The Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries

Before I end my current postings on Templar’s Prophecy, the fourth novel in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery Series, I want to discuss the tension between the town of Cirencester and the Augustinian Abbey of Saint Mary.  This is a topic which I wrote about in several postings in July 2017 and which you can access through the archive link for that month shown on the right below.

Cirencester Abbey was the largest of the Augustinian abbeys in England and extremely important to the life of the town in which it was located.  It was founded in the early 12^th century by King Henry I who granted them a charter in 1133 and established their position in the community.  I could devote this entire posting to a list of the many endowments both in Cirencester and elsewhere that were awarded to the abbey, but instead, I would like to discuss the tension this caused between the townspeople and the abbey because it plays an important part in my story.

There had been a minster or collegiate church in Cirencester from Saxon times when the town began to repopulate after the Roman withdrawal in the 5^th century.  This was still the case after the Norman Conquest when the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086 by order of King William the Conqueror.  Shortly thereafter, in 1108, the Order of Augustinian Canons was created in England.  King Henry I began building the church and the Augustinian monastery in Cirencester in 1117, leading to the appointment of its first abbot in 1131 and the charter in 1133 mentioned above.

During the reigns of King Henry II and Richard I, the abbey controlled the Manor of Cirencester and with it the whole town.  By the early 14^th century, the abbey had secured the power of law enforcement usually controlled by the sheriff of the shire and was even awarded its own goal or jail in 1222 by King Henry III.  For all practical purposes, the abbey ran the town and grew rich from the valuable wool trade which had developed between the 12^th and 14^th centuries.

There were three important developments in the 14^th century.  The first was the rebuilding of the nave of the abbey church which by this time was a magnificent church, dominating the nearby impressive parish church about which I have spoken in recent postings.  That parish church is still prominent today in Cirencester. but it is hard to visualize the even more impressive abbey church that was next to it because nothing remains above ground of the abbey church or other adjacent abbey buildings following the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII.  The Corinium Museum in Cirencester has some objects on display from the abbey church: carved stone faces of a king, a bishop, and a woman, along with medieval floor tiles.  Pictures of these objects are scattered throughout this posting.

A second development in the 14^th century was the growing friction between the abbey and town.  Those townspeople in the growing wool business felt constrained by the control of the abbey.  The abbey’s powers in that century were increased by bribes paid by the abbot to the monarch.  I have tried to incorporate this tension into my story.

Another development of the 14^th century was the townsfolk’s complaint of evil living by some of the monks and other abuses within the abbey.  This, too, was a point of tension between the townsfolk and the abbey.  Although the plot my story is fiction, I have described some of these abuses into Templar’s Prophecy.

Next time, I will speak of several interesting medieval topics from my fifth book, Joseph of Arimathea’s Prophecy.  Please join us then.

The fourth book in my Lady Apollonia’s West Country Mystery Series is entitled Templar’s Prophecy.  The book’s cover, shown on the left, features the medieval tomb effigy of a knight of that order that we found in the Templar Church of the Temple district of London, the exterior of that church is shown above.

You can read an earlier posting about the Knights Templar by clicking the May 2017 Archive using the link on the right below.  In that month’s archive, go to the May 30 post concerning the Knights Templar.  I mentioned there that my husband and I had visited various sites of Templar churches in England as well as in Spain, on the pilgrimage route from France to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain.

These ancient churches display the great power and wealth which the Templars amassed between the 12^th century when they were founded and the early 14^th century when they were dissolved by Pope Gregory.  Templars were a religious military order founded in 1119 to provide support and protection to pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land.  Within twenty years of their founding, a papal bull had exempted the order from local laws, from paying taxes, and from all authority except that of the pope.  Such exemptions enabled them to gain the power and amass the wealth mentioned earlier.

