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rectory of [Patrix]bourne as he had agreed and promised;
and now either dead or nearly so, and, after his decease without
executors, there would be little prospect of settling matters’.
According to Heales, the Prior and Convent of Merton presented Brother
Peter de Fodryngehe as incumbent at Patrixbourne and he was admitted by
two chaplains of the Pope and administrators of the Archbishop of
Canterbury in the first decade of the 1300s. In 1317, the Archbishop of
Canterbury decreed that there should always be two chaplains at
Patrixbourne, one of them at Bridge. In exchange for certain land and
rights to tithes, they should pay the Archbishop 40s. a year and
rebuild the chancel of the church, ‘if necessary’. On October 4, 1333
the escheator of Kent was ordered to restore the church and manor to the
Prior of Beaulieu as they had been wrongfully confiscated on the death of
Prior Simon in the same year.40
From the onset of the Hundred Years War in about 1337,
problems relating to payment of the annual £10 rent for Patrixbourne by
Beau-lieu began to arise. In February 1340 the king gave the Patrixbourne
property belonging to Beaulieu over to the keeping of the abbot of Langdon
because the proctor of Beaulieu was unable to pay the rent, presumably
because he had not received it from Beaulieu. A month later, Patrixbourne
was committed to the keeping of ‘Bartholomew de Bourn parson of Walsoken’
against payment of £10 a year.41 In September 1381 |
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Patrixbourne
was taken over by the vicars of Bekesbourne and Patrixbourne who agreed to
pay the annual rent of l00s. to the Exchequer and to maintain the clergy,
the houses and building of the manor and to be responsible for all other
charges ‘as long as the war with France shall endure.42
Continuing poor communications as well as political
expediency no doubt contributed to the acquisition in 1390 of Patrixbourne
by Richard Altryncham from the prior and convent of Beaulieu on a
sixty-year lease.43 Although Richard Altryncham was
granted the lease in recognition of his service to the Crown during the
wars with France, there seems to have been an element of negotiation with
Beaulieu. Heales records a petition sent to the Bishop of St David’s in
Wales by the prior of Beaulieu asking for help in obtaining compensation
for the loss of 100 sous annual income. The prior believed he had been
promised the compensation when the lease was granted to Richard Altryncham
at an earlier hearing in London. Richard Altryncham sold the estates he
had acquired from Beaulieu to Merton Priory in October 1409.44
The arrangement was confirmed the following year with a grant from the
prior and convent of Beaulieu of the manor of Patrixbourne to the prior
and convent of Merton, thus ending more than two hundred years of
ownership by the canons of |