The defendant Leveson was accused of having contrived secret conveyances of many parcels of the said tithes and lands for the benefit of his own family, some of the properties having been sold for large sums of money, and the church revenues defrauded thereby. Also that he had so altered and confounded the buildings, fences, and boundaries of the church lands, and so mixed them up with his own inherited lands, that it had become impossible to discern or distinguish which were the original possessions of the College; possessions which at the Domesday Survey had extended to 3,000 acres, besides the lordship of Lutley, near Halesowen. Dr. Oliver states that in his time (1836) there remained some “houses and lands now belonging to the prebendaries and Sacrist, which are leased out for lives.” The “corpses” of the six prebends are supposed to have consisted of the tithes of their respective districts in Willenhall, Hilton, Hatherton, Fetherston, Monmore, and Wobaston. The Rev. Richard Ames, Curate of Bilston for 46 years (1684–1730), makes the following record:— 1723, December 9th.—The Reverd. Mr. Wm. Craddock, Rector of Donnington (Salop), was installed Prebendary of Willenhall, he having resigned that of Hatherston. The mandate for his installmt. was directed to me (ye Senior Prebendary) by ye Rt. Hon’ble George, Lord Willoughby de Broke, Deane of o’r Collegiate Church of Wolverhampton, and of Windsor; I being constituted locum tenens. On ye 10th December, 1723, by virtue of an’r mandate to me, directed by ye same Ld. Willoughby de Broke, ye same Mr. Wm. Craddock was by me put in possession of ye Sacrist’s Stall, both which places became vacant by ye death of Mr. Hinton. He (Mr. Craddock) was also constituted principal official. In 1836, when Dr. Oliver wrote his history of the church, the Chapter of the College consisted of the Hon. Henry Lewis Hobart, D.D. (Dean), the Rev. R. Ellison, M.A., prebendary of Willenhall, and the other prebendaries (of Kinvaston, Hilton, Featherston, Monmore, Hatherton, and Wobaston respectively), and the Rev. G. Oliver, D.D., perpetual curate and Sacrist (an Act obtained in 1811 by Dean Legge had constituted the Sacrist the real incumbent of the church). The Chapter had it own seal, which was of proper ecclesiastical design, and of some antiquity. On the death of the very Rev. and Hon. H. L. Hobart, D.C.L., &c., in 1846, the Collegiate establishment of Wolverhampton ceased to exist, and its property became vested in the ecclesiastical Commissioners. Such was the gross abuse of ecclesiastical patronage, the entire income of the Collegiate Church (except £100 a year for a curate of very indefinite status) had been absorbed in the payment of a Dean of the two “peculiars” of Windsor and Wolverhampton, and of some half-dozen legendary prebendaries who were for the most part unknown, even by name, to the oldest inhabitant of the parish.