WILLIAM CLOWN

Rarely, after the years of the first fervour in the twelfth century, are we given a chronicler's portrait of the head of a house of Austin canons. For this reason, as well as for its intrinsic interest, we may for a moment glance at the career of Abbot Clown of Leicester. The abbey of Leicester had in earlier centuries been a well-to-do but undistinguished house. It had prospered, especially from its sale of wool, and the abbot had for that reason been summoned to Edwardian parliaments. No doubt the fortunes of the abbey had also been influenced by connexions with the court that had begun when, from 1245 onwards, the earldom of Leicester had been held by the royal earls of Lancaster. Its period of greatest prosperity opened with the election of William Clown, a century later, in 1345. The new abbot, who probably took his name from a village in Derbyshire, was to hold office for more than thirty years, and the steady growth in the prosperity, and also, it would seem, in the good governance of the monastery, which coincided so nearly with the abbacy of Thomas de la Mare, is one more indication that the Black Death should not hastily be invoked as a catastrophic agent of universal scope. The pestilence ravaged the town of Leicester, and served as an excuse, or an occasion, for the appropriation of some churches, but it did not seriously affect the fortunes of the house.