ALIEN PRIOEY OP SX. MICHAEL S MOUNT. 3 



English government found it necessary, or prudent, to prevent all 

 intercourse, at least of a civil or secular character, between the alien 

 priories and the parent monasteries, and to intercept the transmis- 

 sion of pecuniary supplies from the former to the latter ; and, ac- 

 cordingly, commissions were habitually issued for the removal of 

 these dependent communities from the coast to more inland places, 

 and for ascertaining and sequestering all the property, moveable or 

 territorial, belonging to them. The process was called a seisure "in 

 manus regis." The survey returned by the Sheriff, or other commis- 

 sioner of the Crown, containing an inventory of the goods, &c., was 

 called an "Extent." The seisure did not operate as a confiscation, 

 but as a sequestration pro tempore, analogous to the devolution of a 

 Bishop's Temporalities into the custody of the Crown during a 

 vacancy of the see. The process is described, and the various in- 

 stances in which the prerogative of seisure was exercised during 

 the 13th, 14th, and 15th Centuries, are specified from original 

 records in the Appendix to Dr. Oliver's Monasticon Exoniense, 

 (Supplement p. 424), supplied, at my request, by the present Deputy 

 Eeeper of Eecords, Mr. T. Duffus Hardy. 



Eventually, the Alien Priories were all dissolved by authority 

 ot Parliament long before the Eeformation ; and their possessions 

 were, in part, appropriated to various English ecclesiastical and 

 collegiate establishments; among which were Shene and Sion at 

 Kichmond and at Isle worth; King's College, Cambridge; and Eton 

 College; All-Souls, Oxford, &c. 



Before the final seisure and appropriation of these Priories, the 

 Priory of Mount St. Michael had, in effect, ceased to be at all de- 

 pendent on the great Abbey^of the Norman Mount, and the appoint- 

 ment of the Prior had become one of the benefices in the patronage 

 of the Duke of Cornwall, and the monks were Englishmen. But as 

 I have no intention of writing a history of the Mount, or of its 

 ecclesiastical and temporal possessors (for it has, from very early 

 times, been occupied as a fortress, as well as an ecclesiastical estab- 

 lishment), I will, without further introduction, bring the document 

 in question before the reader. 



The date of the seisure was not long before the preparation by 

 Edward the 3rd for the invasion of France, of which the earliest 

 important event was the Battle of Crecy. 



At the wish of some friends here I have translated the docu- 

 ment, although, as a general rule, such mediaeval records ought to be 



b3 



