There are few surviving documents from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries linking Willington manor and Newnham Priory. However, the extant documents, when taken together, provide some insight into the relationships between the two bodies.

The Willington Domesday Book entry of 1086 does not mention a church, but one had been built by 1166 when it was named in the first charter of Newnham Priory. The priory had been founded by Simon de Beauchamp, Baron of Bedford, in that year. The Augustinian prior and canons of Newnham Priory became patrons and rectors of Willington church, holding the advowson from 1229, or before, when the first recorded chaplain or vicar was Nicholas de Wileton.

Simon de Beauchamp endowed Willington church, the tithe from Willington mill, certain rents from the manor and wood sales to Newnham Priory. Furthermore, the priory owned glebe land in Willington amounting to about ten acres, and other lands were granted by Willington parishioners in the early thirteenth century, including a capital messuage and land.

When the Beauchamp's barony of Bedford came to an end, with the death of the last baron in 1265, the patronage of the priory passed to the Mowbrays as part of the Beauchamp estate inherited by the late baron's sister, Maud, who had married Sir Roger de Mowbray (believed to have died 1266).

Willington, the Mowbrays and Newnham Priory

In 1385 Richard II had made a grant of free warren to Newnham Priory for lands in fourteen parishes which had links to the priory and the Mowbrays: Barford, Bedford, Biddenham, Cardington and Cotes, Goldington, Newnham, Ravensden, Renhold, Sharnbrook, Stagsden, Stotfold, Willington and Wootton. The grant recorded the right of the prior, the convent of Newnham and their successors to:

Among the witnesses was Thomas de Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham. The other witnesses were a very distinguished group.