Chichester’s freak surrender before Archbishop Jones, and Allen’s misconduct in fathering the Inquisition of 1621 in the teeth of his Derry verdict, may be said to have been concerned with the Bann alone. Still the grant of Lough Neagh was so intimately linked with the river that any tribunal would have felt itself assisted by a full disclosure of facts where questions of good faith and probabilities had to be determined. An artificial darkness as to the origin and bearing of the Patents prevailed, and in such murkiness the law pronounced on their authenticity. Shade shaded shadiness. This obscurity tended indirectly to the acceptance of another forlorn document concerning the modern history of the fisheries. The lease to May, which the House of Lords in 1878 was denied sight of, was at last put in evidence, and its value had to be appraised. When produced, the woeful spectacle it presented explained the reluctance to allow it to be examined at the trial in 1874. Erasures, in which battalions of interlineations lay entrenched, pitted the parchment; and its plight spoke plainly of felonious mutilation. Who had been at work to change it, and to what purpose? The author of the forgery was long dead, but the extent and nature of his operations could easily be traced. No sleuth hound was needed to follow the track. The original lease had been registered in the Dublin Registry of Deeds in 1805, and a “Memorial” of its contents, signed by Lord Donegall, was lodged there. Such Memorials must (by Statute) contain the description of premises in the exact words of the deed presented for registration, and this one had been framed on Lord Donegall’s behalf by his solicitor and was signed by his lordship with his own hand. Registry officials only receive and file Memorials when, by a comparison with the originals, they are satisfied that the law has been complied with. When, therefore, the so-called “lease to May” was produced in 1908 its challengers straightway resorted to and compared it with Lord Donegall’s Memorial. A glance at the “Memorial” established that there had been foul play as to the lease. It showed that what had been registered in 1805 was a lease of the Bann only and of a salmon fishery therein, while the so-called “original” granted “the salmon, trout, and scale fisheries of Lough Neagh and the River Bann.” This laidly “fakement” explained the secret of the non-production of the lease in 1874-8. A forgery had been committed, and those who then had its custody felt too conscience-stricken to attempt to make it evidence.