Mount Grace Priory

Mount Grace Priory is a ruined priory and a mansion in the village of East Harlsey in the North York Moors -Nationalpark in the English administrative unit North Yorkshire . Today it is the best preserved of the ten medieval Carthusian houses in England. The priory was founded in 1398 by Thomas Holland, 1st Duke of Surrey , son of King Richard II. Half-brother Thomas Holland, 2nd Earl of Kent , in the midst of the open forest. It was the last monastery established in Yorkshire and one of the few ever established in Britain between the time of the Black Death (1349-1350) and the Reformation . It was a rather small monastery with space for a prior and 23 monks.

The Mount Grace Priory consisted of a church and two monastery buildings. The northern of the two had 16 cells, the southern only five, a house for the brother and the prior and a chapter house . To the west of it stood the lay brothers' apartments and the guest house.

Following King Richard's abdication, Holland and other supporters of the king attempted to assassinate his recently crowned successor, Henry IV , on New Year's 1400, but were imprisoned and executed. Holland's body was later found and reburied in 1412 in the chapter house that he himself founded. The orphaned priory, deprived of its founder and the income that Holland and King Richard had given it, depended on royal generosity in income for over a decade.

Carthusian Priory

In establishing the priory, Thomas Holland requested that the monks pray for the king, queen and other members of the royal family, as well as for himself and his heirs, John and Eleanor Ingelby and many others. The Prior of Grande Chartreuse allowed him to nominate Robert Tredwye as first rector and to dedicate the priory to "the Blessed Virgin and Saint Nicholas ". The second part of the name was dropped and the priory was named "House of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin in Mount Grace". Nicholas Love , Prior of Mount Grace, succeeded in forging a link between the Priory and the House of Lancaster , partly by using his "Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ" Thomas Arundel , Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor Henry IV ., supporting the Archbishop's campaign against Wyclifism and offering Arundel fraternity in the spiritual goods of Mount Grace in exchange for material goods. In 1410 the house was formally accepted into the order and Love was appointed fourth rector and first prior.

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Panorama of the ruins of Mount Grace Priory from the southwest

The House received a number of assignments and charters:

In March 1399 Richard II granted the monks a letter of freedom in general matters, e.g. B. the right to mine lead.
In May 1399, at the request of the Duke of Surrey, he assigned them the remote priory of Hinckley in Leicestershire , Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight and Wareham in Dorset . For the duration of the war between England and France, they were also given lands from the Priory Sainte Marie de Lire in Evreux in Normandy .
When the Priory of Wareham was lost, soon after Henry IV's accession to the throne, the king granted the monks an appanage of £ 100 a year from the state treasury until they had estates of the same value (£ 1000) and a barrel of “better red wine” from the monks Gascogne ”in Hull every Martin Day .
In 1412 Henry V confirmed Hinckley's donation so that five monks would pray for him and Thomas Beaufort , the Earl of Dorset.
In 1421 he gave the monks four more distant priories, Long Bennington , Minting and Hagh (Hough-on-the-Hill) in Lincolnshire and Field Dalling in Norfolk , which made an annual income of £ 100.

In 1439 the priory asked parliament to confirm its title to the land - the number of those claiming the property meant they did not dare to build it - and Henry VI. confirmed it in 1440. After that there were still gifts and income:

In 1456 Sir James and Lady Elizabeth Strangways of Harlsey Castle granted the priory patronage over the Church of Beighton in Derbyshire .

In 1462 the king gave them the manor of Atherstone in Warwickshire (part of the distant priory Great Ogbourne in Wiltshire ) for the benefit of the poor.

In 1471 the king gave them the manor of the remote Begare Priory in Yorkshire for three masses a day for the king and the souls of his family, but in 1472 he withdrew them from the priory and reassigned them to Eton College, to which they had previously belonged .

In 1508 the Prior of Mount Grace leased the Chapel of East Harlsey and the manor of Bordelby to the Prior of Guisborough for an annual lease of £ 8 for fifty years .

In 1512, Sir Thomas Strangways' last will mentions a Lady Chapel in Mount Grace and gives instructions to the priests who should sing mass there.

