RELIGIOUS HOUSES 



the apport due to their superiors. If other custodians were appointed, 

 reservation was however always made of a minimum sufficient to sustain 

 the prior and the two or three monks who dwelt with him. When 

 Edward III. came to the throne he restored many of the alien priories 

 to their original owners and remitted the arrears of payments due to the 

 Crown. But ten years later, when war broke out again with France, he 

 reverted to the policy of his predecessors, and again seized the property 

 of these French aliens. For twenty-three years these foreign houses 

 remained in his hands ; but with the peace of 1361 most of them were 

 restored, only to be again sequestrated eight years later when the war 

 was renewed. In the time of Richard II. the alien priories continued 

 mostly in the hands of the Crown ; they finally came to an end under 

 Henry V. in 1414, when those that had not been already assigned with 

 the Pope's assent to other religious purposes, were suppressed and 

 their estates vested in the Crown. The Crown however in the great 

 majority of cases recognized its responsibilities and transferred the pro- 

 perty to other monasteries, such as the Carthusian house of Sheen, or to 

 colleges and schools for educational purposes. 1 



A large number of the religious houses of Hampshire were subject 

 to diocesan visitation, but the three Cistercian monasteries, the house of 

 White Canons, and the alien priories, as well as the priories of the 

 mendicant orders and the preceptory of the Hospitallers, were exempt. 

 It is a little remarkable to find that the Cistercian nunnery of Wintney 

 was subject to the bishop. There were in the county, exclusive of the 

 hospitals and colleges, thirteen houses visited by the Bishop of Winchester, 

 whilst twenty were visited by commissaries of their own order. 



The record of the visitations made by the commissary of the prior 

 of Canterbury in 1501 is given under the respective houses for the first 

 time,* nor have the valuable reports of the ' mixed commission ' of 1535 

 been hitherto printed. Numerous references to monastic visitations have 

 also been obtained from the episcopal registers of Winchester. The lists 

 of superiors have in several cases been materially extended from those 

 supplied in the modern Monasticon. Information has been sought not 

 only from the episcopal registers, but from original chartularies, and 

 from the stores of the British Museum and Public Record Office. 

 These sketches of the different religious houses make no pretence to 

 be exhaustive in their treatment. Several of the Hampshire foundations 

 well deserve monographs which have yet to be written. 



1 There is a good summary of the history of the alien priories in Gasquet's Henry VIII. and the 

 Monasteries, vol. i. ch. 2. 



* Kindly supplied by Mr. Leland S. Duncan, F.S.A. 



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