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Building the Endowment: Lay Benefactors, Their Motives, and Their Gifts

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Building the Endowment: Lay Benefactors, Their Motives, and Their Gifts CHAPTER THREE BUILDING THE ENDOWMENT: LAY BENEFACTORS, THEIR MOTIVES, AND THEIR GIFTS In recent years, scholars have begun to look more closely at medieval patrons and benefactors and their relationships with the monasteries they founded or assisted. Such research can reveal a great deal about the reasons for a monastery’s economic success or lack thereof, and about the trends in monastic patronage in a given period. We can also detect whether “networks of patronage” existed around a monastery, that is, whether a group of barons and their families and tenants co- operated in order to support a new foundation. As well, it is useful in considering the history of a religious house to ask whether benefaction patterns changed over time, and whether families who played an early role in supporting a house continued to do so. The ability or inability of a religious house to attract benefactors from outside the county in which it was situated also indicates something of the regional or national importance of the house. This chapter will explore these issues through an examination of the identities of the major lay benefactors of Plympton Priory in the twelfth century and the contributions they made to the support of this institution. As has been seen in the previous chapter, Bishop William Warelwast’s new house of Augustinian canons at Plympton received substantial sup- port from Warelwast himself, subsequent bishops of Exeter, and those surrounding them in the decades following its foundation in 1121. The bishops of Exeter and their circle were not alone in their generosity towards Plympton Priory, however; the lay elite of Devon also took note of this new religious house in their county. Charters transcribed from the lost Plympton cartulary and other documents which survive from the twelfth century indicate that the magnates of Devon and their tenants made a signi cant contribution to the establishment of an size- able endowment for Plympton Priory in the decades immediately after its foundation. By 1535, when the survey of monastic wealth known as the Valor Ecclesiasticus was conducted, Plympton Priory was assessed as having a total income of £898 0s 8 1/8d.1 Of the religious houses 1 J.C. Dickinson and H.P.R. Finberg both noted that the total of £912 12s 8 1/8d 58 chapter three in the Diocese of Exeter, only the old English Benedictine foundation, Tavistock Abbey, had a greater income in 1535: £902 5s 7 1/8d.2 It seems unlikely that Plympton Priory would have attained this level of wealth without the support from lay donors which complemented the landholdings transferred from the secular college and the donations from the bishops of Exeter and their associates. The lay elite of Devon participated in the establishment of a sub- stantial endowment for Plympton Priory through the donation of a wide range of lands and secular privileges. In addition to these sources of income, which were known as temporalia, the priory also received from the laity rights to a number of parish churches in Devon. These rights—such as the prerogative of choosing the incumbent of a par- ish church—and the income attached to them (either in the form of a pension or a share of the tithes) were known as the spiritualia of a religious house. In 1535, Plympton Priory’s spiritualia were reckoned to be worth £454 7s and 2½d, a gure which far surpassed the spiri- tual income of any other religious house in the Diocese of Exeter.3 A signi cant portion of this amount can be traced to the churches given to the priory by the bishops of Exeter and to chapels which may have been attached to the college at Plympton before its conversion into an Augustinian priory. However, the contributions of lay donors to the spiritual wealth of Plympton Priory should not be underestimated. Such benefactors were likely in uenced by the church reform movement which had originated in the eleventh century and had attacked the lay ownership of churches. Although the precise extent of the generosity of lay benefactors to Plympton Priory is somewhat elusive due to the lack of a complete extant cartulary, the survival of extracts from a lost Plympton Priory cartulary and of a con rmation charter from Henry II strongly suggest that the lay elite of Devon in the twelfth century made signi cant contributions to the growth of Plympton Priory’s temporal and spiritual wealth.4 given in the nineteenth-century printed edition of the Valor Ecclesiasticus is an error (Dickinson, Origins of the Austin Canons, p. 296; H.P.R. Finberg, Tavistock Abbey: A Study in the Social and Economic History of Devon, 2nd ed. [New York/Newton Abbot, 1969], p. 28). 2 Finberg, Tavistock Abbey, p. 28. 3 MDE #28, p. 149; Valor Ecclesiasticus: temp Henry VIII auctoritate instituta, eds. J. Caley, J. Hunter (London, 1810–25), vol. 2, pp. 299–405. 4 An earlier version of these \ ndings was published as ‘Lay Benefactors of Plympton Priory in the Twelfth Century,’ TDA 134 (2002), 33–56..
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