By the Rev. J. E. Jackson. 



65 



Corsham manor worth £97 a year, also from Wilton borough and 

 Berford £4 a year, from Sherston manor (N. Wilts) £60 a year, 

 Porstock co. Dorset, £18, Hurdcot co. Somerset, £17, and from 

 Freshwater and Whitfield in the Isle of Wight, £70 13s. 4d., 

 being total £266 13s. 4d. a year. Her brother King Edward II. 

 gave her in 1317, a further allowance of 100 marks (£66 13s. 4d.); 

 to be paid partly by the value of 10 casks of wine from South- 

 ampton. 



"Many curious and interesting particulars respecting her," (says 

 M. A. Everett Wood) " are to be found in the wardrobe accounts of 

 the period. From these we gather very different ideas of conventual 

 life in the thirteenth century from those that we are wont to form 

 of it in the nineteenth. During the earlier years of her profession 

 Mary was under the government of her grandmother, Eleanora of 

 Provence, who entered the convent in 1286, but as she advanced 

 in years she was by no means confined within the walls of the 

 cloister. She paid frequent visits to the courts of her father and 

 brother ; she went on pilgrimages to the most famous shrines ; 

 nay, when the state of her health required it, she was even per- 

 mitted to change her residence for the sake of the air. On two 

 occasions she took upon herself a singular office for a veiled lady — 

 she attended her step mother Queen Margaret during her con- 

 finement of her second son Edmund of Woodstock, and afterwards 

 accompanied the royal mother on a pilgrimage of thanksgiving. 

 A few years afterwards she performed the same good office for her 

 niece Elizabeth de Burgh. In the affairs of the convent Mary 

 took an active part ; though she never aspired to the rank of 

 Prioress, she was invested with power to visit all the establishments 

 of the same order in England, and to administer discipline, reproof 

 for correction, as she thought fit. She closed a life of unwearied 

 activity about the year 1333, having survived by some years the 

 whole of her family. The following letter was written to her 

 brother Edward II. , about the election of a Prioress of Amesbury. 

 The nuns were always anxious to secure one of their own Convent 

 j as their superior, while the Abbess of Fontevrand, with whom the 

 choice rested, frequently imposed upon them a Prioress from the 

 vol. x. — NO. XXV11I. E 



