page_title: Sandwell Priory
section_title: Shrewsbury party
hierarchical_section_title: Sandwell Priory / Conflict and disorder / Shrewsbury party
caption_attribution_description: English: Shrewsbury Abbey
context_page_description: Sandwell Priory was a small medieval Benedictine monastery, near West Bromwich, then part of Staffordshire, England. It was founded in the late 12th century by a local landowner and was only modestly endowed. It had a fairly turbulent history and suffered considerably from mismanagement. It was dissolved in 1525 at the behest of Cardinal Wolsey – more than a decade before the main Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII
context_section_description: The malaise encouraged Shrewsbury Abbey to attempt a take-over. It seems that around 1370 the Abbot of Shrewsbury, the long-lived Nicholas Stevens, encouraged one Richard Tudenham to put himself forward as the rightful prior against the holder of the office, Prior John de Kyngeston.  At Easter 1372 Kyngeston cited five men in the King's Bench, who he alleged had assaulted him: they failed to appear and the Sheriff was ordered to arrest them. When the five finally appeared before the court, in summer 1373, Kyngeston alleged against John de Witton, that he had wounded him in the arm with an arrow. Witton tried to forestall further action by claiming that the writ had been incorrectly phrased because it named Kyngeston as the prior of Sandwell, when the real prior was Tudenham. Kyngeston then initiated a case against Nicholas Stevens, although it is not known exactly what he alleged against the abbot.
  On 8 December 1379 a commission of oyer and terminer was issued following further allegations made by Kyngeston against Stevens and some of his associates. Kyngeston said that he had been assaulted at the priory itself by a gang consisting of Stevens, Richard de Westbury and Ralph de Wyburbury, both monks of Shrewsbury Abbey, Henry Morwood, the vicar of Handsworth, four other secular clergy and others. Abducted from the priory, he was held at a house in Sleap, one of the Abbey's manors to the north of Shrewsbury. Before a notary public he was forced to sign a resignation statement and to call off all proceedings against Stevens. Despite the allegations of coercion, Bishop Robert de Stretton proceeded as if the prior's resignation were valid. He received letters under the seal of Sandwell Priory stating that the two remaining monks had elected Richard de Westbury as their prior and he confirmed Westbury as prior. Westbury now found himself challenged by Tudenham, the original pretender to the office. Tudenham obtained papal provision to the priory and began an action against Westbury in the Church courts. However, Richard II's Council ordered his arrest on 8 July 1380 because he had breached the Statute of Provisors, a 1350 law designed to prevent such appointments by the Pope. Westbury seems not to have enjoyed good relations with the patrons. When Richard, the last of Guy de Offeni's male line died around 1250, the manor of West Bromwich had been divided between his daughters, Sarah and Margaret. The latter married into the Marnham family, which thereafter held half of the manor. In 1387 John Marnham sued Westbury for delivery of a bond which he had retained unlawfully, a nadir in the priory's relations with its lay patrons.
  When the time came in 1391 to elect Westbury's successor, there was again only one monk left in the priory. He promptly elected William Pontesbury, a monk of Shrewsbury and a close friend of Westbury. However, the new bishop, Richard le Scrope, annulled his choice and brought in John of Tamworth from Coventry as prior – one of at least three occasions in the 14th century when the election of a prior was overturned by a bishop. However, this was not the end of the struggle. In 1397 Alexander Leddesham, a renegade monk aided by an armed gang, drove Tamworth out and for some time occupied his place. Tamworth took action in Chancery to recover his position, complaining that Leddesham still rode the countryside at the head of an armed band.
  The ambitious Abbot Stevens died in 1399 and this may have made it easier to accept a prior from Shrewsbury. In 1401, Archbishop Thomas Arundel, restored to office by the new regime of Henry IV, was conducting a canonical visitation and personally appointed John de Acton, a monk of Shrewsbury, as successor to Tamworth. His successor, Richard Dudley, was accused of harbouring murderers and thieves in 1414. The allegations concerned the activities of a group of robbers and extortioners who killed a man at Wolverhampton and maimed others at Tettenhall. Dudley was said to have received them at the priory just before Christmas 1413. He was bailed and ultimately pardoned, as were
caption: Shrewsbury Abbey, an important Benedictine house in the Middle Ages, is an Anglican parish church today.
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