tenure of gavelkind lands in Kent into knight service or serjeanty. In so doing, he drew their attention not only to his grandfather’s charter confirming Mabel’s deed of enfranchisement but also to a charter whereby his father, Edward I, had changed the descent of gavelkind lands held by John de Cobham. Of the latter charter, he sent a transcript for the justices’ consideration, pointing out that the good. reasons for which it had been executed included the welfare of the State. That contention was not surprising, for implicit in gavelkind was a weakening of the feudal chain. In his charter, Edward I had claimed that it was the King’s prerogative to abolish, or at least to change, such laws and customs as diminished the strength of the Kingdom and ‘that it has often happened by the ancient Kentish custom of partition in gavelkind that lands and tenements which in certain hands when undivided are quite sufficient for the service of the State and the maintenance of many, are afterwards divided and broken up among co-heirs into so many parts and particles that no portion suffices for its owner’s maintenance’.
   Edward II’s intervention must have seemed manna from heaven to the infants’ guardian, who lost no time in asserting that it was now apparent that the King by his charter could create frank fee irrespective of whether 

or not the lands were held immediately from him and that no statement by the County to the contrary was receivable in evidence. It says much for the justices, and perhaps even more for that strong Plantagenet sense of justice on which their independence rested, that the court was still not satisfied. Time was taken for further consideration and, after another two years, the case yet remained on the record. Nearly five hundred years later, the Court of Common Pleas decided that the King had no prerogative right of changing gavelkind by altering the tenure even when the land was held immediately from him; that, however, was in another case.⁷ A similar view had been expressed in the sixteenth century by William Lambarde, whose descendants were later to become lords of Ash.
   It would seem from the subsequent history of Scotgrove that William de Gatewyk cannot have won his suit. Maybe he died, maybe the case died, maybe it went on so long that the infants all came of age and matters were settled amicably; it is unlikely that what precisely happened will ever now be known.
   Although the de Torpels and the de Faukehams were both wealthy families and given to good works, the chantry that is known to have existed at Scotgrove was probably a Gatewyk foundation. No record of