On February 12th, 1534, Richard Harecourt became the escheator for the year, and remained till November 18th, when another was appointed, who proved to lack the necessary property qualification, so Longford had to pay the King’s dues direct. Next year (November 24th, 1535) Thomas Skrymsher was appointed. The King now made one of those “exchanges” which became so frequent later. The manor of East Molesey was pleasantly situated on the southern bank of the Thames, in Surrey, and had obvious advantages over the remote estate in North Staffordshire. It belonged to the old and historic priory of Merton, where Becket had been educated, where the Parliament had sat which enacted the statutes of Merton, and which had provided a refuge for the patriot Hubert de Burgh in his days of adversity. Its past fame and present wealth seemed to warrant its inmates in a confident assurance of security, and they agreed to give the King their riverside manor of East Molesey in exchange for the distant and forlorn cell of their Order at Calwich. No doubt they hoped eventually to retrieve its fortunes and to re-establish it as a religious house, though for the present they had to acquiesce in the arrangements regarding it which had just been made. The exchange appears to have been made in 1535–6, and Merton renewed the lease to Longford for £43, with the obligation to discharge the pension of sixty shillings to “the late priory of Kelyngworth.” Almost immediately the process of squeezing the larger houses began, and Merton Abbey soon succumbed. The date of its surrender, with Abbot and fourteen monks, is April 16th, 1538. The lease of Calwich to Longford was renewed in the same year. In 1540 he obtained an acknowledgment that he had paid all his dues to Cromwell and Gostwick, and was empowered to receive from the various escheators “tayles” (tallies, _i.e._, receipts) for them. The Augmentation Book in 1543 has a record of his twenty-one years’ lease, but the reversion was sold to John Fleetwood. Longford soon found himself in financial difficulties. In spite of the grant of Calwich, for which Sir Anthony Fitzherbert wrote to thank Cromwell on April 18th, 1537, he could not pay the rent due. The royal escheators were hard taskmasters, exacting the uttermost farthing, and Fitzherbert’s letter shows Longford had been some time in debt. In 1541 they levied a distraint, and ejected from the estate the tenants to whom Longford had sublet it. He had to enter into a bond of £200 to settle the matter, and this only added to his embarrassments. In 1543 he was in the Fleet, the debtors’ prison, writing piteous appeals for loans wherewith to discharge his indebtedness to the King.