Beeston Priory is tucked away in a far corner of the older part of Beeston Regis. Well nestled behind a flank of trees, protected from the full effect of wind and sea storms by the sheltering mass of Beeston Bump. This, and a ready source of water, were no doubt aspects of the topography that brought the original monastic builders of the Priory to this spot in the first place. Surrounded by a stream and at the time low lying fen like landscape. Here the priory was built and evocatively dedicated to St Mary of the Meadows.
Norfolk was once viewed as a wildly pagan, an untamed, unchristian place. From the 12th century onward Christian monastic missionaries were sent out into East Anglia. Which is why Norfolk has the greatest number of medieval round towered churches in one county, and was once also peppered with many small local priories. The earliest Castle Acre Priory was founded in 1090 by Cluniac monks, Binham Priory founded by the Benedictines in 1091. Weybourne Priory was founded in 1200, South Creake Abbey 1206, Beeston Priory 1216. Indicating a strong focus in this area to provide resources for an evangelising ministry.
Augustinian Canons were the founders of the last three of these Priories. Financial patronage for Beeston came from Margery de Cressy, from a highly influential Anglo-Norman family. It was in the nature of the Augustinian monastic rule that they didn't live completely isolated from the host community, but actively engaged with it. Beeston Priory provided alms, preachers for local churches and ran a local boys school.
Weybourne and Beeston Priories both appear to have never had much more than four resident monastic canons. But it would be a mistake to think they were therefore insignificant foundations. Beeston over the centuries accrued extensive agricultural holdings, built a smithy, brewery, bakehouse and fishponds two of which survive to this day. This size of monastic estate would have required a substantial lay brotherhood in order to run it. Probably between three to four times the number of canons.
The ruins today, shorn of their architectural flourishes, paintwork and ornament, show you only a skeletal bone structure. The Priory consisting now of the barest of walls, blocked in windows, all severely fractured like broken teeth. On visiting you have to work hard imaginatively to envisage the substantial building complex that was once here. One that had a central economic role. as well as being the religious hub for the locality.
At its dissolution in 1538 the priory's lucrative agricultural lands were sold off. The ruins themselves providing an easily accessed source of dressed stone for local farmhouses. Its unsurprising then that much of the priories original ground plan has subsequently been robbed out. The size and layout of these buildings can only be conjectured. Parts of the priory church chancel show signs of once being roughly re-roofed, and adapted into barns for agricultural and livestock storage. This would explain why it survived depredation to its present height and level of preservation. Many larger and wealthier monasteries in East Anglia having been reduced to the mere stubs of a foundation outline.
Though humbled and diminished in status, the ruins of Beeston Priory nevertheless has a fascinating attraction. Their hunched smallness, secreted away, their lack of alluring beauty, the muted rustication of their sacred spaces, so seemingly lacking in flashy charisma, hold great warmth in their humility and human scale. They possess an approachable poignancy, a echo in the present of the simple caring ministrations of an institution that once thrived and fed the secular and sacred sustenance of its surrounding community.
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