1594 by
Sir Ambrose Willoughby. From him the estate was purchased in 1597 by
Jasper Selwyn, Counsellor at Law, of Stonehouse, who was the fourth
in descent from John Selwyn, one of a Sussex family.

In 1751 the direct entail was broken by Colonel Selwyn, and the
property was re-entailed on the descendants of his daughter, Mrs.
Townshend, though it was left by will to George Selwyn for his life.
On his death it devolved on Thomas, Lord Sydney, and has since
remained in the possession of the Townshend family.** Walpole has
given a description of the place in the days when he used to visit
it.

** Bigland, "History of Gloucestershire," vol. ii. p. 200.

"I stayed two days at George Selwyn's house, called Matson, which
lies on Robin Hood's Hill; it is lofty enough for an Alp, yet it is
a mountain of turf to the very top, has wood scattered all over it,
springs that long to be cascades in twenty places of it, and from
the summit of it beats even Sir George Lyttleton's views, by having
the city of Gloucester at its foot, and the Severn widening to the
horizon. His house is small, but neat. King Charles lay here at the
siege, and the Duke of York, with typical fury, hacked and hewed the
window-shutters of his chamber, as a memorandum of his being there.
Here is a good picture of Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in his later
age, . . . and here is the very flower pot and counterfeit
association for which Bishop Sprat is taken up, and the Duke of
Marlborough sent to the Tower. The reservoirs on the hill supply the
city. The late Mr. Selwyn governed the borough by them, and I
believe by some wine too. . . .

"A little way from the town are the ruins of Lantony Priory; there
remains a pretty old gateway, which G. Selwyn has begged to erect on
the top of his mountain, and it will have a charming effect."*

* "The Letters of Horace Walpole," vol. ii. p. 354.

Selwyn's schooldays were passed at Eton with Gray and Walpole. In
1739 he became an undergraduate of Hertford College, Oxford, or Hart
Hall as it was called. It was to Hertford also that later Charles
Fox went, "a college which has in our own day been munificently
re-endowed as a training school of principles and ideas very
different from those ordinarily associated with the name of its
greatest son." Hertford was in the middle of the eighteenth century
a college where the so-called students neither toiled at books nor
at physical exercise. They passed a short and merry time