RELIGIOUS HOUSES 
and in 1263, when the earl visited Dun- 
stable, the prior went out to meet him, and 
admitted him to the fraternity of the house.’ 
In 1265 a council was held at Dunstable to 
consider the possibility of peace with the de- 
feated barons, and the king and queen visited 
the house in the course of the year?; but 
though Simon de Montfort had been there 
quite recently, and the sympathy of the 
prior with his cause could not have been al- 
together a secret one, no fine was imposed 
upon the priory on that account. 
In 1274 a long and expensive suit was 
begun between the prior and convent of 
Dunstable and Eudo la Zouche,? who had 
become lord of Houghton and Eaton Bray by 
his marriage with Millicent de Cantelow. 
Eudo refused to recognise the rights of the 
prior (established not only by charter, but by 
long custom) to a gallows and prison in 
Houghton ; he released one of his men from 
the prison and overthrew the gallows. Under 
the next prior, William le Breton, the gal- 
lows was restored ; but Eudo still refused to 
recognise the prison as the prior’s right, and 
presently erected a gallows of his own. The 
dispute went on for some years, and, after the 
death of Eudo, was continued by his wife 
Millicent until the year 1289, when it was 
finally decided in favour of the prior. The 
poverty and difficulties of the house went on 
increasing, although great efforts were made, 
after the deposition of William le Breton 
and other officers of the monastery in 1279,° 
to curtail expenses and get in ready money 
for the payment of debts. Corrodies and 
chantries were granted to several persons, 
manors and churches were let out to farm, 
and in the year 1294 the usual allowance 
for one canon was made to serve for two.° 
1 Ann. Mon. (Rolls Series), iii. 226. Richard de 
Morins had been an admirer of the elder Simon 
de Montfort, whom he calls ‘ genere nobilis sed 
fidei fervore nobilior; in armorum exercitio nobi- 
lissimus,’ and adds that the son was ‘ debilior patre’ 
(ibid. §2). 
2 Ibid. 240. 
3 [bid. 261-3. 
4 Ibid. 343-53. This later dispute turned on 
the rights of the common of Houghton, and Milli- 
cent appealed to Domesday, saying her ancestors 
held the land of the king by barony. (It is assumed 
that this Millicent is the same as the wife of Eudo 
la Zouche.) 
5 Ibid. 283. 
8 Ibid. 387. The amount of white bread used 
in the house, and the expenses of the almonry and 
guesthouse were all lessened at the same time. 
Shortly before this, in the year 1290, the chronicler 
records how the body of Queen Eleanor passed 
It was just at this time that the king was 
asking for subsidies for his Welsh war. 
By an accumulation of misfortune, in the 
same winter the outer walls of the priory 
had collapsed in the wet weather, and 
their hayricks had been destroyed by fire ;” 
and the tithes due to the Hospitallers from 
North Marston church were in such long 
arrears that a new arrangement had to be 
made to pay them off.® In 1295 the house 
at Bradbourne was so poor that all the wool 
produced there had to be granted to the sup- 
port of the three brethren who served the 
church and chapels.? The later pages of the 
annals are a long story of poverty and struggle 
to get clear of debt; and the continuous narra- 
tive ends dismally enough with the account 
of the expenses of the installation of John of 
Cheddington, which amounted (with the 
addition of the debts of the previous prior) to 
£242 8s. 441° Of the fourteenth century 
there are only a few scanty notices, the only 
events told at any length being those con- 
nected with the peasants’ revolt in 1381, 
when the prior, Thomas Marshall, appears 
by his courage and moderation to have saved 
his own house from serious loss, and his 
burghers from punishment."* In 1349 an 
attempt was made by Thomas de Beauchamp, 
Earl of Warwick, and marshal of the king- 
dom, to prove that the prior held his lands 
by barony ; but the jury which was sum- 
moned at that time declared upon oath that 
the lands had always been held in pure and 
perpetual alms.’? King Henry VI. visited 
Dunstable in 1459,'* but there is no record 
of his relations with the priory ; its history 
during the fifteenth century is not recorded 
in any way. But in the sixteenth century 
it was again connected with an important 
historical event, when on 23 May 1533, in 
the Lady Chapel of the conventual church at 
Dunstable, Archbishop Cranmer pronounced 
through Dunstable on the way to London, and 
rested a night in the church: at the erection of 
the memorial cross the prior assisted, asperging 
with holy water (ibid. 362). 
7 Ibid. 388. 
8 Ibid. 394. The arrears amounted to 210 
marks. By the Concordia made at Westminster 
4 marks a year were to be paid in future and all 
arrears forgiven except 12 marks. The arrange- 
ment with the Hospitallers for this church dated 
from 1185 (Harl. 1885, f. 24; Nero, E vi. f. 
236). 
® Ann. Mon. (Rolls Series), 401. 
10 Tbid. 409. 
11 [bid. 418. 
12 [bid. 412. 
13 Thid. 420, 
373 
