The petition prays the king to see that the College be not “tortiously disinherited,” and appeals to the memory of the “noble Saints John of Beverley, Bede, and Richard of Armagh, formerly scholars of the College.” A petition so full of fictions hardly deserved to lead to success, and the College was eventually compelled to redeem its right to the estate by payment of a large sum of money to the heirs of Frauncis. The interest of this petition, however, lies in the fact that in 1728, on the occasion of a dispute arising for the mastership between Mr. Denison and Mr. Cockman, it formed the ground upon which, in the King’s Bench at Westminster, it was held that the College is a Royal foundation, and the Crown the rightful visitor; the truth being that the whole body of Regents and non-Regents of the University were and always had been the true and rightful visitor. But the French Petition to Richard II. was not the only fabrication to which William of Durham’s unworthy beneficiaries had recourse in order to establish a fictitious antiquity and deny their real founder. About the same time they stole the chancellor’s seal and affixed its impress to a forged deed purporting to have been executed in A.D. 1220, the 4th of Henry III., May 10th, by Lewis de Chapyrnay, Chancellor. This false deed records the receipt of four hundred marks bequeathed by William, Archdeacon of Durham, for the maintenance of six Masters of Arts, and the conveyance of certain tenements to Master Roger Caldwell, Warden and senior Fellow of the great hall of the University. The reader will the more agree that this forgery was worthier of Shapira than of “honest and holy clerks,” when he reads in Antony à Wood (_City of Oxford_, ed. Andrew Clark, vol. i. p. 561)--who was not deceived by it--that it was written “on membrane cours, thick, greasy, whereas, in the reign of Henry III. parchment was not so, but fine and clear.” There never were such persons as Chapyrnay and Caldwell, and William of Durham did not die till 1249, and then left only three hundred and ten marks. Mr. Twine, the author of the _Apology for the Antiquity of Oxford_, said of this deed, “mentiri nescit, it cannot lie.” “But,” says quaintly Mr. William Smith, “if ever there was a lie in the world, that which we find in that Charter is as great a one as ever the Devil told since he deceived our first Parents in Paradise.” It would oppress the reader to detail all the other fictions which followed on this early one. One lie makes many, and as time went on outward embellishments were added to the College commemorative of its mythical founder. Thus a picture of King Alfred was bought in the year 1662 for £3--perhaps the same which one now sees in the College library. There was--so Mr. Smith relates--an older picture of him in the Masters’ lodgings.