A papal bull having also been obtained, on the 28th of August 1425, the archbishop, in the course of a visitation of Lincoln diocese, executed his letters patent founding the college, dedicating it to the Virgin, St Thomas Becket and St Edward the Confessor, and handed over the buildings to its members, the vicar of Higham Ferrers being made the first master or warden.
But I refused the permission which Becket solicited of reprinting it; the public curiosity was imperfectly satisfied by a pirated copy of the booksellers of Dublin; and when a copy of the original edition has been discovered in a sale, the primitive value of half-a-crown has risen to the fanciful price of a guinea or thirty shillings."
Becket is an irregular structure, dating from the reign of Henry VI., but frequently restored.
Such a mitre appears on a seal of Archbisho p Thomas Becket (Father Thurston, The ?P allium, London, 1892, p. 17), The custom was, however, .already growing up of setting the horns over the front and back of the head instead of the sides (the mitre said to have belonged to St Thomas Becket, now at Westminster Cathedral, is of this type), 1 and with this the essential character of the mitre, as it persisted through the middle ages, was established.
Being forfeited by his grandson Eustace FitzJohn in the reign of Stephen, Knaresborough was granted to Robert de Stuteville, from whose descendants it passed through marriage to Hugh de Morville, one of the murderers of Thomas Becket, who with his three accomplices remained in hiding in the castle for a whole year.
