Some additions to the plan of the Benedictine Priory Church of St. Mary, Blyth, Notts.

Extract

Shortly after the Conquest the Honour of Blyth, comprising a large part of South Yorkshire and parts of Derby, Notts., and Lincoln, as well as manors in more distant counties, was granted to Roger de Busli, a Norman named from his manor of Builli-en-Bray near Neufchâtel, in the pasture country of north-east Normandy, a kinsman of the great house of Belesme. By the time of the Domesday Survey de Busli had moved the head of the Honour to Tickhill, where he had selected the site of his great castle, and in 1087–8 he decided to found a monastery at Blyth, not impossibly upon ground cleared by this transfer. His foundation charter endows the monks with the church of Blyth, &c., making it over to ‘the monks serving God in that place’. The priory was made subordinate to the abbey of Holy Trinity (elsewhere described as St. Katherine) at Rouen, on a pension of 405. The church is said to have been completed shortly after the death of the founder, who is known to have been dead in 1098, and just before that of his eldest son, who died in 1102. Another son, Arnaldus, who carried on the line, appears as a witness to the foundation charter, and a daughter, Beatrix, married Robert earl of Eu. The foundation had twenty-nine known priors, who came mainly from the abbeys and priories of Notts, and Yorkshire, and was dissolved in February 1535–6, when the eastern or monastic portion of the church was condemned to destruction, the area being included in the grant of the Blyth Hall estate, and the western or remainder became entirely parochial.