What would the traveller have seen as he rode around the countryside five hundred years ago on horseback or in his lumbering ox-cart? He would find bustling towns and sleepy villages, much as he would today, together with isolated farm houses and cottages, but at regular intervals he would have come across a monastery. Perhaps not a vast, affluent centre of learning like those in Winchester, but still significant communities, offering spiritual and physical refreshment to the traveller as well as the inmates. Discounting the splendours of Boxgrove, there were four within a day’s ride from Petersfield: Selborne Priory and Durford Abbey, the nunnery at Easebourne, near Midhurst, and Shulbrede Priory, at Linchmere, all with their own stories to tell.

The largest monasteries were cities in themselves, thriving centres of devout communities. As sacred shrines many of them accumulated great wealth, and their abbots and priors were among the most influential men in the land. In the Middle Ages it was joked that if the Abbot of Glastonbury were somehow to wed the Abbess of Shrewsbury, any child of the marriage would be richer than the king of England. This could hardly be said of a union between Durford and Easebourne!

The Premonstratensian Abbey at Durford was founded in about 1160 by a group of monks from Welbeck, in Nottinghamshire, on land granted to them by the Hussey family of Harting. They were part of a fairly obscure order who were renowned for their teaching and preaching, so the canons from Durford also served the church of St. Bartholomew at Rogate. Yet it was significant enough for Edward II to visit on his way to Portchester in September 1324.As well as perhaps ten monks, there would have been some two dozen other residents: servants, farm workers and labourers, managing an estate of about 300 acres, but by the Dissolution in 1536 the Abbey was deep in debt and the buildings greatly decayed.

A year earlier the Commissioner for Monasteries had written: “It might have better been called Dirtforde, the poorest abbey I have seen.” Like Easebourne, Shulbrede and Boxgrove, the entire holdings were appropriated by Sir William Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton and Lord Privy Seal, who owned the Cowdray estate. The buildings were purchased by Sir Edmund Mervyn for £327 and finally demolished in 1783. A farm now stands on the site, incorporating the few stones that remain, and there is a fine mediaeval bridge nearby.

Easebourne Priory was founded before 1238 as a house of Augustinian Canonesses. For the Daily Office they used the present parish church, but parts of the monastic buildings remain, incorporated into a later house. At the Dissolution the Prioress and her nuns were ordered to leave, and it is said that the Prioress pronounced a curse of fire and water upon the new owners, and that their male heirs should perish.

Nothing happened for more than two centuries, by which time Fitzwilliam’s estate had passed to the Browne family. Then, in 1793, soon after extensive repairs had been carried out to Cowdray House, a small piece of smouldering charcoal fell on to the floor of the carpenter’s workshop, and by morning the entire great house was a burnt out ruin.


At the same time, the eighth Viscount, aged twenty-four and on holiday in Europe with a friend, recklessly attempted to shoot the falls on the Rhine at Laufenburg. Their boat capsized and they were never seen again. So the curse of fire and water was fulfilled.

Shulbrede Priory, a little to the north, was an Augustinian Priory founded around 1200. The church with its central tower was a very substantial building, especially for a house with just a prior and five canons. By the time of the visitation by the King’s Commissioners in 1535, servants outnumbered canons by twenty-six to three, and the Priory was suppressed two years later.

The remains, including the vaulted parlour and the Prior’s Chamber, became a Manorial farmhouse, and since1905 have been the home of the descendants of the composer, Sir Hubert Parry, whose suite of piano pieces, Shulbrede Tunes, were inspired by the house and its surroundings. The Priory, which contains some important Tudor wall paintings, is open to the public at summer Bank Holiday weekends.

Selborne Priory met with rather a different fate. It was founded in 1233 by Bishop Peter des Roches, again for Augustinian, or Black Canons, on land given by James de Norton and James de Oakhanger in the valley of the Oakhanger stream. At its height the Priory was endowed with property as far afield as Bramdean, Alton and Petersfield, and received appropriations from churches at Basing, Tisted and East Worldham, among others. In 1462 its two thousand acres were valued at nearly £90.

Being directly under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester, Selborne Priory was subject to regular visitations, or inspections.

There was often criticism of the behaviour of the canons and of the condition of the buildings, and by 1484 its state was such that it became the property of Magdelen College, Oxford, which had been founded by a Winchester bishop, William Wayneflete, some forty years earlier. Within two years a papal bull had been issued and the Priory was deserted. So Selborne Priory escaped the trauma of the Reformation, and although its walls are now nothing more than lines in the turf, some beautiful mediaeval tiles have survived, reset in the Parish Church. The archives have survived too, more or less complete, safe in the Founder’s Tower at Magdalen.

Tom Muckley, May 2004

This article was originally published by the Petersfield Post

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