The wealthiest Norman foundation in southern England

Although the 1291 assessments of annual income have been shown generally to be a substantial underassessment of monastic wealth they are, nevertheless, a reasonable guide to the relative positions of individual monasteries as they were all made on the same basis. What they show is that Lewes was the wealthiest post-Conquest foundation in southern England and ranked alongside several cathedral priories in wealth. No other Cluniac monastery was assessed at even one third of Lewes’s wealth, which in the 12th century was clearly sufficient to enable it to embark not only on a major building programme, including a church to equal any of its rivals in England, but also enabled it to grow rapidly in numbers to  as many as 100 monks at its height. Only later, with the onset of punitive taxation of alien monasteries during the French Wars of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, did Lewes Priory suffer major losses to its revenue from which it never fully recovered. But in the 12th and 13th centuries it was one of the major religious houses in England, a significant patron of the visual arts and the possessor of one of the largest libraries in medieval England, whose monks were sent to establish 8 monasteries in England and 2 in Normandy.

Relative wealth of English Cluniac houses

As the table demonstrates,  approximately one third of  English Cluniac houses were little more than cells of 2 or 3 monks, dependent on a larger mother house and living on a relatively tiny endowment. Such cells were common throughout the Cluniac Order in Europe. Relatively few English Cluniac houses had the level of income sufficient for lavish building campaigns or large numbers of monks, and only Lewes (and Reading) were in the first rank. Most of their wealth came early and from the end of the 12th century substantial new endowments of property to Cluniac houses were rare in the face of competition from the newer orders.

Below: Castle Acre cloister from Prior’s lodgings; Below right: Thetford infirmary cloister

             Annual income  £

                             Annual income    £