A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE 



with lands, tenements, and mills in the same 

 parish, also with the churches of Ashby and Bas- 

 ford (Nottingham) as well as with lands in both 

 these parishes. The property of the house was 

 gradually increased by gifts from different mem- 

 bers of the Esseby family, and other benefactors.^ 

 At the time of the dissolution it was worth 

 j^i45 OS. 6d., and received rents from lands in 

 the counties of Leicester, Oxford, Warwick, 

 and Buckingham, as well as from the county in 

 which it was situated. - 



It does not seem possible to recover anything 

 of the early history of the house until the year 

 1229, when Hugh de Neville received a man- 

 date from the king to allow the prioress of 

 Catesby to have timber from the forest of Silver- 

 stone within the king's park for the building of 

 her church,3 and in 1232-3 Henry III. made a 

 grant to the prioress of a cartload of firewood 

 daily from his wood of ' Beisewood,'* and this 

 privilege was subsequently confirmed by his suc- 

 cessors Edward I., Edward III., and Henry IV. 

 The pope in 1246 directed the bishop of Lincoln 

 to hear the complaints of the sisters against 

 certain clerics for wrongs done to them, and to 

 adjudicate in the matter.^ 



Margaret Rich, sister of Edmund, the canon- 

 ized archbishop of Canterbury, was at that time 

 prioress, having been elected in 1245.' The 

 saintly mother of the archbishop on her death- 

 bed committed his two sisters, Margaret and 

 Alice, to their brother's care, leaving a certain 

 sum of money to procure their admission into a 

 convent of high standing. The archbishop, 

 however, considered such a dowry bordering on 

 simony, and in his search for a convent home for 

 his sisters that would be willing to receive the 

 maidens with nothing but their piety to recom- 

 mend them, came to the gate-house of the com- 

 paratively poor house of Catesby. The prioress 

 received them with a warm welcome, and on 

 her death was succeeded by Margaret the elder. 

 On the archbishop's death in 1240 he bequeathed 

 to his sister at Catesby his pall and a silver tablet 

 enjrraved with a figure of Our Lord which he 

 was in the habit of always carrying with him. 

 Miracles soon became associated with these 

 relics, and the story of them formed part of 

 the evidence for Str. Edmund's canonization.' 



1 These and other bequests were confirmed by a 

 charter of Henry III. Chart. R. 36 Henry III. 



m. 25. See Dugdale, Mon. iv. 637. 

 - Fahr Eccl. (Rec. Com.), iv. 339. 

 'i Close, 13 Hen. III. m. 9. 

 ■i Pat. 17 Hen. III. m. 34. 



5 Dodsworth MS. Ixxiii. 79. 



6 Line. Epis. Reg. Roll of Grossetate. The 

 prioress is there termed Margery of Abingdon, of 

 which town the archbishop was a native. 



^ The life of St. Edmund in the Cotton collection 

 of early fourteenth-century date, states that the arch- 

 bishop when dying, ' remembering his holy sisters who 

 were nuns at Catesby, left them his cloak of a grey 



Margaret died in 1257. Matthew Paris, who 

 chronicles her death, describes her as ' a woman 

 of great holiness, through whose distinguished 

 merits miracles have been made gloriously mani- 

 fest.' * She is sometimes termed St. Margaret of 

 Catesby. It was no doubt through the influential 

 position of Margaret that the convent obtained 

 from the king in 1247 * grant of a weekly 

 Monday market within their manor of Catesby, 

 and two years later a grant of a three days' fair 

 beginning on the eve of the Translation of 

 Edward the Confessor.^ In the autumn of the 

 same year in which Margaret the elder sister 

 died, Matthew Paris chronicles the death of the 

 other sister Alice in almost identical words, and 

 styles her prioress.^" This is a mistake of the 

 chronicler, who was then an old man, and not 

 infrequently recorded the same event twice in 

 the same year. Alice was never prioress. She 

 died in 1270.11 



During the rule of Felicia, who succeeded 

 Margaret Rich as prioress, the death occurred of 

 William de Mauduit, earl of Warwick, 1267 ; 

 his body was buried at Westminster Abbey, but 

 his heart was sent for interment to the priory of 

 Catesby,!- probably as a mark of special devotion 

 to St. Edmund of Canterbury, whose altar in the 

 conventual church was to some extent a place of 

 pilgrimage. An undated charter, probably about 

 this time, mentions a yearly rental of 2s. left to 

 the nuns of Catesby for the support of a lamp to 

 burn before the relics in their church. i'' Another 

 grant of 1276 bequeathed a rental of 7,0(1. to 

 maintain a light before the image of St. Anne in 

 the priory church of Catesby. 1* 



The first recorded admission of a superior of 

 this house by the diocesan is that of Amabilia in 

 1276, entered in the register of Bishop Graves- 

 end, where mention is also made of brother Hugh 

 as master of the house.^^ In 1279 Henry de 

 Erdington bestowed on the convent the advow- 



colour, made of cloth called camlet, with a cape of 

 lamb's wool, and likewise a silver tablet, on which was 

 sculptured an im.ige of Blessed Mary nursing her 

 Son in her lap, and the Passion of Christ, and the 

 Martyrdom of Blessed Thomas, through which at 

 Catesby, where they are reverently preser\'ed, the 

 Lord works at the present day miracles worthy of 

 eternal remembrance (Cott. MS. Julius. D. vi.).' The 

 most interesting of the MS. lives of St. Edmund is one 

 at St. John's College, Cambridge, in a late thirteenth- 

 century hand. It is largely quoted in Bernard Ward's 

 excellent Life of St. Edmund (1903) which is compiled 

 from the various early lives. 



» Chron. Major. (Rolls Ser.), v. 521. 



» Pat. 31 Hen. III. m. 13 ; 33 Hen. III. m. 36. 



10 Matt. P.iris. Ckron. Major. (Rolls Ser.), v. 642. 



11 See Waller's Life of St. Edmund, p. 30, and Ward's 

 Lfe, pp. 216, 247. 



1- Dugdale, Baronage, i. 399. 



13 P.R.O. Anct. D. B. 3613. These relics were 

 probably those of St. Edmund. 

 1* Ibid. B. 3656. 

 15 Line. Epis. Reg. Roll of Gravesend. 



122 



