Dissolution of Alien Priories

At the same time as this new pattern of landholding in Normandy and the regions southwards towards the Loire was being established by English soldiers and settlers, an older pattern, lingering from the time of the Norman Conquest of the 1060s, was finally cleared away. From the eleventh century through to 1415, despite many alarms along the way, large numbers of Norman and French religious houses had retained property in England, the endowment of ‘alien’ priories which had continued to look to France for guidance and the appointment of their heads. Fears had long been expressed that such houses harboured spies and the enemy within, but it was left to Henry V to order their final destruction. Henry V’s conquest of Normandy not only reversed the patterns of 1066, allowing an English army now to plunder the lands of the original plunderers of the eleventh century, but was accompanied by the deliberate obliteration of the last vestiges of Norman domination in England.

From the great disendowment of alien priories which followed, significant resources were redistributed to new collegiate foundations: to Winchester College, to Wykeham’s New College at Oxford, to Archbishop Chichele’s All Souls. Henry VI’s great colleges at Eton and at Cambridge were endowed with a large part of the English estate formerly controlled by the Norman abbots of Bec, cradle of Lanfranc, Anselm and most of the Norman archbishops of Canterbury in the century after 1066. Henry V’s own foundation of a Charterhouse for Carthusian hermits at Sheen in Surrey was granted the English estate of the Norman abbey of St-Evroult, once home to the Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis, first celebrator of William the Conqueror’s union between England and Normandy. This dissolution of the alien priories, which was bitterly resented in France, marked a highly significant break with the past. Like the King’s decision from 1417 to address all of his private correspondence in English rather than French or Latin, it suggests a new, chauvinistic approach to the relations between England and France.

Where once the Normans had colonized England, it was now Englishmen who filled the role of sahibs and proconsuls, directing an enterprise in France organized for English rather than mutual Anglo-Norman benefit. Henry V’s dissolution of the alien houses also paved the way to other disendowments of Church land: to the closure of failing small priories in the 1480s from which new religious foundations such as Magdalen College Oxford reaped significant gains, and ultimately to a far more dramatic dissolution of religious houses, when Henry VIII and the reformers of the 1520s turned their attention not just to alien but to English monasteries, beginning with what remained of the small fry, later laying hands on the greater prizes, in all cases merely continuing a process that had already begun under Henry V. In this way, as in his personal puritanism, Henry V supplied an important model for the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers. Once again, the fifteenth century emerges as Janus-faced, looking both forwards and backwards in time, its own identity never entirely secure.