Another example of a Templar church in England is the one in ruins in Bristol as shown on the right.  Similarly, we encountered connections with the Templars in Scotland in Roselyn Chapel, south of Edinburgh.  We also found an ancient Templar construction in a castle in Ponferrada, Spain, shown at the end of this posting.  In addition to churches and castles, we encountered place names such as Templecombe in Somerset, England.  This village, northwest of Yeovil, became an administrative center for the Templars in 1185 to manage their lands in the southwest of England.

Although the origins of the religious order in the twelfth century were military, no more than ten percent were knights who were well respected for their fighting skills.  They wore a distinctive white mantle with a red cross.  The other noncombatant members of the order managed a large economic infrastructure throughout western Christendom.  Their wealth and power grew over the decades, resulting in over a thousand Templar facilities scattered across Europe and in the Holy Land.

The power of the crusaders in the Holy Land waxed, then waned between the end of the eleventh century and the end of the thirteenth century, coming to an end at the Siege of Acre in 1291.  In Templar’s Prophecy I introduce a fictitious young crusader who was captured at Acre.  His grandson plays a role in my story which is set a century later.  After losing their fortification at Acre, the Templars military function was significantly reduced, but their power and wealth were well established.

Various monarchs of the period borrowed money from the order, and this led to their downfall.  King Philip IV of France destroyed them in his country in 1307.  With the cooperation of a French pope, he charged them with heresy and saw to it that their leader was martyred, largely so that he did not have to repay his huge debt to them.  A few years later the religious order was destroyed, so it was difficult to include Templars in a story set in the late 14^th century.  But if you go back and read my posting of February 8, 2021, the prologue of Templar’s Prophecy, you will gain some insight in how I attempted to do it.

See you next time.

In my last post, I introduced the early history of Cirencester in the Roman and Saxon periods, but Templar’s Prophecy, the fourth novel in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries, is set in AD 1395 in medieval Cirencester.  This post will talk about that period in the town.

Cirencester’s population at the time of the Domesday Book in AD 1086 was about 350 persons, but it grew over the centuries to an estimated 2500 by the fourteenth century.  The main economic engine of the town was the wool trade which provided the reasons to have my heroine, Lady Apollonia, living in Cirencester.  English Cotswold wool was brought to Cirencester where it was woven, fulled or cleaned and thickened, and then dyed.

For four centuries in the medieval period, there were two great churches which sat almost side by side in the northeastern part of Cirencester, north of the great marketplace.  Just outside the walls which enclosed Cirencester Abbey was the Church of Saint John the Baptist which grew to be the largest parish church in Gloucestershire.  A picture of its impressive tower and south porch is shown on the upper left.

Yet even this mighty parish church building would have been dominated in medieval times by the greater church of Cirencester’s Saint Mary’s Abbey.  The abbey was built on the site of a minster church which dated back to Saxon times.  It was founded by King Henry I as an Augustinian abbey in AD 1117 and was enlarged in the 14^th century to become the largest Augustinian abbey in all of England.  Dissolved by King Henry VIII in the 16^th century, only grass parkland remains where the church and other abbey buildings once stood, as you can see in the picture below.

One Norman gate to the abbey grounds, shown below, and parts of the abbey wall remain today.  Some remnants of the once mighty abbey can be found elsewhere: a tithe barn on the outskirts of the town and some buildings in the town which utilized stone quarried from the abbey.

In its day, Saint Mary’s Abbey was immensely powerful.  The abbot, in the 13^th century, gained control of the wool fair, an annual event which attracted buyers and sellers, both domestic and foreign.  The abbey drew income from all its transactions, and this market did very profitable business because Cotswold wool was particularly prized in Europe.  The economic power which the abbot had often brought him into conflict with townspeople, and I have tried to weave some sense of that conflict into my story.

There were several medieval hospitals in Cirencester.  The Hospital of Saint John, shown below, was founded by King Henry I and received significant support in goods and personnel from Cirencester Abbey by the early 13^th century.  Such a hospital tended to the needs of elderly and sometimes feeble people of the town.  There were two other medieval hospitals in Cirencester which also have remains today:  Saint Lawrence. a leper hospital and Saint Thomas.  In the early medieval period, there was also a castle, but that had been destroyed, well before my story, at the time of the Civil War between King Stephen and Queen Matilda.

