THE RELIGIOUS HOUSES OF NORFOLK INTRODUCTION The religious houses of Norfolk were exceptionally numerous, even when the great area of the county is taken into consideration. The Benedictines were powerful in the district, though Norfolk had no great house of the black monks that could vie with Bury St. Edmunds. Cnut, in the very year that he became king of England, founded the abbey of St. Benet at Holme, amid the desolate swamps by the Norfolk Broads. Here the monks so greatly prospered and increased, that in the course of a few years they were strong enough to send off a swarm of their comrades to take the place of the canons ejected from the restored abbey of St. Edmund in Suffolk. With the advent of the Normans and the removal of the bishop's chair to Norwich, came the establishment of the cathedral priory of the Holy Trinity which was entrusted to the care of the Benedictines. Four out of the five priory cells of Holy Trinity were in this county, namely those of Aldeby, Lynn, Yarmouth and St. Leonard's, Norwich. Wymondham, for several centuries an important cell of St. Albans, became in the fifteenth century an independent abbey. Norfolk possessed two Benedictine priories of some importance, those of Binham and Horsham, as well as three others of smaller size at Modeney, Molycourt, and Mountjoy. The Benedictine nuns had three settlements, if the priory of St. George's, Thetford, on the Suffolk side of the water, is included. Carrow Priory, on the verge of the city of Norwich, was much valued for the education it afforded to the young ladies of the county. The Thetford nuns were so much under the shadow of the monks of St. Edmund that for two centuries their very food — bread, beer, and even cooked meats — were forwarded to them by cart, once a week all the way from Bury St. Edmunds. The Cluniac monks had three considerable houses : Castle Acre, with its two small cells at Normanburgh and Slevesholm ; Bromholm, of so much repute as a place of pilgrimage to the special relic of the Holy Cross ; and Thetford, removed from the Suffolk to the Norfolk side of that town in 1 1 14. The story of the Cluniac houses, originally alien, but released for the most part from foreign tribute and granted charters of naturalization when the French wars subsided, is always interesting ; this is specially the case with the three Norfolk priories.^ There were no Cistercian monks in the county, but a Cistercian abbey of nuns was founded at Marham in the reign of Henry III. ' The question of the Cluniac establishments is discussed at some length in the Introduction to the ' Religious Houses of Northamptonshire,' and in the accounts of the priories of St. Andrew, Northampton, and Daventry. F.C.H. Northants, ii.
