The Regular and the Secular: Plympton Priory and Its Connections to the Secular Clergy

CHAPTER SEVEN THE REGULAR AND THE SECULAR: PLYMPTON PRIORY AND ITS CONNECTIONS TO THE SECULAR CLERGY As was seen in Chapter Three, a topic of research which has drawn much attention from scholars of medieval monastic history has been the support that religious houses received from their patrons and benefactors. Less work has been done, however, on the subject of the religious houses themselves as patrons of the secular clergy.1 This is surprising, since many religious houses possessed the right to present clerics to various parish churches—a right also known as the “advowson” in England—and consequently played an important role in assisting members of the secular clergy to obtain bene ces.2 A religious house that possessed many advowsons or advowsons yielding high incomes was likely to receive many expressions of interest from unbene ced clerics 1 Christopher Harper-Bill, ‘The Struggle for Bene\ ces in Twelfth-Century East Anglia,’ Anglo-Norman Studies XI, Proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1988, ed. R. Allen Brown (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 113–32, discusses the in uence of the papacy, the episcopacy, and the Crown on monastic presentations to bene ces; Richard K. Rose, ‘Priests and Patrons in the Fourteenth-Century Diocese of Carlisle,’ in The Church in Town and Countryside: Studies in Church History, vol. 16 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 207–18, includes religious houses in his examination of the patrons of the bene ced clergy in the diocese of Carlisle; Barrie Dobson, Durham Priory, 1400–1450 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 144–72, discusses the patronage of the prior of Durham, as does Robert Donaldson in ‘Sponsors, Patrons and Presentations to Bene ces—Particularly those of the Prior of Durham—during the Later Middle Ages,’ Archaeologia Aeliana 38 ser. 4 (1960), 169–77. For the sake of comparison, see Richard Brown, ‘The Ecclesiastical Patronage of the Bishops of Winchester, 1282–1530,’ Southern History 24 (2002), 27–44. An earlier ver- sion of the ndings in this chapter was accepted for publication in vol. 25 (2004) of Medieval Prosopography as ‘The Incumbents of Bene ces in the Gift of Plympton Priory, 1257–1369’; this volume is forthcoming. 2 The normal procedure was that the superior and members of a religious house would, when a bene ce in their gift became vacant, present to the bishop the man they wished to become the next incumbent of that bene ce. The bishop would then institute the candidate to the bene ce. The incumbent might be a rector—that is, he would receive the majority of the tithes associated with the bene ce—or a vicar. A religious house would appoint a vicar if the house had appropriated the bene ce, which involved the religious house obtaining a greater share of the tithes and of\ cially becoming the rector of the church. The vicar would carry out the normal pastoral duties and would receive a set portion of the tithes and possibly certain dues and offerings as well. See Hartridge, A History of Vicarages in the Middle Ages, pp. 36–8. 180 chapter seven and their supporters or relatives. Plympton Priory was a house in such a position: by the fourteenth century it possessed the greatest number of advowsons of any religious house in the diocese of Exeter.3 The fact that Plympton Priory possessed, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the advowsons of eighteen churches4 meant that its prior and canons frequently participated in nding clerics to \ ll the bene ces in their gift. In addition, religious houses could exercise patronage through providing “titles”—documents in theory expressing nancial support—for men who wished to be ordained. As will be seen, the involvement of the canons of Plympton Priory in this practice waxed and waned over the course of the fourteenth century and into the fteenth. The purposes of this chapter are to investigate the participation of Plympton Priory in the distribution of titles, and also to demonstrate the importance of religious houses in providing bene ces to members of the secular clergy through a case study of the patronage of this particular English religious house in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A goal of this study is to make use of this cross-section of the bene ced clergy in order to examine more closely the education, levels of ordination, origins, and connections of men who served as rectors or vicars in this period. Through a prosopographical examination of the kinds of men who were incumbents of bene ces in the gift of Plympton Priory, one can gain a fuller understanding of the links between the priory and the secular clergy in the diocese, as well as a more complete picture of the place of a major religious house in providing support to those seeking bene ces. In addition, such an investigation produces a cross- section of the secular clergy in this region for more than a hundred years, throwing into high relief the great diversity within the clergy and, in particular, the “class” differences between rectors and vicars. By providing information on the careers of more than one hundred members of the secular clergy, this study also sheds light on the local experience of some of the “hot-button” issues in the Church in the 3 Reg. Grandisson III, pp. 1661–75. 4 In the middle of the thirteenth century, the prior and canons of Plympton had the right to present to eighteen rectories and vicarages, all in the diocese of Exeter: these were Blackawton, Bratton-Clovelly, Bridestowe, Dean Prior, Egg Buckland, Exminster, Ilsington, Marystow, Meavy, Newton St. Cyres, Peter Tavy, Stokeinteignhead, Sutton (Plymouth), Tamerton Foliot, and Ugborough in Devon and Maker, St. Kew, and St. Mawgan-in-Pydar in Cornwall. By c. 1340, Plympton Priory had alienated the advowsons of Bratton-Clovelly, Bridestowe, Ilsington, Peter Tavy, and St. Mawgan-in-Pydar. (Reg. Bronescombe, Reg. Stapeldon, Reg. Grandisson, passim). .

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