near the village. Letter 14 describes the visit of bishop William of Wykeham in 1373, to correct the scandalous "particular abuses" in the religious houses in the parish. He orders the canons of Selborne priory (Item 5th) "to take care that the doors of their church and priory be so attended to that no suspected and disorderly females, suspectae at aliae inhonestae, pass through their choir and cloiser in the dark"; (Item 10th) to cease "living dissolutely after the flesh, and not after the spirit" as it has been proven that some of the canons "sleep naked in their beds without their breeches and shirts"; (Item 11th) to stop "keeping hounds, and publicly attending hunting-matches" and "noisy tumultuous huntings"; (Item 17th) to properly maintain their houses and the convent itself, since they have allowed "through neglect, notorious dilapidations to take place"; (Item 29th) to stop wearing "foppish ornaments, and the affectation of appearing like beaux with garments edged with costly furs, with fringed gloves, and silken girdles trimmed with gold and silver." Richard Mabey describes White's reaction to the "Priory saga" as "grave disapproval of the monks' sensuality and ... general delinquency". A sequence of Letters then relate the history of the priors of Selborne, until Letter 24 which relates the takeover of the priory by Magdalen College, Oxford under bishop William Waynflete in 1459. White describes this as a disastrous fall: "Thus fell the considerable and well-endowed priory of Selborne after it had subsisted about two hundred and fifty-four years; about seventy-four years after the suppression of priories alien by Henry V., and about fifty years before the general dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII." The final letter records that "No sooner did the priory .. become an appendage to the college, but it must at once have tended to swift decay." White notes that since then, even "the very foundations have been torn up for the repair of the highways" so that nothing is left but a rough pasture "full of hillocks and pits, choaked with nettles, and dwarf-elder, and trampled by the feet of the ox and the heifer". White had reason to be bitter about the takeover by Magdalen College, as it had made them Lords of the Manor of Selborne, which in turn gave them the right to appoint the parish priest. White's biographer Richard Mabey casts doubt on the "frequent assumption" that White's