Please join me for my next post when I plan to discuss the Knights Templar on which the title to my book is based.

Cirencester, the English town in which the fourth novel, Templar’s Prophecy, in the Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries, is set in AD 1395, has an even more ancient history going back to the Roman occupation of Britain.  There was a Roman military presence in Cirencester by the middle of the first century a. d.  A stone wall enclosed 200 acres of the Roman town, which by the second century was called Corinium Dobunnorum.  The Corinium Museum in Cirencester today takes its name from the Roman designation.  Dobunnorum in the title refers to the Celtic tribe which occupied the area.

Corinium was laid out in a typical Roman rectangular street pattern, much of which remains to the present day.  The Roman forum and basilica were larger than any other in Britain except in Londinium.  A depiction of the forum in the Corinium Museum is shown above.

To this day, Cirencester is the largest town in the Cotswald region of England, but already in Roman times, its location was important in the network of Roman roads which passed through it in various directions.  It is on the Fosse Way which the Romans constructed to link Lincolnshire in the north with Devon in the south as well as London in the east with Wales in the west.  A sign near the site of the Roman East Gate to Corinium is shown below.  It speaks of two of the main Roman roads passing through Corinium.  The third was Ermin Street which linked Corinium to Glevum or modern Gloucester.

Corinium has offered archaeologists many Roman treasures even though little of it remains on view above ground in modern Cirencester beyond the footprint of the walls surrounding the Roman town.  The Corinium Museum, however, has a rich display of Roman objects including many beautiful mosaic floors such as this one in the photo below.

The site of the Roman amphitheater is just southwest of the Roman walls.  It is now covered in grass, but had other types of vegetation in the medieval period.  I used this in Templar’s Prophecy as a site where villains in my story could hide.  My historian friend Phil Moss from Gloucester is shown walking with me in the middle of the amphitheater site in the image below.

Roman occupation of Britain ended early in the 5^th century, after which the population grew much smaller.  However, the Romano-Britons and other Britons that did remain were supplemented in the 5^th and later centuries by invading Saxons. These Saxons who were Germanic peoples. rose to prominence in Cirencester as elsewhere in England.  One lasting effect of the Saxons in Cirencester was Dyer Street in the northwestern part of the town.  Unlike the ancient rectangular street pattern of the Romans, Dyer Street meanders with lovely, gentle curves.  A house on Dyer Street which jetties out in its upper stories, shown on the upper left, was my inspiration for the residence of Lady Apollonia’s household in Templar’s Prophecy.

In my next post, I will continue to speak of ancient Cirencester.

Perhaps the most exotic setting that occurs in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries is found in my fourth book, Templar’s Prophecy, the cover of which is shown on the left.  The prologue is set is Nubia in the middle of the 14^th century.  Why such a place and time for my prologue?  I begin my 2021 posts by lifting topics from Templar’s Prophecy, to answer these questions.

In each of my seven books, I have tried to include some features of medieval life that are unfamiliar to our contemporary existence.  The Templar brotherhood was an important monastic movement in England and continental Europe until the early 14^th century when it was banned by the French king.  To bring medieval Templars into one of my stories, I had to find a way to bridge the beginning of the 14^th century, when the Templars were disbanded by the French king, with AD 1395, the time of Templar’s Prophecy.

My interest in archaeology also provided me an excellent idea.  In one of my Archaeology Magazines, I found an article about a dig in Sudan, which in the Middle Ages was called Nubia.  It revealed the existence of an important Christian church which had been a healing center and sight of pilgrimage until later in the 14^th century when the area was converted to Islam.  I decided to use this Church of Raphael the Archangel in Banganarti in the Kingdom of Makuria, Nubia in AD 1350, as the first setting for my story, Templar’s Prophecy.  It had been a famous healing center in the fourteenth century of which an archaeological reconstruction from the magazine Archaeology is shown below.

