teries of England. There have been writers who, though they con- demned the wholesale destruction of all monasteries by Henry VIII., have yet been disposed on the whole to accept the statements contained in the preamble to the First Act of Suppression ; and there is indeed at first sight something very plausible in the theory that the smaller houses were worse than the large ones, as less influenced by public opinion both within and without. The question however is not what might have happened, but what actually did happen ; and so far as this county is concerned, there is no evidence that the smaller houses were more degenerate than the greater ; they were nearly all well spoken of at the last by the local commissioners. Nor do we find here any signs that one order was on the whole worse than another, though the latest reports of the abbey of Missenden tend to justify Wolsey's efforts to reform the Augustinians. But indeed it very often happened that two houses [1] of the same order, separated by only a few miles of country, might be in a very different condition ; and the same house which at one visitation was censured might a few years later be praised ; not because of any fault in the times, or in the order, but simply because of the change of superiors. This fact has not perhaps received as much consideration as it deserves : duly weighed, it will account for a good deal that would otherwise be difficult to understand.
Five of the Buckinghamshire monasteries were destined to come to an end before the general dissolution. The priory of Luffield was suppressed in 1494 to endow Henry the Seventh's new chapel at West- minster ; and the priories of Tickford, Ravenstone, and Brad well formed part of the endowment of Cardinal's College in 1524. The priory of Chetwode had been absorbed into the abbey of Nutley in 1461.
HOUSES OF BENEDICTINE MONKS
1. THE PRIORY OF LUFFIELD
The priory, of Luffied was probably the first house of this order in Bucknghamshire, [2] and was dedicated to the honour of St. Mary ; the name of the founder Robert de Bossu, Earl of Leicester, shows the date of founda- tion to have been earlier than 1133.[3] Gifts of land for the support of the monastery were confirmed by Henry I. and the Empress Maud and also by bulls of Eugemus III. and Alexander III.:[4] there is no well-known name among its benefactors except that of Hamo son of Meinfelin. [5] The endowments in the twelfth century were not extensive, and no considerable gifts were added at any later time, so that the number of monks must always have been small. The house seems to have been reckoned almost from the first as a royal foundation, and the royal patronage was of real advantage in at least one case of need. For we are told by the chronicler of Dun- stable [6] that in the year 1244 a band of five- and-twenty robbers burst into the monastery while the monks were singing vespers, and carried away all the portable ornaments of the church, with everything else they could
- ↑ E.g. the abbeys of Warden and Woburn in
- ↑ It is partly in Northamptonshire as well as in the county
- ↑ Tanner gives the year 1124 Notitia, Northants, xxii
- ↑ Dugdale, Mon. iv. 348
- ↑ He gave 5½ hides in Thornborough and the church. Hund. R. (Rec. Com.), ii. 351
- ↑ Ann. Mon. (Rolls Ser.), iii. 165. The priory of Beverley was robbed in the same year. Such acts were by no means uncommon at this time
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