BEFORE AND AFTER THE MONASTERIES

(This document is still very much a work-in-progress)

When Robert of Groxton, Dean of Allerdale and Vicar of Gilcrux, died in or shortly before 1262, he left a village in crisis. Calder Abbey held the patronage of the church and had been drawing income from the parish for years. Nobody had formalised the arrangement. By the time of Robert’s death, the abbey’s share had grown so large that the parish could not maintain a priest. A village that had supported a church for generations could no longer pay for one.

When Robert of Groxton, Dean of Allerdale and Vicar of Gilcrux, died in or shortly before 1262, he left a village in crisis. Calder Abbey held the patronage of the church and had been drawing income from the parish for years. Nobody had formalised the arrangement. By the time of Robert’s death, the abbey’s share had grown so large that the parish could not maintain a priest. A village that had supported a church for generations could no longer pay for one.

Bishop Robert de Chauncy of Carlisle stepped in. The settlement he imposed at Rose Castle divided Gilcrux’s church income into two permanent streams and fixed them on parchment. Calder Abbey, as rector, received all the tithes of sheaves from the parish, except from the land belonging to the church. The abbey kept its mill and its meadows in the parish. A monastery could hold a rectory just as an individual could (the arrangement was called an appropriation.) A sheaf, incidentally, wasn’t threshed grain. Rather, it was  a bundled stalk taken straight from the field. By becoming the rector, Calder Abbey had the right to send its lay brothers to Gilcrux at every harvest and take a tenth of the crop before anyone else got a look in. 

The vicar received the glebe land that Robert of Groxton had farmed. He received the tithes of mills and meadows, both the abbey’s and those of others in the parish. He received the altarage, that is: oblations, mortuaries, and obventions. He received the increase of animals that the abbot and convent held. And Calder paid him four marks a year: two pounds, thirteen shillings, and fourpence. [1]

The bishop also settled who maintained what. The abbey provided books, vestments, and ornaments for the church, and repaired them at its own cost if the church roof caused the damage. The vicar covered damage caused by his own neglect, unless the abbey itself had rendered those items useless through its own use of the church. And if the abbey ever withheld the mill and meadow tithes, or conveyed them to someone else, it had to compensate the vicar. The bishop stood as arbitrator.

Abbot William of Calder agreed to the terms and acknowledged the bishop’s right as diocesan. These were legal terms, enforceable and specific, governing a relationship between a distant monastery and a small Cumbrian village that would hold for nearly three centuries.

The settlement named no incoming vicar. The incumbents board in the church today records Robert in 1260 and then there’s a gap until John Lestoson in 1334. Whether that reflects an incomplete record or a post that stood vacant for a generation, we can’t say with certainty. What the gap does confirm is that the 1262 ordination was a framework, not a solution. It created the legal conditions for a vicar to exist. 

The four titles in this story are worth separating (just in case you’re as confused as I was.) Robert of Groxton held two offices at once. As Dean of Allerdale he was a rural dean, an administrator answerable to the bishop, responsible for supervising the clergy of a district. As Vicar of Gilcrux he was the parish incumbent, serving the people of a single village. A vicar, strictly speaking, acts in place of someone else, the word comes from the Latin for substitute. When a monastery appropriated a church and became its corporate rector, it drew the great tithes and appointed a vicar to do the actual pastoral work. That was Gilcrux’s situation after 1262. A rector holds the rectory in full, receives the great tithes, and bears the legal responsibility. Calder Abbey became Gilcrux’s rector in everything but name from the moment it acquired the patronage, and the 1262 ordination simply formalised that. Abbot William was none of these things locally. He was the elected head of Calder Abbey, a monastic superior whose house happened to own rights in a village thirty miles away.

The 1262 settlement also tells us, with its emphasis on sheaf tithes, that arable farming dominated the fields around Gilcrux. The mention of multiple mills, the abbey’s and those of others in the parish, suggests a community large enough to need more than one. The increase of animals reserved for the vicar points to livestock grazing alongside the crops, part of the mixed agricultural economy Cumbria has always known. And the crisis itself reveals how far monastic power had already reached into a village that neither abbey called home.

