Category Archives: Benedictine

Binham Priory

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Located between Fakenham and Wells-next-the-Sea (which is someway inland these days), the priory is Norfolk’s most complete monastic ruin. It was founded by Peter de Valognes, the nephew of William the Conqueror, in 1091. Peter did rather nicely from the Norman invasion and the land he donated to the monks at St Alban’s for a news cell in Norfolk was on land his uncle granted him.

During the reign of Henry I, the monks were granted a market charter and free warren of their lands – which basically meant that they could slaughter as much small game as they wished without irritating the monarch who, according to feudal principles, owned it all under terms of forest law.

Not everything went so smoothly according to Matthew Paris the prior, Thomas, was removed in 1200 by the abbot of St Albans which led to a long running dispute and a falling out with Robert FitzWalter who was the prior’s friend not to mention an important baron in East Anglia. FitzWalter, who would gain his place in the history books during the First Barons’ War claimed to have a charter giving him, and him alone, the right to hire and fire the prior – it was forged but you can’t blame a baron for trying! FitzWalter even besieged the priory and King John not known for his good relationship with the Church had to send an army to raise the siege.

The priory as it stands dates from between 1227- 1244. The west window tracery was the first in England to be formed from bars of stone enabling more glass and less stone to be employed. Excavations have revealed some of the magnificent medieval stained glass.

Inevitably by the time Cromwell sent his commissioners to pay a visit in 1536 there were a series of scandals, three incontinent monks out of a small band six, but it avoided suppression until 1539. A gentleman from the King’s privy chamber, Thomas Paxton, rented the manor which was worth £101 a year. Part of the priory church became Binham Parish Church. Among the survivals are two misericords and four panels from the chancel screen incorporating words from the approved 1539 Bible – Coverdale. The words have been painted over the top of the medieval saints and of Henry VI.

Incidentally if you want scandal, one of the priors, William de Somerton (1317-1355), sold off monastic land to fund his alchemy experiments. And if that’s not lively enough for you there are folktales of tunnels running from Binham to Walsingham – for which there is absolutely no evidence!

Abbots

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https://www.medievalists.net/2017/06/tips-good-ceo-medieval-abbot/

In Benedictine abbeys abbots were responsible for the running of an abbey and its material wellbeing as well as the spiritual health of the monks in their charge. They were lords of the manor, so important on a local political and social level as well as often being prominent figures in secular government. They were also patrons of art and architecture.

Abbots were selected from within the abbey. The result had to be confirmed by an ecclesiastical superior and, under the terms of many charters, by the patron. During the reign of William Rufus this was problem as he kept a number of posts vacant in order to draw the income from the land, based on the principle that when the land was vacant of its tenant ( a role fulfilled by the post of abbot) that the Crown, which was the owner, took the profit. And clearly elections were not always as straight forward as the basic description suggests. There were all sorts of internal and external political shenanigans that didn’t necessarily have a great deal to do with piety.

Originally the abbot filled the role of father figure but as time passed many abbots were taken to task for not eating in the refectory with the rest of the monks or living away from the cloister. As well as not having oversight of the monastic foundation which they were supposed to be running they were also effectively invisible in terms of the example they were supposed to be setting. And if they were present the example was not necessarily positive – one of the abbots of Selby was taken to task for being drunk most of the time and for womanising.

As the medieval period progressed abbots were celebrated not for their piety but for their administrative capacities and control of the finances. This in its turn led to some interesting, not to mention creative, accounting in terms of pasturing their sheep on common land or pocketing the proceeds for themselves rather than the chapter.

https://www.stalbanscathedral.org/blog/face-to-face-with-a-medieval-abbot

Heale, Martin. (2016) The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England Oxford: Oxford University Press

Lenham a Medieval monastic Manor

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St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury

In AD 804 Cenulf, or Coenwulf, of Mercia together with Cudred of Kent gave the abbey of St Augustine’s in Canterbury the manor of Lenham in Kent. There’s a bit of a back story in that Cenulf as the overhang had a bit of a problem painting overall sovereignty of Mercia in Kent and at one point had tried to move the chief English see from Canterbury to London. He gave up on the idea in 798 when he installed Curdred as King of Kent. Cudred was his brother.

The two of them gave 20 plough lands, 12 denns (wood) of acorns and 40 tenements to St Augustines. Or put another way they became patrons of the abbey. A further 5 plough lands were added at a later date when the monks extended the manor of Lenham.

The Domesday book reports:

In Haibornehundred, the abbot (of St. Augustine) himself holds Lenham, which was taxed at five shillings and an half. The arable land is eighteen carucates. In demesne there are two carucates, and forty villeins, with seven borderers, having sixteen carucates. There is one servant, and two mills of six shillings and eight pence, and eight acres of meadow, and wood for forty bogs.

