Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 29.djvu/282

 ox Tni: ALIEN rnioiiiEs in tue isle of wight, and tiieui SEIZUllE BY EDWAllD THE FIRST. By the Rev. E. VENABLE3, Trccentor oi. Lincoln.' The Alien Priories of England, during the three or four centuries of their existence, were a standing, and at times, a very inconvenient memorial of the subjugation of the country by a foreign power. The fact of the Norman Conquest Avas stamped, as it were, on the focc of the land, long after our Sovereigns had become Englishmen, by these little settle- ments of aliens dotted everywhere over it, owing allegiance to a foreign ][onarch, paying obedience to a foreign Monastic House, and transmitting the greater part of their rents and profits to their spiritual heads beyond the seas. "When England had been only recently brought under the Xonnan yoke, and the larger i)art of her territory was held by Norman lords, and her kings were far more Norman or Angiovinc than English, these Alien Priories — by which, as is well- known, AYc understand cells appurtenant to the great foreign lleligious Houses, from which they commonly received their Priors, and in most cases their jIonks, and to which they returned their receipts — presented nothing that appeared at variance with a sound national policy, and little that could be distasteful to the national mind. It was only a reasonable arrangement that when a benefiiction of land or tithes was made to any one of the l^'rench monasteries by a Norman lord, an ofl'shoot of their establishment should be })lanted on the estate, in order to secure the profitable cultivation of the land, and the faithful transmittal of the rents and revenues. In fact, the Prior and jIonks of an alien priory were little more than the stewards and servants of the larger house, owing their existence, as a corj)orate body, rather to tho temjioral advantage of the mother-monastery than to tho spiritual benefit of the district in which it was founded. To take an example from the district now before us — ' Head in the liiutoricol Section of tbo SmitLainptyn Mfcliuf, August 7, 1872.