part of the more familiar history of Sussex. Adela, daughter of the Earl of Belesme, had lost her husband, William, the third Earl de Warenne, the last male of his line, in 1148, and not choosing to acknowledge any claim of tithes upon the lands of her dower, though they had been granted to Lewes Priory by its founder, received this reproof from the archbishop. The writer has been supposed by some, from his initial T., to be Thomas à Becket, but as the matter arose soon after her widowhood, and as she afterwards married Patrick D'Evreux, first Earl of Salisbury, who died in 1167, he was more probably Theobald, archbishop from 1138 to 1160. In an age when superstition and violence coexisted, when, as Gibbon[1] observes, the wealth of the church "was alternately bestowed by the repentant father, and plundered by the rapacious son," it is not surprising to find a widowed foreigner of high rank refusing their dues to English monks. The lady persisted in not paying, and never confirmed the grants to the Priory. The only mention of her in the Lewes Chartulary is as a witness to her husband's grant of Nereford Mill, in Norfolk, to the monks (f. 34), and finally that "she died on the fourth of the ides of December, in the year of grace 1174, twenty-six years after her husband: where she is buried is unknown." (f. 108).
"T(heobald), by the grace of God Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of the English, and Legate of the Apostolical See, to his dear daughter Ala, Countess Warenne, greeting.
"An astonishing complaint of the religious brethren, the monks of Lewes Church, has come to our ears, that, whereas they, by the ancient donation of the Earls Warenne, namely, the grandfather and father of thy husband, and by his own also, before thou hadst succeeded to thy dower, they had always without dispute possessed, as the endowment of their church, the tithes of the rents from all domains of the earl, thou, after receiving the investiture of thy dower, hast withdrawn from the said brethren the tithe appertaining to thy dower. At which, if so it is, we vehemently wonder, since of those things which have been notoriously contributed in alms to God and the church, thou neither oughtest or canst claim anything. For it is cruel, and next to sacrilege, again to reclaim and transfer to secular uses what has been once devoutly offered on the Divine altar. Wherefore we wholesomely advise and admonish thee in the Lord, that, as thou mayest wish thy right to be freely preserved to thee by God, in like manner thou shouldest conscientiously restore their right to the monks, and on no account hold back the tithes of the rents of thy dower granted to them. Otherwise we cannot be deficient in doing them that justice which we owe to all. Farewell."
- ↑ Hist., chap. lxix.
