During the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, several hundred houses of monks, canons and nuns in England and Wales were in the patronage of lay folk. These patrons, men and women, ranged in status from the most powerful English magnates to the minor country gentry, just as the monasteries ranged from large, considerably prosperous abbeys to small, impoverished, obscure establishments. And just as varied as the patrons' rank and status was the degree of their involvement with the religious houses under their patronage.

Some fifty years ago Susan M. Wood suggested, in her authoritative study of the monastic patrons of thirteenth-century England, that monastic patronage was a neglected topic.1 Late medieval monastic patronage, moreover, was for a long time a neglected area within this neglected topic. In the half century since Wood's work first appeared, a number of scholars have set out to remedy this neglect, and to push back the chronological boundaries of her study. Important work has since been done on later medieval monastic patronage, notably on issues of patronage within a regional context, on particular types of religious houses, on individual houses, or on certain aspects of monastic patronage, but what has been lacking so far is a full-length study dedicated to the hereditary lay patrons of late medieval English and Welsh monasteries and nunneries.

This book intends to be just that. It examines the subject of monastic patronage during the later Middle Ages, more specifically during the two and a half centuries between the beginning of the fourteenth century, which is where Dr Wood ended her survey, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the mid-sixteenth century. It does so from the point of view of the laity rather than from the angle of the church, and it takes as its focus only the hereditary lay patrons of the later medieval English and Welsh abbeys and priories. Patrons are here defined strictly as the heirs of the original founders of religious houses, into whose hands the advowson of the monastery or nunnery had passed by the fourteenth century and beyond.