To understand how Gilcrux arrived at that point, you have to go back a century.

Calder Abbey, twenty-five miles to the south, had a precarious start. Ranulf de Gernon founded it in 1134 as a Savigniac house, colonised by twelve monks from Furness Abbey. [2] [3] Four years later, in the political chaos following the death of Henry I, David King of Scots sent raiders under William Fitz Duncan into the northern English counties. They despoiled the abbey and drove the monks out. The community fled to Furness but found the door shut: their abbot, Gerold, refused to resign his office, and Furness refused to readmit them. They wandered for years – Hood, Old Byland, Stocking – before establishing Byland Abbey in Yorkshire. A second group of monks from Furness resettled Calder around 1142, and when the Savigniac order merged with the Cistercians in 1148, Calder followed. The abbey that would one day control the sheaf tithes of Gilcrux spent its first decade in chaos.

Holm Cultram Abbey, twelve miles to the north, arrived with steadier backing. Alan of Allerdale (Waltheof’s son) gave the land. Prince Henry, son of King David I of Scotland, issued the foundation charter in 1150. Cistercian monks from Melrose Abbey crossed the border to build it. [4] The new monastery rose in the low-lying wetlands near the Solway, and within a generation it had become one of the most powerful religious houses in Cumberland, draining marshes, running saltpans, trading wool across the Irish Sea. Where Calder struggled, Holm Cultram thrived.

The Cistercians cleared forests, drained bogland, and developed farming techniques that outperformed the secular estates around them. Their granges – large, efficient, purpose-built farms worked by lay brothers and hired labour – functioned as the economic engines of monastic life. Produce flowed back to the abbey to feed the community or fund its expansion. Monasteries accumulated wealth across generations without the inheritance divisions that fragmented secular holdings. They were the most successful landholders in medieval England.

Between 1160 and 1240, both abbeys gained footholds in Gilcrux. The Bonekill family played a significant part. In the late twelfth century, Robert de Bonekill granted Calder one carucate of land in Gilcrux, along with land in both Little and Greater Gilcrux and pasture for twenty oxen, twelve cows, six horses and their foals. His sons Thomas and Walter then gave away the rest of their inheritance at Gilcrux to the abbot and convent of Calder – reserving the right of presentation to the bishop of the diocese. [5]

Beatrice de Molle also granted Calder five bovates of land in Little Gilcrux and a quarter share of the village mill. Her uncle, Adam son of Uhtred, had confirmed these to her as the gift of William son of Liolf de Molle. [6] Her grant promised prayers for her soul and lasting remembrance. For Gilcrux, it meant that a monastery a day’s ride away now held property in the parish. (Beatrice deserves more than a passing mention. She has her own article on this site.)

A century later, the second abbey arrived. Around 1240, William d’Orm d’Ireby – son of Gospatric of Workington and rector of Gilcrux – granted Holm Cultram his mansion in the village, with its buildings, gardens, and orchards, along with further arable land and meadow in subsequent grants. [7] The property lay opposite the church. A later grant mentions land lying “under the tower of Laurence” – a name that survives in the records while the structure itself has vanished. Nobody knows what the Tower of Laurence was. A fortified residence, a symbol of status?

Holm Cultram also sublet part of this holding to Calder Abbey, and Calder owed Holm half a mark yearly for land in the parish. Both monasteries now operated within the same small community, their interests overlapping like the strips in the village’s common fields. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Gilcrux had two Cistercian landlords, a mill under monastic control, and a church whose income drained steadily towards institutions that existed elsewhere. The village that fed itself now also fed the abbeys.

Then the rector died, and the bishop drew the line.

