At that date no “forfeiture or attainder” from which grants under the Thomas Irelande “Letter” were to spring had been suffered by anyone except the monks. It was under Irelande’s Letter they were given to Hamilton, and, leaving Lough Neagh out of account, a test can be applied to the bearing of the Commission and Inquisition by the “finding” as to the Bann. This contained no allegation that the river belonged to the Crown. In 1605-6 the owners of the Bann were as well known and as rightfully in possession as the owner of the Throne of England. If “half Lough Neagh” was found to be the King’s, why did not the Inquisition declare the Bann to be Crown property, instead of dealing merely with monastery fishings therein? Yet the whole non-tidal river was seized as completely as the Lough by Hamilton’s Patent seven months later. The reason was that Chichester had made friends with Hamilton, and arranged to pervert the grant into a conduit-pipe by which the fisheries were passed to himself. Thereupon his “life-estate” blossomed gaudily into flower as fee-simple by the magic of a secret conveyance from “the Scot.” This was done without the payment of a penny to Hamilton—so cheap was “the price of Admiralty” in Chichester’s day. The infected grants of 1603-4, therefore, are the real fount of title, and furnish the clues which the House of Lords in 1878 declared should be traced. No confiscations had taken place in Ulster in 1603-4 save those affecting monasteries. The province was in profound peace under the treaty with O’Neill. Chichester had not become Deputy, and the absence of royal authority or foreknowledge as to the gift of fishery in the Patents is plain from the King’s Letters. These were withheld at the trial as completely as the grants they were supposed to sanction, for the archivist was “satisfied” such trumpery was not to be met with in the Record Office—although he declared himself “thoroughly acquainted” with searches there. Another omission from the archivist’s list is markworthy. This was the non-mention of the second master-Patent in the series—that by Chichester to his nephew, Bassett, of the 1st July, 1608. It alone provided a clue to the frauds. The list of documents, sworn to be complete, was dank with error—however unwitting. Yet no thumbing of musty vellum or conning over script in crabbed Latin was necessary to discover the missing grants. Bassett’s Patent is printed both in the State Papers and in the Calendar of the Record Office. Those of 1604 were published in 1846 in Mr. Erck’s “Repertory.”