Burglary at Bicknacre Priory
By the summer of 1531, the priory at Bicknacre presented a rather sad prospect. Partly abandoned since 1507 in favour of the London hospital of St. Mary Without Bishopsgate, it proved a tempting target for the attentions of Thomas Horsey and his two accomplices, Thomas Harrys of Downamney, Gloucestershire and John Anwick, of Rochford, Essex.
Horsey, younger son of a cadet branch of a well-known West Country family, appears to have broken in and before stealing valuables, tied up one the canons, Richard Cressell, hand and foot. In doing what Wolsey had already done in order to establish Christ Church College, in Oxford and what the first minister’s royal master was soon to do in the nation-wide dissolution a few years later, the very trivial act committed by Thomas Horsey at Bicknacre, has to be seen in its wider context as an impulse of predatory opportunism against an isolated victim beset by increasingly secular circumstances.
In conclusion, whilst anomalies and ambiguities of genealogy are probably insoluble at this distance in time, the affair serves to exemplify an opportunist motive by the younger son of a minor gentry family. It was such an impulse amidst the gentry at large, which Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell were soon to exploit in order to achieve their total religious and political ‘imperium.”
Peter J Webb
Picture: Bicknacre Priory at Woodham Ferrers c. 1250. Remains of West Arch of Crossing from the South East.
Edited version of an article that first appeared in Essex Family Historian, November 2001, page 29