The settlement of 1262 created a system that ran without interruption for the rest of the medieval period. After Robert of Groxton, Gilcrux no longer had a rector. It had a vicar – a man nominated by Calder Abbey – living on the glebe land, collecting his portion of tithes and fees, celebrating mass, hearing confessions, baptising children, marrying couples, burying the dead. He paid synodals to the bishop and dues to the archdeacon. He served the lights, providing candles for every service. In practical terms, he was the parish priest. But he served at the abbey’s pleasure and received only a fraction of what the parish generated.

The abbey’s agents or lay brothers arrived at harvest time. They collected the sheaf tithes, stored them in barns, and transported the grain back to the monastery or sold it locally. The abbey’s possession of the mill gave it permanent economic presence in the parish. Someone had to operate the mill, collect the fee for grinding – and maintain the machinery. Grange Farm in Gilcrux, whose name survives today, almost certainly traces its origins to the monastic granges that Cistercian houses established across their estates. If so, it represents the physical footprint of the abbey’s presence in the village: a working farm that connected a small community to a wider monastic economy stretching from the Solway coast to the Cistercian general chapters in France. There’s a grange farm in our neighbouring village of Tallentire too. 

The church year structured village life. Everyone attended mass on Sundays and feast days. Michaelmas and Lady Day marked the rhythm of agricultural tenancies. Christmas, Easter, and the patronal festival brought special services. The field names that survive on old maps, with their echoes of medieval agriculture, preserve the patterns of a life oriented around the church calendar. For nearly three hundred years the arrangement held. Vicars came and went. The abbey collected its grain. The mill ground on.

Then Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries.

Calder Abbey surrendered on 4 February 1536. Its last abbot, Richard Ponsonby, received a pension of twelve pounds a year. [8] Holm Cultram followed in 1538, though its parishioners petitioned to keep the abbey church, arguing it served not only as their place of worship but as their only defence against Scottish raids. [9] The Crown seized Calder’s rights in Gilcrux – the rectory, the great tithes, the mill – along with Holm Cultram’s separate property in the parish, and eventually sold or granted them to lay landholders. Philip and Mary granted the manor to Alexander Armstrong and his male heirs, on condition that he provide five horses, well caparisoned, whenever summoned within the county of Cumberland. The Senhouse and Eaglesfield family documents from the mid-sixteenth century show former monastic lands circulating among the local gentry who had acquired fragments of the dissolved estates. [10]

The vicar continued on his modest income. The tithes still flowed, but to new masters. What the monks created in Gilcrux was not just a pattern of land ownership. It was an infrastructure of obligation, written into the 1262 settlement and embedded so deeply in the fields and the church and the mill that when the white-robed monks disappeared, the structure they left behind barely changed shape. New owners stepped into the old arrangement. The vicar still served.

The 1262 document, which a bishop wrote at Rose Castle to stop a small village from losing its priest, remains the sharpest record we have of what it cost a community to feed an institution that prayed for its soul from twenty-five miles away.

