Dunstable Priory

• 1. Introduction

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  Dunstable Priory stands at the crossroads of two ancient roads in Bedfordshire, England, where Watling Street meets the Icknield Way. Henry I founded it in 1132, and the reason, according to tradition, was unsettling: the junction had become so infested with robbers that the king cleared the surrounding forest and established both a town and a priory to bring order to the highway. What followed was four centuries of monks, monarchs, debt, diplomacy, and one of the most consequential legal proceedings in English history. The nave that survives today is only a fragment of a much larger complex that once included dormitories, stables, a bakehouse, a brewhouse, and a hostel for pilgrims. How did a modest Augustinian priory in a provincial English town become the setting for the annulment of a royal marriage? And what does its long record of poverty and resilience reveal about medieval monastic life?

• 2. A King's Foundation

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  Henry I did not merely build a church at Dunstable. He handed the priory the lordship of the entire manor and town, granting it the same liberties he held in his own demesne lands. He also gave the community the quarry at Totternhoe, a practical endowment that provided the stone for their buildings. The priory's first prior, Bernard, was no ordinary administrator. He and his brother Norman had traveled to Chartres and Beauvais to study the Rule of Saint Augustine before introducing it to England. Norman later became prior of St. Botolph's Priory in Colchester, and then of Holy Trinity Priory, the house from which Dunstable itself descended.

  Henry II confirmed the original royal charter, and by the time Richard I came to the throne, at least thirteen separate benefactors had granted neighboring churches to the priory. The gifts included the chapel of Ruxox in Bedfordshire, Cublington, North Marston, half of Chesham in Buckinghamshire, and Higham Ferrers with half of Pattishall in Northamptonshire. Several of those grants were contested before the thirteenth century was out, but most held. Across from the priory stood Kingsbury, one of Henry I's own royal palaces, a detail that underlines how deliberately the king had shaped this corner of Bedfordshire around the new religious house.

• 3. Richard de Morins and the Chronicle

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  Richard de Morins arrived at Dunstable in 1202 as a canon transferred from Merton, and he would lead the priory for forty years. He took over as its chronicler in 1210, and the record he left is the main reason historians know so much about the priory's internal affairs. Within a year of his election he was sent on the king's business to Rome, a sign of the trust placed in him. In 1203 he secured confirmation of the lordship of Houghton Regis. By 1219 he had won the right to hold a court at Dunstable for all pleas of the Crown and to sit beside the travelling royal justices during their visits.

  That judicial privilege came with a cost. The townspeople resented it, and their resentment boiled over into open revolt against de Morins's authority in 1228. Henry III visited the priory twice during his tenure, once in the aftermath of the siege of Bedford Castle, and again specifically to try to pacify the discontented burgesses at the prior's earnest request. In 1213, during this same period of relative prosperity, Bishop Hugh of Wells dedicated the conventual church in a formal ceremony. Between 1223 and 1275, only twenty-five admissions to the novitiate were recorded, alongside thirteen deaths, though the chronicler acknowledged that entries were not always made with equal care. The priory would not see such relative stability again.

• 4. Debt, Revolt, and the Mechanical Clock

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  Richard de Morins died in 1242, and within a year the sheep pastures in the Peak district had lost 800 animals to disease. A run of bad harvests followed, and by 1255 the canons had no grain to sell and barely enough for themselves. They were forced to buy all their food for two years at great expense. When the Friars Preachers arrived in 1259, the chronicler noted they were even less welcome than they might have been under ordinary circumstances. Simon of Eaton, who became prior in 1262, inherited a house 400 marks in debt with its entire year's wool already sold.

  It was against this backdrop of financial strain that the priory built something remarkable. In 1283, the Dunstable Priory clock was constructed and installed above the rood screen. It is among the oldest mechanical clocks in England. No record survives of its fate after the dissolution. Three years later, in 1286, the priory was ordered to trim its trees and hedges along the King's Highway under the Statute of Winchester, a measure aimed at curbing highway robbery. That winter the outer walls collapsed in wet weather, and fire destroyed the hayricks. The Hospitallers were owed long-arrear tithes from North Marston church, and a new repayment arrangement had to be negotiated. The priory's later annals, as the chronicler described it, became a long story of poverty and the struggle to escape debt.

