Visiting Entertainers At The Cluniac Priory, Thetf ord 1497-1540

Extract

Except for the Visitations and occasional obedientary rolls preserved in cathedral libraries, the intimate records of English monastic life are disappointingly scarce. They are particularly scarce in East Anglia, where many documents had already been destroyed during the Peasants' Revolt, long before the usual ravages following the Dissolution. It is therefore surprising that one of the few important manuscripts which did survive has received very little attention from scholars. I refer to the priors' accounts from the Cluniac Priory of Our Lady at Thetford, Norfolk.

While very little remains to tell us about life at the priory during the middle ages, we are at least fortunate to have these extremely detailed and almost complete priors' accounts for the final forty-four years of the priory's existence. They are now bound together in a single well-preserved volume, and are deposited at the University Library, Cambridge (Add. Ms. 6969). Although this lengthy manuscript has apparently been at Cambridge for a very long time, it was unknown to the great Norfolk antiquarian, F. Blomefield, when he wrote his History of Thetford (1739). Thomas Martin was unaware of the document when he published his own History of Thetford (1779)—even though he had access to other important materials, including notes from the priory's Cartulary which had perished in the disastrous Cotton Library fire of 1731. The manuscript was also unknown to the committee which compiled the Victoria County History of Norfolk in 1906, despite the fact that L. G. Bolingbroke had seen it and printed two entries from it in “Pre-Elizabethan Plays and Players in Norfolk.”