DISPLAY CASE

Church Power: Orders and Houses

The Augustines founded Missenden, in 1133. Nearly two hundred years later – 1321 – the Abbey appended its seal to a land exchange in Great Kimble, also in South Buckinghamshire.

The Abbey seal shows the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus, standing under a canopied niche.

The Knights Hospitaller (reverse)

Reference: D/ELV/T2

Religious organisations were a big part of medieval life. These took many forms.

This is the seal of Garnier of Nablus, who was prior to the Hospital of St. John in Clerkenwell. The Hospital was the English base of the Knights Hospitaller.

The Order of Hospitallers was formed in the 11th century to care for Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem. It later became a military order, charged with the protection of land captured during the Crusades. The obverse of the seal shows a brother kneeling in prayer beside a cross, while the reverse shows the head of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of the Hospitallers. This impression of the seal is one of the finest known.

Garnier appended it to a grant of land at Buscot in 1190. Within a year, he had become Master of the Hospitallers and was fighting beside Richard I in the Third Crusade. He died in 1192.

The Knights Hospitaller live on in England through the St. John Ambulance service.

Wallingford Priory

Reference: W/TZ1

Founded 1087-1089, the remains of Wallingford Priory are thought to be underneath Bull Croft Park, to the north of the High Street. The Benedictine house was dissolved by Cardinal Wolsey in 1525 to fund the building of Christ Church [then Cardinal] College, Oxford.

This may be the only surviving impression of the Priory seal. Although damaged, it shows Christ with a halo and seated on a rainbow, his right hand raised in blessing and with an open book in his left. It survives as part of the borough archives for Wallingford; the priory’s own archives can be found in Christ Church and the Bodleian Library.