• 5. Discipline and the Canons

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  Bishop Grosseteste visited in 1236, less to examine daily life than to scrutinize the priory's title to several churches. He required every canon to swear an oath individually. One of them fled to Woburn rather than take it. In 1249 the cellarer, Henry de Bilenda, on whom much of the house's financial management depended, fled to the Cistercians at Merivale rather than submit to an audit of his stewardship. In November 1279 Bishop Sutton arrived and conducted his visitation strictly. He removed the sub-prior and others from their offices, expelled certain members he described as less useful, and the following May deposed the prior William le Breton from all pastoral care.

  The chronicler's verdict was that these measures reflected mismanagement rather than moral failure. The new prior, acting on the bishop's guidance, capped the kitchen's budget and assigned a fixed income to it. William le Breton was given proper maintenance at Ruxox. Years later, when Bishop Sutton passed through the church informally, the canons praised him for his sermon. The record of the house is otherwise notable for its restraint. Two young canons who escaped through a window at night to join the Friars Minor at Oxford were excommunicated and brought back; after their penance in the chapter house, they were allowed a full year to reconsider. If they still preferred the stricter order after that, they were permitted to leave. That small episode, recorded with apparent approval by the chronicler, captures something of the tone the priory cultivated across the thirteenth century.

• 6. The Annulment of a Royal Marriage

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  On the 23rd of May 1533, the priory became the stage for one of the defining legal acts of the English Reformation. In the Lady Chapel of the conventual church, Archbishop Cranmer, together with the bishops of Winchester, London, Bath, and Lincoln, pronounced the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon null and void. The location was not chosen for reasons of prestige. Catherine was simply residing at Ampthill, about twelve miles to the north, and the priory provided a convenient venue in the vicinity.

  Two years later, in 1535, the prior Gervase Markham and twelve canons signed the acknowledgement of the Royal Supremacy. On the 20th of January 1540-1, Markham surrendered the house to the king and received a pension of sixty pounds. The smaller English religious houses had already been dissolved by Act of Parliament in 1536, and Dunstable's church and priory closed in January 1540. At the time of the dissolution there were thirteen members besides the prior: eleven canons and two lay brothers. The king's officials initially intended to establish a new cathedral see at Dunstable, which would have preserved the great church. That plan was abandoned after a few years, and the buildings were stripped of anything valuable and left to ruin. Only the parochial nave survived.

• 7. Stone, Glass, and What Remains

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  St Peter's is one of the clearest surviving examples of Norman architecture in England. It was built in cruciform plan with a great tower at the crossing and two smaller towers at the west end. Construction took between seventy and eighty years to complete, and within a decade of its completion a storm destroyed much of the west front. The damaged section was rebuilt in Early English style. The west front retains four arches dated to 1170-90, set above a later fifteenth-century doorway, decorated with diaper pattern and stiff-leaf moulding. The west doors still carry the marks of shots fired during the English Civil War.

  The wall at the east end, inserted when the priory was dissolved in the sixteenth century, was rebuilt in 1962. The architect Felix James Lander designed the work, which was carried out after his death by his son Sean Lander. Two round-arched windows with Perpendicular tracery were introduced into the upper east wall, filled with stained glass by Christopher Webb: one depicting St John the Baptist, St Peter, and St Martin of Tours, the other showing St Fremund, St James the Great, and St Nicholas. All the stained glass in the church dates to the twentieth century. The oldest is a south aisle window installed in the second half of the 1920s, designed by Archibald John Davies of the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts and commissioned in memory of Charles and May Binns. John Hayward designed eleven windows across three separate commissions, including six nave windows installed in 1989 and three Lady Chapel windows produced in 1984 depicting the Annunciation, Visitation, and Nativity. To the southwest of the church a fifteenth-century gateway still stands, a trace of the monastic complex that once surrounded the nave.