Note 18.3

Aconbury may not have provided an attractive option for Annora when she decided to take her religious vows. Her sister Margaret, married to Walter de Lacy, had received the land in Herefordshire to establish a priory for the souls of her father, mother and oldest brother. This gift from King John, eight days before he died, appears to indicate the king's repentance for the persecution of William de Braose and his family. Margaret gave the priory to the Order of the Hospital of Saint John (the Hospitallers) but later regretted her decision. The first surviving record of the dispute which arose between Margaret and the order is dated 1233. The Hospital had impoverished the nuns at Aconbury because of its increasing military expenses in the Holy Land and when the prioress died in 1230 the order sought to impose a successor against the will of Margaret and the nuns. The priory had been following an Augustinian Rule, praying for the souls of William de Braose, his wife Maud and their son William and contributing funds to the care of the sick in the Holy Land. Margaret's dissent when her priory appeared to be on the brink of ruin only resulted in the threat that the order required its members to serve in the Holy Land if instructed, a terrifying prospect for a community of largely elderly women. The position of prioress remained vacant and Margaret stubbornly carried out the administrative duties herself, refusing to let the order impose any further misery on her beloved foundation. Margaret travelled to Rome to appeal to Pope Gregory IX and won his support for a fair resolution of the dispute. This was remarkable enough, but the Hospital of Saint John defied the Pope by corrupt legal means until 1237. At one stage Margaret was summoned to a court hearing on a date by which she could not possibly have travelled the distance. In her absence she was excommunicated and heavily fined. The Hospitallers were criticised throughout Europe for such practices and Margaret's appeals to Pope Gregory appear to have coincided with his desire to bring them to heel. The Pope's difficulty serves to illustrate how powerful the military order had become. Margaret 's resistance and ultimate victory was therefore rare and spectacular. Aconbury was disassociated with the Hospital of Saint John and continued as an Augustinian priory. H J Nicholson made a study of Margaret's ordeal and presented her work in Margaret de Lacy and the Hospital of St John at Aconbury, Herefordshire. The article appeared in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History in 1999, Volume 50, Part 4, pages 629-651. Aconbury Priory also appears in Women Religious: the founding of English nuneries after the Norman Conquest by Sally Thompson (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991)

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