The Prior of the Knights Hospitaller in Late Medieval England, by Simon Phillips

Abstract

The role of the English Prior of the Order of St John, the Hospitallers, has often appeared anomalous. As representative of an international military order that was also one of the greatest ecclesiastical landowners of later medieval England (with revenues of almost £6,400 in 1338 and an income of just over £5,700 in 1535), the Prior did not fit easily into orthodox narratives of growing national identity or relations between church and state. Although members of a religious military order taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, Hospitallers were laymen. The Order in England supplied their headquarters on the front line of Christendom in Rhodes with responsions, a third of annual income. Most Priors were experienced in administration and warfare in the eastern Mediterranean. Thomas Dowcra spent much of his time as English Prior (1501–27) polishing his credentials to the Grand Mastership, which he narrowly failed to secure in 1521. Yet, by the late fifteenth century, the Prior of the English langue had assumed the position of the premier baron in the realm. This Janus-like aspect has traditionally led historians to detect or assume an inherent tension between the Prior’s duty to the Order and his allegiance to his king. In this detailed new study of the public activities of later medieval Priors in England, Simon Phillips challenges this view. Trawling through the archives of English government as well as those of the Order, Phillips closely examines the exact relationship between successive Priors and the English state. While due attention is given to the three Priors who also acted as royal treasurers—Thomas Chauncey (1273–80), Robert Hales (1381) and John Langstrother (1469, 1470–71)—Phillips presents a broader argument for increasing involvement in national politics and royal service that intensified from the mid-fifteenth century until the very eve of the dissolution of the Order in England in 1540, a victim of its international association, and hence of papalism, rather than any historic intransigence or hostility to the Crown.