Heritage before modernity: the afterlife of a dissolved priory

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article makes a case for the further exploration of heritage before modernity through an investigation of the afterlife of Merton Priory in Surrey, England. The Augustinian Priory was dissolved in 1538 amid the Henrician Reformation and, thereafter, the site was transformed rapidly into a saleable commodity. As such, the Priory site became an exploitable social and economic resource, especially by textile manufacturers. The article complicates this apparently stark transformation from self-contained monastery into proto-industrial landscape by acknowledging how the residual Priory buildings were used, viewed, and understood by its post-Reformation owners, especially anti-Catholic Puritans. I argue that the remains were incorporated within a triumphalist account of England’s Protestantisation and, by extension, reveal a surprising instinct towards their preservation amid better-known acts of iconoclasm. In doing so, the article emphasises how the rescripting of the site’s heritage was a privilege of its owners and that limited opportunities existed to promote alternative accounts of the site’s past beyond those which could be mobilised by external, but no less powerful, stakeholders. Indeed, Merton Priory evinces the emergence of efforts by archaeologists and antiquarians to fix the site’s historical significance and to dispel the endurance of ‘vulgar’ rumours about its past.