founded College of St. Mary Magdalen at Oxford, in whose possession
it has remained ever since, except small portions which have been
enfranchised from time to time. It includes Otterbourne hill, with
common land on the top and wood upon the slope, as well as various
meadows and plough lands. The manor house, still bearing the name of
the Moat House, was near the old church in the meadows, and entirely
surrounded with its own moat. It must have been a house of some
pretension in the sixteenth century, for there is a handsome double
staircase, a rough fresco in one room, and in the lowest there was a
panel over the fireplace, with a painting representing apparently a
battle between Turks and Austrians. The President of Magdalen
College on progress always held his court there. The venerable Dr.
Rowth in extreme old age was the last who did so. Since his time the
bridge crossing the moat fell in and choked it; it became a marsh;
the farm was united to another, the picture removed, and the only
inhabitants are such a labourer's family as may be impervious to the
idea that it is haunted.

Simon the Draper, otherwise Sir Simon de Wynton, granted a plot of
land to the north-west of the Manor House to Adam de Lecke in
villeinage, and later in freehold to John de Otterbourne, reserving
thirteen shillings rent. By this last it was rented on his wife
Alice, from whom it passed through several hands to John Colpoys in
the year of Henry VI., and twenty-two years later this same John
Colpoys agreed with the warden and fellows of Winchester College to
enfeoff them of one messuage, four tofts, twenty acres of arable
land, and eighteen acres of meadow, to the intent that they should on
the 7th day of April in every year celebrate the obits of Alice his
deceased wife, of John Giles and Maud his wife (her parents), of Sir
John Shirborne and of Joan Parke, and of Colpoys himself and Joan his