In fact, there had been hardly a reign since the Conquest, in which great estates had not been bestowed by our princes on favoured subjects.

Anciently, indeed, what had been lavishly given was not seldom violently taken away.
Several laws for the resumption of Crown lands were passed by the Parliaments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Of those laws the last was that which, in the year 1485, immediately after the battle of Bosworth, annulled the donations of the kings of the House of York.

More than two hundred years had since elapsed without any Resumption Act.
An estate derived from the royal liberality had long been universally thought as secure as an estate which had descended from father to son since the compilation of Domesday Book.

No title was considered as more perfect than that of the Russells to Woburn, given by Henry the Eighth to the first Earl of Bedford, or than that of the Cecils to Hatfield, purchased from the Crown for less than a third of the real value by the first Earl of Salisbury.