No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Excavations on the Site of the Priory Church and Monastery of St. Peter, Eye, Suffolk
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2012
Extract
The small town of Eye in north central Suffolk was one of those feudal centres which sprang into great importance on the redistribution of English lands following the Norman Conquest. It had, however, a previous history as head of an Honour, being held as such in the reign of Edward the Confessor by Edric the king's falconer, and was thus chosen as a suitable site for the establishment of one of the Conqueror's prominent barons, and granted to William Malet. This man was Sire de Graville, a small town a little east of Havre in Normandy, where the priory church founded by his grandson William, and some remains on the site of the Malet castle, still exist on a height overlooking the Seine. He was apparently of English birth on the maternal side and of very high family, his mother being a sister of the famous Godiva, wife of Leofric Earl of Mercia, and was thus one of those Normans who had definite pre-Conquest connexions with Saxon England.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1927
References
page 299 note 1 See monograph on the Malet family, and Dict. Nat. Biog., xxxv, 421, quoting Freeman, Norm. Conq., iii, 779. It has also been suggested by A. S. Ellis that she was Godiva's daughter.
page 299 note 2 Ordericus Vitalis, Eccl. Hist., bk. iii, ch. 14.
page 299 note 3 Dict. Nat. Biog., loc. cit., and Simeon of Durham, Op. Hist. (Roll Series), ii, 188; also Henry of Huntingdon and A.S. Chron., but without names of prisoners taken by the Danish fleet.
page 300 note 1 Dict. Nat. Biog., loc. cit.
page 300 note 2 Hesilia Crispin was in the fourth generation descended from Rollo, first Duke of Normandy. Married to Malet c. 1044.
page 300 note 3 Dugdale, Mon. Angl., i, 356.
page 300 note 4 Ibid., 357.
page 300 note 5 Ordericus Vitalis, op. cit., bk xi, ch. 2, foot-note.
page 301 note 1 Dict. Nat. Biog., xxxv, 420.
page 301 note 2 The Malet family.
page 301 note 3 Dugdale, op. cit., i, 358.
page 301 note 4 Details of the Honour and Manor are taken from Coppinger's Manors of Suffolk.
page 301 note 5 From notes collected by an old resident of Eye. Dugdale, op. cit., i, 358, states that this janitor was put in by the founder's successors, maintained at the charges of the monastery until the new prior's appointment, and then received as his fee the sum of 5s. for an ox.
page 302 note 1 Dugdale, op. cit., i, 359.
page 302 note 2 Leland, Collect., iii, 26.
page 302 note 3 Tanner quoting MS. Coll. Ben. Cantab.
page 306 note 1 At Cérisy the cloister is on the south, at Eye on the north.
page 312 note 1 Illustrated in the British Museum Guide to Medieval Antiquities (1924), fig. 25.