______________

[1] The ordination of the vicarage of Gilcrux, 1262. Cumbria Archive Centre, Carlisle, ref: DMH 10/2/20. Part of the Mounsey-Heysham Family collection, within deeds relating to the properties of the Diocese of Carlisle. See also the Register of St Bees Priory and related charter evidence, and the Gilcrux ecclesiastical profile compiled for this archive.
[2] The early history of Calder Abbey is preserved in a narrative by Abbot Philip of Byland, whose predecessor Roger was one of the original twelve monks. See ‘Houses of Cistercian monks: The abbey of Calder,’ A History of the County of Cumberland, Vol. 2 (1905), pp. 174-178. Available at British History Online: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/cumb/vol2/pp174-178
[3] The twelve monks are named in Abbot Philip’s narrative: Robert de Insula, Tocka de Loncastre, John de Kynstan, Theodoric de Dalton, Orm de Dalton, Roger the sub-cellarer, Alan de Wrcewyk, Guy de Bolton, William de Bolton, Peter de Pictaviis, Ulf de Ricomonte, and Bertram de London. Ibid.
[4] ‘Houses of Cistercian monks: The abbey of Holmcultram,’ A History of the County of Cumberland, Vol. 2 (1905), pp. 162-173. Available at British History Online: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/cumb/vol2/pp162-173. See also the Register of Holm Cultram, ed. F. Grainger and W.G. Collingwood, Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society Record Series, Vol. 7 (1929)
[5] Robert de Bonekill’s grant of one carucate of land in Gilcrux, with land in Little and Greater Gilcrux and specified pasture rights (Loftie 1885, 224). His sons Thomas and Walter Bonekill granted their remaining inheritance at Gilcrux to the Abbot and Convent of Calder Abbey, reserving the right of presentation to the bishop of the diocese (Bulmer 1901)
[6] ‘Beatrice de Molle bestowed on the monks 5 oxgangs of land in Little Gilcrux (Gillecruch) and the fourth part of the mill in Great Gilcrux.’ A History of the County of Cumberland, Vol. 2, p. 176. The land had been confirmed to Beatrice by Adam son of Uhtred as the gift of William son of Liolf de Molle. The witnesses (Gospatric son of Orm, Thomas, Alan son of Ketel, Uhtred son of Ketel) place the transaction between 1160 and 1170.
[7] Register of Holm Cultram, nos. 104-106. See also A History of the County of Cumberland, Vol. 2, p. 130. William d’Orm d’Ireby was the grandson of Gospatric of Workington (Grainger & Collingwood 1929, 40-41)
[8] ‘Houses of Cistercian monks: The abbey of Calder,’ A History of the County of Cumberland, Vol. 2, p. 178.
[9] The parishioners’ petition is preserved in the records of the Court of Augmentations. A History of the County of Cumberland, Vol. 2, p. 172.
[10] The grant from Philip and Mary to Alexander Armstrong (Mannix & Whellan 1847.) The 1548/1549 lease from Sir Thomas Chaloner to John Senhouse and the 1559/1562 final concord transferring properties including Gilcrux between the Eaglesfield and Senhouse families. See the Gilcrux ecclesiastical profile compiled for this archive.

Archivist’s Notes

1. The rector’s name: Groxton or Crofton?
The Gerry Martin Associates archaeological report (2011) names the last rector as “Robert of Crofton” (citing Smith 2005, 101-102.) The original 1262 ordination document held at the Cumbria Archive Centre (ref: DMH 10/2/20) clearly reads “Robert of Groxton rector of the church of Gillecrus.” The primary source confirms the article’s usage.
2. The date of 1262: what exactly happened when?
The research document gives 14 April 1258 as the date the church was appropriated by Calder Abbey, October 1278 as the date of affirmation (both from Smith 2005, 101-102,) and attributes the detailed definition of the vicar’s income to Bishop Strickland’s edict (1400-1419.)These may represent separate legal acts in a longer process: appropriation (1258) ordination of the vicarage (1262) affirmation (1278) and a later restatement or enforcement under Strickland. The specifics in the article may belong to the 1262 ordination or to the Strickland intervention. The archival record (DMH 10/2/20) is dated [1262] and its terms match the article’s description closely, which suggests 1262 is correct for the core settlement. Strickland’s later edict may have been a reinforcement after the abbey overreached again.
3. The Bonekill/Buncle family: previously omitted.
The Gerry Martin report (citing Loftie 1885 and Bulmer 1901) records Robert de Bonekill’s grants and his sons’ donation of the remaining inheritance to Calder, with the reserved right of presentation. Now included in the article above. 
4. Beatrice de Molle’s family relationships.
My original article described William son of Liolf de Molle as Beatrice’s “brother or cousin.” The charter evidence names Adam son of Uhtred as confirming the land to “Beatrice his niece” as the gift of “William son of Liulf of Molle his nephew.” The relationship between Beatrice and William is not directly stated as brother or cousin. I’ve edited the article to removes this characterisation and follows the charter language.
5. The Philip and Mary grant to Alexander Armstrong.
Recorded in Mannix & Whellan 1847. Now included.