8 - Surviving Reformation: the rule of Robert Strange, 1539–70

Summary

The manor of Cirencester left the church ‘on the morning of 19 December 1539 and was taken into the hands of the Crown’, where it remained for eight years. In July 1547 it was granted to Thomas, lord Seymour of Sudeley, who held it until his execution in March 1549. It was then purchased by Sir Anthony Kingston, who died in 1556, another suspected traitor. Elizabeth I granted Abbey House to a more stable proprietor, her physician Richard Master, in June 1564. The aptly named Masters settled down, and were to prove an abiding presence in the turbulent politics of the town for the next two centuries. Thomas Seymour, Anthony Kingston and his successor as lord of the manor, Sir John Danvers, were courtiers. The Masters settled down to become ‘gentlemen of town and country’. From the dissolution of the abbey until the 1570s, however, the manor and the parish were run by a small group of local men appointed by the bailiff of courtiers who were too preoccupied with national affairs to have a significant impact on local politics. The lordship of the abbots became, for practical purposes, a bourgeois oligarchy.

In the months following the fall of the abbey the ‘custodianship of the site’ was granted to a wine merchant named Richard Basing. Problems arose when the crown sold the ‘Church Steplee and surplues houses of the late monastery’ to a local knight, Sir Anthony Hungerford and his kinsman by marriage, Robert Strange, the late abbot's bailiff.