Fonts

The Mount Grace Priory became an important place for the production and preservation of contemplative and devotional texts: Among the writers were monks like John Norton and Richard Methley , who was responsible for his translations from the Latin of "The Cloud of the Ignorant" and for the anonymous translation into English by Marguerite Porete "mirror of simple souls" became known. The only surviving manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe also belonged to the chapter house in Mount Grace.

resolution

The priory was closed in 1539 during the general dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII . Some of the monks (1534) tried to avoid the oath of submission after they were imprisoned. The last prior, John Wilson , handed the keys to the priory to the representatives of Henry VIII. Then the property was transferred to private hands.

Mount Grace Priory was at a gross value of £ 382 5s. 11½ d. (£ 323 2 p. 10½ d. Net) including £ 104 6 p. 8 d. valued from spirituals in Lincolnshire, £ 164 from lands outside Yorkshire, and the remainder from native Yorkshire lands. In December 1539 the brothers received pensions totaling £ 195- £ 60 plus the house and chapel named Mount for the prior, £ 7 for each of the eight priests, and small sums for 18 of them.

Daily life

Unlike monks of other orders who live together, the Carthusian monks lived as hermits at that time . Everyone had their own cell - which was more like a small house - and only gathered in the chapel for liturgical hours at night and on Sundays and feast days. Each monk spent the other hours individually in his cell. In addition to chanting the liturgy and talking “about serious matters” during the weekly three-hour abandoned walk, the Carthusians are silent and their diet is strictly vegetarian.

The monks of Mount Grace Priory were very careful about hygiene and cleanliness. A latrine is located in the reconstructed cell and visitors can examine the trenches that were used as a sewer system.

After the dissolution

After the dissolution, the ruins of the priory and guest house were integrated into two houses of later date: a 17th century mansion - a rare Commonwealth period building built by Thomas Lascelles (1624-1697) - and the larger house of 1900–1901, an important example of the Arts and Crafts Movement . The mansion in the priory was decorated in the Arts and Crafts style under the industrialist Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell .

Current condition

Today visitors can see the floor plan of the entire monastery, including a reconstructed Möchs cell together with the typical, small Carthusian chapel and the later house. There is also a museum there that shows the history of the priory.

The property is now owned by the National Trust but is managed by English Heritage . English Heritage is currently renting the prior's house as a vacation home.

Priors and Rectors of Mount Grace

Carthusian Houses: The Mount Grace Priory lists a number of the House's priors along with the years they were in office. It could be that this is not entirely correct because the first two entries name rectors and not priors; nor is the list complete, as Carthusian records show Nicholas Love (or Luff) as first prior and fourth rector.

Robert Tredwye or Tredewy, 1398
Edmund, in 1399
Nicholas Luff, in the years 1413, 1415, 1416 (term of office ended according to other sources in 1417.)
Robert Layton, in 1421
Thomas Lockington - Prior 1421–1447 (from The typescript List of Obiits of the Carthusians of the English Houses ( The Houses of Carthusian Monks ... writes "Thomas, occurs 1428" and "Thomas Lockington, occurs 1436, 1437, 1439" as separate entries.))
Robert, in 1449 and 1454
Robert Leke, in the years 1469 and 1473
Thomas, in 1475 and 1476
Thomas, in 1497
Henry Eccleston, in 1501 and 1506
John, 1527-1528 and 1531-1532
William (?) Fletcher, in the years 1532–1533
John Wilson, 1537-1538

literature

Michael G. Sargent: Nicholas Love. The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, based on Cambridge University Library MSS Additional 6578 and 6686, with Introduction, Notes and Glossary . University of Exeter Press, Exeter 2005. ISBN 0-85989-740-0 .

Web links

Commons : Mount Grace Priory - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b Mount Grace Priory . English Heritage. Retrieved June 2, 2015.

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d Mount Grace Priory . Moors Knowledge. Retrieved June 2, 2015.

↑ ^a ^b The Charter names him as the first prior.

↑ ^a ^b Reference Code: WYL230; Ingilby Records . Ingilby History. Retrieved June 2, 2015.

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k ^l ^m Houses of Carthusian monks: Mount Grace Priory . British History Online. Pp. 192-193. Retrieved June 2, 2015.

↑ ^a ^b The Archive of Bermondsey Abbey . University of York. ( Memento of the original from February 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved December 29, 2010. @1@ 2