In the time of king Edward the Confessor, it was worth twenty-eight pounds, and afterwards sixteen pounds, now twenty-eight pounds. Of this manor Robert Latin holds one yoke, which is worth five shillings.

To make clear the process by which the monks of St Augustine’s held on to the manor William the Conqueror (but not in Kent because they came to terms) held all the land but he returned the land which the monks of St Augustine’s had previously held but now they received the land in return to service to him- which to be clear meant that for every knight’s fee of land they held they were required to put one knight in the field if William so required.

The monks of St Augustine’s continued to to benefit from Plantagenet patronage throughout the medieval period.

Once the abbey was dissolved, the land effectively went into the administration of the Court of Augmentations. In this case, Lenham became Crown estate until Elizabeth I gave it to her very capable chief minister William Cecil who alienated it to Thomas Wilford.

William Cecil (National Portrait Gallery)

Alienation means that the land was sold or transferred. Most land in alienable but it demonstrates that the ownership of the land has moved out from the feudal system. In a feudal system land is transferred by sub-infeudination i.e. the monarch would still be the tenant in chief and William Cecil would have been Elizabeth’s vassal. Thomas Wilford would have been a sub tenant and a vassal of William Cecil. This was not the case.

Wilford’s grandson passed the land to Sir Thomas Brown, Lord Montagu whose wife was a FitzAlan. We can see that once the land passed out of Crown ownership that the manor of Lenham transferred through inheritance, marriage or sale. The Montagu family alienated the manor to the Hamilton family – specifically the widow of Sir George Hamilton. Elizabeth Hamilton’s maiden name was Colepepper or Culpepper. I am currently not going to chase down the links with the Thomas Culpepper who was executed in 1541. Suffice it to say that the Culpeppers were an important part of Kent’s gentry.

Edward Hasted, ‘Parishes: Lenham’, in The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent: Volume 5 (Canterbury, 1798), pp. 415-445. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-kent/vol5/pp415-445 [accessed 29 November 2020].

https://opendomesday.org/place/TQ8952/lenham/

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/st-augustines-abbey/

History Jar picture quiz 1 – answer – The Alfred Jewel

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The first image in the History Jar’s new quiz is, of course, the Alfred Jewel which can be found in the Asmolean Museum in Oxford. The words around the end of the jewel read, “Alfred ordered me to be made.” The jewel is the ornate end of an aestel -that’s a pointer to you or me. The socket formed by the dragon’s head at the bottom of the jewel is where the ivory pointer would have sat.

The jewel was found a few miles from Athelney Abbey in Somerset in 1693 when it was ploughed up. Athelney Abbey is very near the site where King Alfred made his counter attack against the Great Viking army in 878. The king had been forced to retreat into the marshes in 877 and built a fort near Athelney before launching his counter attack.

Asser, who was Alfred’s chaplain, described the site as being a small island. And it was Alfred who is often credited with the founding of Athelney Abbey. However, there is a distinct possibility that there was already some sort of monastic foundation on the site as the name and the charter suggest enlargement rather than foundation.

William of Malmesbury writing later describes the abbey as poor but that the Benedictine brothers who lived there loved solitude. By the fourteenth century the quiet and solitude seems to have turned Athelney into a retirement home for royal pensioners. The archives contain a protest from the monks about Gilbert de Reagan who had been sent to the abbey to live as a pensioner. The monks replied that there were already two aged servants of the king living at the expense of the abbey.

In 1314 the abbey was used a prison for another Benedictine, William de Walton, who according to the Bishop of Lincoln, had been very wicked and should be kept locked in fetters in his cell at all times. Eventually William was returned to Peterborough Abbey, where he originally came from, as he had escaped a couple of times much to the consternation of the Athelney brothers.

In 1349 the plague hit the abbey killing two abbots in swift succession.

By 1536 the abbey was in debt to the Crown to the tune of £33 but that might have been because in 1497 the abbot had supported Perkin Warbeck against Henry VII and the abbey had been fined 100 marks. Cromwell’s commissioner found the abbot and his eleven monks to be leading good lives but on the 20th February 1539 the abbey surrendered.

The Alfred Jewel

https://www.ashmolean.org/alfred-jewel Follow the link for a closer look at the Alfred Jewel.

‘Houses of Benedictine monks: The abbey of Athelney’, in A History of the County of Somerset: Volume 2, ed. William Page (London, 1911), pp. 99-103. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/som/vol2/pp99-103 [accessed 5 June 2020].