page_title: John Wessington
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: John Wessington / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Plaque in Durham Cathedral’s Cloisters for John Washington, erstwhile Prior thereof; ancestor of George Washington, later President of the United States of America.
context_page_description: John Wessington was an English Benedictine who became prior of Durham Abbey.
context_section_description: He may have been named for Washington, County Durham. He entered the Benedictine order, and was one of the students regularly sent by the Benedictines of Durham to be educated at their house at Oxford, then known as Durham College and now part of Trinity College, Oxford. In 1398 he became bursar of Durham College, obtaining books for its use from the chapter at Durham, and writing in 1422 a treatise to prove that it should be exempt from the jurisdiction of the general ‘prior studentium’ at Oxford because the college existed before the appointment of the prior.
  About 1400 Wessington appears as chancellor of Durham Cathedral, and in the autumn of 1416 he was made prior. He retained this office for twenty-nine and a half years, during which he was active in extending and repairing the buildings of the cathedral and its dependent houses. In 1426 he presided over a general chapter of Benedictines in England held at Northampton. He resigned his priory in May 1446, the bishop of Durham Robert Neville, issuing letters for the election of his successor on the 26th. The chapter of Durham made provision for his old age: he was assigned a pension, a private room in the monastery, and five attendants. He died on 9 April 1451.
caption: Plaque in Durham Cathedral's cloisters for John Wessington (Washington).
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