To provide the link between the Templars who no longer existed in 1350 with my story, set in AD 1395 in Cirencester, I have created two new fictional characters:  Hugh de Farleigh, a Templar from a family of knights in Cirencester who was captured by the Mamelukes at the fall of Acre in 1291 and sold to a Nubian Christian as a slave, and Benesec Raphael de Farleigh, his grandson, a boy in 1350 in Nubia who comes as a mature adult to Cirencester, the ancestral home of the de Farleigh’s, in 1395 to play a role in my story as a physician.

The prologue to Templar’s Prophecy tells the story of Martin Harlech, another resident of Cirencester, whose life has been so plagued by diseases of the skin that he has sought relief through pilgrimages to a variety of favorite medieval sites including Santiago de Compostela and Rome.  Finally, his desperation takes him to Banganarti, Nubia, in Africa in AD 1350 to visit the healing center at the Church of Raphael the Archangel.  Although this Englishman from the West Country of England is unfamiliar with the languages that he encounters in Nubia, he does begin to experience relief from his disease which he fears is some form of leprosy.

After many weeks of healing, he is also amazed to encounter a person with an English voice from the West Country who is Hugh de Farleigh, an aged Templar captured and sold into slavery a half century earlier.  Harlech is befriended by de Farleigh and becomes acquainted with de Farleigh’s family, including his Nubian wife, son, and young grandson Benesec Rafael.  The latter has inherited Hugh de Farleigh’s blue eyes but shows the African ancestry of his Nubian parents and paternal grandmother in his black skin.

Benesec Raphael de Farleigh, Hugh’s grandson comes to Cirencester 45 years later to explore his de Farleigh ancestry, but finds his dark skin is immediately noticed suspiciously by the locals.  The Lady Apollonia who is living in Cirencester at the time, finds this stranger from Africa a well-educated and fascinating friend.  Benesec’s African training as a physician is an asset which enabled me to have him play a role in my West Country story.

The illustration below is a medieval rendering of Saint Raphael in the church where it was discovered in the archeological dig in Sudan.

My next post will begin exploring the history of Cirencester where Templar’s Prophecy is set.

As 2020 draws to a close I want to complete the medieval topics from Memento Mori which I have been presenting in recent postings.  Two topics deserve our attention before I move on to others from Templar’s Prophecy next year.  These will begin with Lollardy and Medieval Gangs.

Many modern readers are not familiar with the meaning of Lollardy which plays a role in Memento Mori, the third novel in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries.  This term refers to reformed religious followers in England of the Oxford scholar John Wycliffe who was introduced in my first book, Effigy of the Cloven Hoof, because of his historic connection with the village of Aust in which that book was set.  That association was described in my blog posting of November 13, 2016, a link to which is available in the Archives on the lower right.  John Wycliffe, pictured on the right, died on the last day of 1384.  He had been declared a heretic in 1381 because of his translation of the Bible into English and for many of his ideas about reforming the Catholic Church.

The term “Lollardy” was first used in England in 1387 by the Bishop of Worcester in whose diocese Gloucester is located.  Memento Mori is set in that city in 1392, so the people there who were interested in Wycliffe’s ideas were among the first in England to be called by that name.  Lady Apollonia’s third husband, Richard Windemere, is a wealthy merchant, and it is with his merchant friends that he became involved in discussing some of Wycliffe’s ideas of reform.  These friends seemed to be particularly interested in Wycliffe’s Bible in English and in his conviction that the great wealth of the medieval church contradicted the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.  Robert Windemere learns that his wife, the Lady Apollonia also shares some of Lollardy’s concerns about abuses and problems in the Church without openly supporting the Lollards.  In the years after Wycliffe’s death, the scholar and the Lollards were declared to be heretics by the Roman Church.

