Text Box: Lewes Priory: Taxation © Graham Mayhew 2008 Text Box: As well as the royal exactions from Lewes as an alien monastery until 1351, Lewes Priory was also liable to the normal demands of the royal exchequer. In total over the 250 or so years from 1280 to the surrender in November 1537, the monks paid something in the region of 15 times the priory’s total annual assessed income in royal taxation, giving an average per decade of approximately £600. Roughly half of this was due to the priory’s alien status. Most of the rest was in the form of clerical tenths, but there were also feudal aids, loans and benevolences, requests for military provisions, ninths on wool fleeces, subsidies and the poll taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1381. In most cases, where the evidence survives, Lewes Priory appeared to have paid in full without especial difficulties. But on occasion peaks in extraordinary royal taxation coincided with other unforeseen financial demands on the priory’s resources, most obviously after the prior’s capture by the French in 1377, causing a short-term crisis. Decades where taxation (not including levies because of Lewes’s alien status) over the ten years equalled or exceeded one year’s total revenues were 1310-19, 1410-19 and the 1520s. Additionally the 1290s, 1300-9, the 1340s, 1370s and 1380s, 1400-9, 1510-19 and 1530-7 all saw royal demands equivalent to at least two-thirds of one year’s revenue. When the levies on alien priories are added into the equation, it can be seen that Lewes Priory had to sustain severe royal demands on its revenue from the 1290s to the end of the 1340s and relatively high, but lesser, demands from 1370 to 1420 although with a respite during the 1390s, when the priory was, in any event, recovering from the costs of raising its prior’s ransom. Demands for high levels of royal taxation, however, could sometimes coincide with internal crises in the priory’s economy. The sudden change in fortunes from solvency, as reported by the Cluniac visitors in 1288, to debts of over 8,500 marks by 1294 may well have been caused by losses due to the maritime flooding of the south coast in 1288, of Norfolk in 1287 and 1290 and the loss of the hay crop in 1290 due to an exceptionally wet early autumn. Such events would have hit the priory’s revenues both from arable crops and sheep farming especially hard. By June 1290, Lewes Priory owed its chief wool buyer, Baroncino Gualteri, 4,200 marks. Coupled with this was the extraordinary demand for 6 papal tenths imposed in 1289 followed by a further royal tenth in 1290. By 1291 the priory was also in debt to the crown for 2,000 marks. Further royal demands followed for a tenth in 1295 and three tenths Text Box: plus a third or a fifth granted by the convocations of Canterbury and York during 1297. But by this time Lewes was also charged (since 1294) with half its annual income as an alien priory. It is therefore hardly surprising that the priory simply could not meet all its obligations, a point recognized by the king when, in October 1299 at the instance of the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, Edward I ordered a respite in the demands for arrears from the sheriffs of the various counties where the priory’s estates lay. Then in 1301 came the demand for a further three papal tenths from the clergy. By this time although peace had led to the lifting of the priory’s alien status, its financial resources had been exhausted. Under such circumstances the debts of 22,000 marks reported by the visitors in 1301 become readily comprehensible. Nevertheless Lewes Priory’s extensive landholdings meant that by 1307 debts had been reduced to 4,000 marks and despite the demands of four papal tenths granted in 1309 and six granted in 1312, by 1314 debts had fallen to only £2000. The crisis of the mid-1320s, when Lewes Priory was again taken into the king’s hands on account of a resumption of the war with France, would appear to account for the debts reported variously at £7,840 or £10755 inherited by the new prior, Peter de Jocellis, in 1329; but again the priory’s underlying sound finances enabled this debt to be reduced to only £1856 by 1335, despite the imposition of a further four papal tenths in 1330, an aid to the marriage of the king’s sister in 1332, six papal tenths in 1333 and a royal tenth in 1334. Again it would appear to be the enormous cost of keeping the custody of the priory during the French wars which began again in 1337 and continued with only intermittent truces throughout Text Box: the next decade, which had resulted in the dire financial state by 1348 recorded in the Earl of Arundel’s petition. The next two decades, from 1350 to 1369, in which royal demands from the clergy were relatively low, saw a steady recovery and there was apparently little difficulty in meeting the increased royal demands of the 1370s when the resumption of war led to the levy of six tenths and two poll taxes. Indeed the poll taxes clearly worked to the priory’s advantage. The imposition of 1s per monk in 1377 and 3s 4d per monk plus 6 marks for the prior in 1379, both amounted to only a small fraction of the cost of a tenth. The poll tax of 1381 assessed at half a mark (6s 8d) a head on the prior and 39 monks only cost the priory £13 6s 8d, compared to £106 4s 6d for a clerical tenth. The cause of the priory’s renewed financial problems was the French raid of 1377 and its aftermath in the ransom of 7,000 nobles (£2333 6s 8d) paid for the return of the prior. Nor is there any evidence that the priory had any obvious difficulty in meeting its obligations for royal taxes over the next century and a half. It was, after all, relatively easy to budget for a single annual tenth or twentieth. Even the two tenths imposed on three separate occasions between 1414 and 1418 to help fund Henry V’s French wars, appear to have been met without problems. Similarly successive priors seem to have absorbed the administrative burdens of being the usual collectors of the clerical tenth in Lewes archdeaconry, although on one occasion, in 1405 the prior, having accounted for the full amount due, did petition the crown for a writ of aid against clerical defaulters, who had refused to pay. Indeed not until the forced loan of £500 assessed on Lewes for Henry VIII’s French campaign in 1522 and the associated demands of 1523 and 1525 were the priory’s finances seriously strained by royal demands. Overall, then, royal taxation became merely another regular item of expenditure to be budgeted for. It may occasionally have caused minor cash flow problems but it does not appear in itself to have been a significant factor in the priory’s relative decline in wealth from the elite of the first rank of English monasteries. This was due far more to the crisis of 1294-1351 when its alien status led to the saddling of the priory with enormous, albeit temporary, debts and more seriously forced the permanent alienation of some of its property.

Top:  West Hoathly, Sussex: Priest’s house, built by Lewes Priory in the early 15th century following the appropriation of the parish church and creation of the rectory manor.

 

Right: Langney Manor