the self-supported zeal and care of a few learned men after those times that we can still, however imperfectly, trace the localities, possessions, or customs of these establishments, which for many centuries exercised so important an influence, whether for good or evil, on the feelings of the people. Few records of the intimate life of monks and nuns have come down to us, although we have occasionally the free-spoken revelations of a garrulous monk, like the Chronicle of Jocelin de Brakelond; but the notices of the interior arrangements of monasteries are rare and insufficient, though the names of their former occupiers are now often indistinctly used among us as by-words of reproach.
Some monastic orders, like those derived from Cluny and Premonstre, were exempted by Papal authority from the superintendence of the diocesan bishops, but others continued liable to episcopal visitation; and from the records of such periodical examinations we occasionally gain an insight into the domestic life of convents, which their very nature is framed habitually to deny. This source of information has been seldom applied to, and may not be very attractive, involved as the facts often are in the phraseology of legal forms; but, being genuine and contemporaneous, their evidence is worth preserving on matters so little known.
With respect to the small Priory of Benedictine Nuns at Easebourne, near Midhurst, there are extant a few such visitations[1] during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which on this occasion may be referred to, as adding some details to its scanty history; and perhaps this convent exhibits to us, in its records of occasional misrule, nothing exceptional, or differing from what may have been passing in other similar communities. No fixed date can be named for the foundation of Easebourne Priory, though it happened about the middle of the thirteenth century, and was certainly clue to the liberality of a neighbouring landholder, John de Bohun,[2] whose family so long held an important position at Midhurst, down to the time of Henry VII. Franco de Bohun held land there of the
- ↑ Dallaway, in his History of the Rape of Chichester, has given some incomplete extracts from these.
- ↑ Johannes de Bohun clamat habere sine charta manerium suum de Esseborn cum libera warrenna, &c., et quod ipse et antecessores sui, a tempore quo non extat memoria, plene usi sunt libertatibus predictis."— Dallaway, i. p. 237, from MSS. Bodl. No. 138.