I introduced the idea of medieval gangs in Effigy of the Cloven Hoof, Book One of the series, where a gang run by a noble family in Devon was involved in smuggling and other illegal activities.  That gang was enabled to include smuggling in its list of illegal activities because of its location near the English Channel.  One survivor of that family makes an appearance early in Memento Mori, Book Three, under the assumed name of Jimson, as a member of a gang run by a corrupt cellarer monk of Saint Oswald’s Priory in Gloucester.  Historically, Saint Oswald’s Priory had experienced declining fortunes by 1392, a fact I used to allow this corrupt monk to misuse his power as cellarer and run a gang for his own enrichment.  The ruins of Saint Oswald’s Priory are pictured below.

Jimson, while involved in a robbery for the cellarer’s gang, encounters a more powerful gang run by the illegitimate daughter of the Sheriff of Gloucestershire.  She is one of my favorite villains as she used her class status to run the most powerful gang in the city.  Her gang used an abandoned warehouse by the quay along the River Severn in Gloucester, the site of the medieval quay is pictured below.

In January, we will begin to post topics from my fourth book, Templar’s Prophecy and plan to start with the prologue, which is set in, of all places, Nubia in the mid-14^th century.  I hope you will stay tuned.

My last posting discussed Plague and Death in Memento Mori, the third novel in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery Series; its cover of the paperback edition is pictured to the left.  The subject matter we shall speak to in this posting will discuss “anchorites.”

Medieval anchorites were religious persons, male or female, who, for personal reasons of religious commitment, withdrew from secular society.  They became hermits who, unlike others in monastic life choosing to live in communities, took a vow to locate in one place, called a cell or anchorhold, for the purpose of leading a prayerful and ascetic life alone.  This vow was for life and was taken so seriously in Germany that the local bishop often pronounced the Office of the Dead when the anchorite entered his or her cell.  This signified the anchorite’s death to the world and his or her dedication to a new, entirely private existence.  Anchorites could communicate with people who supported them or sought advice from them through small windows in their cells.

In Memento Mori I have introduced an anchorite whose location or anchorhold was a hermit cell attached to the Chapel of Saint Kyneburgh in Gloucester.  This character is based on a real hermit who was known to have lived in the 14^th century when this novel is set.  The map on the right shows the location of his real cell adjacent to the chapel and close to the South Gate of medieval Gloucester.  As was typical of these cells, it would also have had a window or squint looking into the chapel.  The hermit was able to observe all services in the chapel and keep an eye on the relics of Saint Kyneburgh.  There would have been at least one window in the cell facing out from the cell to the community.  This would have allowed the hermit’s needs to be cared for and would have let in daylight.

The picture below shows a modern fence erected along the path of Gloucester’s medieval wall near its South Gate.  The Chapel of Saint Kyneburgh and its hermit’s cell no longer exist but would have been located by the right side of this modern fence.

The anchorite character plays a major role in my story.  I hope you will enjoy reading Memento Mori to discover what that role is.

In my first book in the series, Effigy of the Cloven Hoof, Lady Apollonia was influenced by Mother Julian, the first woman to publish writings in the English language.  Mother Julian was a fourteenth century female anchoress in real life.  Among anchorites in medieval England, females such as Mother Julian frequently outnumbered males.

Mother Julian’s location was next to a parish church in Norwich, Norfolk, East Anglia.  The picture below shows her cell attached to the south side of the church.  The cell had the window shown in the picture which yielded good light in the daytime and another window into the wall of the church that allowed the anchoress to view directly into the chancel area of the church.

My next posting will address still other medieval topics from Memento Mori.  Please join us!

The last blog posting completed my discussion of the ancient city of Gloucester in Memento Mori, my third novel in the Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries Series, whose cover is shown above on the left.  Now I wish to discuss other topics addressed in this book beginning with Death and Plague, topics much related in the 14^th century setting of my books.

