The institutional development of England's major monasteries in the later Middle Ages was marked, perhaps above all, by the independence of their superiors. From the thirteenth century the separation of their sources of income and their administration was fixed and they set course for a public lordship and a prelacy which brought them closer to the political nation. At best, it offered these ancient abbeys an anchorhold in the sea of troubles that stretched from the Black Death to the break with Rome; but often its effects tended to the worst, causing the head and their house to collide and divide. One lordly abbot of Westminster landed his monks in the Tower; another a century on was forcibly retired. At Evesham, one of the oldest and wealthiest of the Benedictine foundations in England, it might be said the liberation of the abbots was nothing less than the making of the monastery. They finally cut the convent free from episcopal control and they defended its age-old endowment from the grabbing hands of their neighbours with an unusual degree of success. Leadership ‘gloriose et viriliter et magnis sumptibus’ was the measure of the house chronicler.

The documents edited here provide snapshots of the administration of the abbey from both sides of the constitutional divide between the superior and their community. The household account, dating from the quarter-century reign of John Wykewone (1435–60), gives a view of the engine-room of abbacy. In principle the office was well-funded with income from as many as eight manors (more than their Westminster colleagues) but here in 1456–7, the receiver's audit showed a deficit (£55) and substantial outstanding debts of almost £175, as much as the total annual value of many other monasteries. Six of the abbacy's manors were then held in demesne, which perhaps accounts for the poor return, although in the second half of the fifties lowland England was as much as a decade out from the troughs of the century's middle years. The debt burden reflected Wykewone's frequent recourse to credit. Some of the largest loans were raised from local lordship – £60 from Lord Sudeley – whose collateral, counsel and company he courted by operating a household much like his. Wykewone made as many as twenty payments to players in the course of the year; he also retained a harpist. Hospitality evidently flowed through expenditure on some 800 gallons of wine. Wykewone was an aspirant gentleman and he commissioned a pedigree roll, perhaps modelled on the Sudeley's own. Yet he also tended to his roots in the monastic tradition. In this year he bought himself a new black habit, and in spite of his age made the journey to Oxford for the inception of a student monk.

The purchase of patronage for the prosperity and protection of the house was matched in the administration of the prior. These imperatives weighed especially heavily in the twenty years witnessed here. Registered are both the traditional favours given to the governing elite, such as a grant of confraternity, and the greater rewards which the supervision of Wolsey and then Cromwell had encouraged them to demand. The pitch for political allies accelerated in 1538, as many other monasteries and all of the friaries surrendered to the crown. Clement Throckmorton, a local man in the service of Richard Rich, Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, was appointed General Receiver. Thomas Cromwell's son, Gregory, was awarded an annuity. It was the conviction of the convent that their best hope lay with the Tudor regime. Even so, they continued to renew its property leases, to the extent that when the end finally came in January 1540, the crown inherited tenants only at the start of their term. These points of local detail can only enhance the landscape of late monastic England which is now being redrawn.