256 LONGDON, WITH CASTLE MORTON AND CHASELEY.

meetings they had remained in ignorance of their personal liability for expenses over which they had no control, which expenses already amounted to £2,500; and a petition of objectors was presented to the Secretary of State, praying her Majesty to dissolve the Commission, and to allow the drainage area of 3,900 acres, or thereabouts, to remain in the disgraceful state in which it has hitherto been. There had likewise been serious differences between the engineer and the Board; and even members of the Board itself - once the best of friends - are now estranged from this cause, into which, however, I must not enter further, as it is possible we shall yet hear a great deal more of this deplorable collapse.

Castle Morton common (about 677 acres) still remains unenclosed. With the exception of Great Malvern common, this is the last remnant of the once extensive Malvern "chace." The land in Castle Morton is chiefly a loamy marl, and the course of cropping various; the four-course system generally prevails, wheat, beans, barley, and clover; turnips not much grown. In Longdon the marshes are on the S.W. side, a fine alluvial sand through the centre, and marly clay on the N.E. of the parish, altogether an excellent corn-growing soil. Chaseley has some fine meadows by the Severn, and good sandy tillage land.

Except at Chaseley, where many of the men are employed on the Severn, which bounds the eastern side of the parish, the males are generally employed in agriculture or trades appertaining thereto. Some of the females are "slop"-sewers, while others sew gloves; and it is a decided "feather in their cap," as proficients in that art, that an eminent glover of Worcester declares that he would back the Castle Morton gloveresses against all England for neatness of work.

Longdon, in Saxon days, belonged to the Abbot of Westminster, but at the Conquest was parcelled out among several Norman lords. Chaseley and Castle Morton were villages in the parish and manor of Longdon, but in 1762 Chaseley was