Throughout history there have been major occurrences of what we now call the Bubonic Plague, transmitted by fleas often found on rats.  The sheer number of rats and their contact with humans became the vector for the disease to jump from animals to humans.  Two major outbreaks of plague have been in Europe: the first was in the 6^th to 8^th centuries and was known as the Plague of Justinian, the emperor who contracted the disease after its arrival in Constantinople in AD 542.  Justinian was one of the few lucky enough to survive it as between a quarter and a half of the population were killed by the disease in this occurrence.  See my earlier posting of May 16, 2017 in the archives below on the right for more information on the Bubonic Plague.

Major occurrences of the plague came to Europe in the middle ages in multiple waves.  The first wave, called the Black Death at the time, struck England in 1347 with several repeat visits before 1392 when my Memento Mori novel was set.  These waves, a devastation which affected almost everyone, wiped out a third to a half of the total population of the country.  Subsequent waves of the plague returned to England for three more centuries and even spread to colonial America.

One of the effects of the 14^th century plague in England was an emphasis on creating tombs decorated by full length carvings of decaying bodies in churches. These were obviously remembering one’s death, or “memento mori” in Latin which I have used as my title.  Such tombs were nearly always accompanied by a threatening poem:

Listen man, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I;
As I am now, you soon shall be
Prepare therefore to follow me.”

However, a cheeky widow in Yorkshire was known to have added her own codicil to the poem:

To follow thee, I’m not content
Until I know just where thee went.

By the next century, transi or cadaver tombs became quite popular in England.  The effigy in such a tomb shows the human body in some state of decay.  The skull shown on the cover of my book is taken from one of my husband’s photos of a transi tomb in Exeter Cathedral, while the photo shown immediately below has me looking at a transi tomb in Tewksbury Abbey.

Plague and death greet the reader of Memento Mori in the prologue to my story.  Laston, the squire of the knight Sir Alban, Lady Apollonia’s fourth son, is returning from a crusade of the Teutonic Knights that he and his master had joined.  He is trying to find Apollonia to inform her of the death of her son from the plague and bring her what little remains of her son were possible in 1392.  Eventually, he finds her in Gloucester and one important aspect of my story tells how Apollonia deals with her loss.

The Lady decides, in Memento Mori, to construct a fitting memorial for the remains of her son.  In writing this story, I was guided by a fourteenth century tomb in Exeter Cathedral, shown below, as my inspiration for how Apollonia wished her son’s tomb to be designed.  This badly damaged Exeter example displays an effigy of a knight with his squire on the left and his horse, on the right.

Please join me in December when I will continue speaking of other aspects of medieval life described in Memento Mori.

My last blog posting continued a discussion of surviving medieval buildings in the city of Gloucester.  It focused on the medieval monasteries in Gloucester other than the Abbey of Saint Peter which I discussed in an earlier posting.  Gloucester in 1392 is the setting for my third novel in the Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries Series, Momento Mori, so please join me as we consider other medieval buildings which still stand in Gloucester.

We begin with two parish churches, the first of which is Saint Mary de Lode, shown above.  It is also known as Saint Mary Before the Gate of Saint Peter because of its location just west of Saint Mary’s Gate of the Abbey of Saint Peter.  This is the gate through which my heroine entered the abbey grounds when she visited the abbey church.  The picture you see above is the view she would have had when she exited the abbey grounds through this gate.

We can see that the tower of Saint Mary de Lode Church is ancient Norman architecture while the chancel is 13^th century Gothic.  Its earlier history is less certain, but legend suggests that a local king was buried on this site in the 2^nd century, the first Christian church in Britain.  The word “Lode” in the name of the church refers to a water course or ferry and may go back to a time when there was an east branch of the River Severn which passed near this site.

Another parish church shown above on the left, Saint Mary de Crypt, also plays a role in Memento Mori.  One of my villains, Sherf, was married on the porch of this church before departing to live in Cornwall at the end of the novel.

Another surviving ancient building is The New Inn on Northgate Street.  It is shown on the lower right and is a fine example of a medieval courtyard inn with galleries.  In our day, the New Inn has a restaurant, pub, coffee shop, hotel with 36 rooms, and two function rooms  Although the present building dates from half a century after my novel, it was built on the site of an even older inn and provided me with a living example of a medieval inn that was in business in Gloucester during the fourteenth century.

