Grovebury Priory

The beginnings of the Priory lie with a grant of the royal manor of Leighton made by Henry II to the abbess and convent of Fontevraud in 1164.

Firstly, it followed in part the model established by the highly influential and prestigious Cluny Abbey (which by the 12th century numbered more than a thousand monasteries.

[14] With the passing of the Plantagenet dynasty, Fontevrault and her dependencies began to fall upon hard times, and the decline was worsened by the devastation of the 14th century Hundred Years War.

[15] Grovebury seems never to have been a true house on the elaborate Fontevraud double monastery model, but largely a land holding administered by a small number of male religious.

An altogether banal but instructive example would be Blakenham Priory in Suffolk (a possession of the great Benedictine abbey of Bec[17] in Normandy), where it is doubtful that true conventual monastic buildings ever existed, at least of any size.

This prior of Leighton had a good deal of trouble with his tenants on the subject of feudal services during the thirteenth century, which involved him in suits before the Curia Regis from 1213 to 1290.

This was a person of some importance, since he doubled as the proctor general of the abbess of Fontevraud in England, and in that capacity was obliged to make journeys for which he had to seek safe conducts from the king.

It seems however to have returned to its original position as a cell of Fontevraud, for it was reckoned in the next century among the alien priories, and in consequence of the measures introduced by 1414 was seized and granted in 1438, along with many other properties, to Eton College; and a few years later, in 1481, transferred to the dean and canons of St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.

[22] The site of Grovebury Priory, more correctly 'La Grava', was comprehensively excavated by the Bedfordshire County Archaeology Service between 1973 and 1985,[23] in advance of destruction by a 60-ft deep sand quarry.