth, Earl of Leicester. Around the reputation of Dudley there lurk too many sinister stories for us to lightly dismiss any charge brought against him or his agents. He was suspected of having put many persons away by the means of poison: a method very fashionable in that age of the Renaissance and widespread neo-pagan culture; and that he was an ambitious man to whose ambition no bounds of prudence or conscience were set is generally acknowledged by historians. He was by no means alone in this, but was typical of his age, an age great in refinements, culture, and wealth; great in arms, and no less notable in its tortuous policies, national and domestic; and in its lies and manifold duplicities. [Illustration: TOMB OF ANTHONY FORSTER, CUMNOR.]