The last building, shown below. is on Westgate Street, and, like the New Inn, was built after 1392 when Memento Mori is set.  When I was last in Gloucester doing research for my story, this ancient building had become The Gloucester Folk Museum.  However, it served as my inspiration for Windemere House, the grand home in my story of Lady Apollonia and her third husband, Richard Windemere.

Please join me for future posts as we prepare to discuss a great “pandemic” of the fourteenth century:  the bubonic plague.

My last blog posting began a discussion of surviving medieval buildings in the city of Gloucester.  It focused on the Abbey of Saint Peter which became Gloucester Cathedral at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII.  Gloucester is the setting in 1392 for my third novel in the Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries Series, Momento Mori.  In this post, however, I would like to call your attention to other medieval monastic buildings which still stand in Gloucester or survive as ruins.

Saint Oswald’s Priory is my starting point because it, like Saint Peter’s, plays an important role in my story.  The ruins of the abbey, viewed from its south side, are shown above in a picture taken in 2018.   I am standing between two Phil’s: Phillip Brockington, a friend and traveling companion from Indiana on the left and Philip Moss, a well-known Gloucester historian and friend, on the right.  Saint Oswald’s Priory was originally a minster dedicated to Saint Peter when it was founded in the 9^th century, but the dedication of the priory was changed to Saint Oswald when the saint’s bones were translated there from Bardney Abbey in Lincolnshire in AD 909.

The priory gradually declined through the centuries before the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century by King Henry VIII.  That decline enabled me to make it the base location for one of the criminal gangs which are an important part of the story of Memento Mori.

The city of Gloucester had three mendicant orders of friars in 1392 at the time of my novel.  These orders arose in Europe, primarily in the 13^th century, based on a different monastic model: instead of the traditional isolation of monks in their communities, these orders adopted a lifestyle of poverty, traveling, and living in urban areas. Their purpose was preaching, evangelization, and ministry, especially to the poor of their communities.  They were an important part of life in Gloucester, though not directly involved in the plot of Memento Mori.  All three of these orders were supported by King Henry III in the 13^th century after his coronation in Gloucester at the Abbey of Saint Peter.  Henry III was the only English monarch since the Norman Conquest to be crowned outside Westminster.  Perhaps this special relationship with the city contributed to his support.  Each of these orders are referenced by names based on the color of their robes.

I begin with the Blackfriars, shown to the left, whose Gloucester facility on the south side of the city is the best surviving complete example of a Dominican House in Europe.  We can thank its survival after the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16^th century to its purchase by Sir Thomas Bell, a wealthy Gloucester capper and clothier who remodeled the church into his private residence, using its other buildings for his businesses.

The Greyfriars were Franciscans who wore grey robes.  Ruins from their house in the southeastern part of Gloucester are shown on the right.  Finally, the Whitefriars were Carmelites whose house was thought to be near the North Gate of the city, but little was known about this monastery.  Surprisingly, while preparing this posting, I learned of a current archaeological dig at the site of a demolished multi-level carpark near the north Gate.  This has been established as the location of several of the Whitefriar buildings.  My Gloucester historian friend, Philip Moss, received the final report of the archaeologists just days ago.

Another local monastic institution of Gloucester was Llanthony Secunda Priory, founded in 1136 south of the medieval city wall of Gloucester in what is now the docks area of the city.  It was a secondary house and refuge for Augustinian monks from Llanthony Priory in Wales.  The surviving remains have been listed structures since 1952 with restoration occurring in 2013, the year after my husband, Lou, took the picture of some of those remains shown below in 2012.

Medieval Gloucester had more monastic orders than any other city in the West County of England.  I hope you have found interesting this brief mention of them.  In my next post, I will discuss medieval churches and other ancient buildings that play a role in Memento Mori.