Lilleshall Abbey
Lilleshall Abbey was an Augustinian abbey in Shropshire, England, today located 6 miles north of Telford. It was founded between 1145 and 1148 and followed the austere customs and observance of the Abbey of Arrouaise in northern France. It suffered from chronic financial difficulties and narrowly escaped the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries in 1536, before going into voluntary dissolution in 1538.
Lilleshall was one of a small number of monasteries in England belonging to the rigorist Arrouaisian branch of the Augustinians. A persistent tale, possibly stemming from William Dugdale, the pioneering 17th century historian of Britain's monasteries, claims that there was an Anglo-Saxon church at Lilleshall, dedicated to St Alkmund. Even Dugdale sounded a note of scepticism, and by 1825, when Hugh Owen and John Brickdale Blakeway wrote their history of Shrewsbury, the scepticism was dominant and they would allow only they “could not disprove” the existence of the Anglo-Saxon foundation. much less the even less plausible tale that Alkmund was actually buried at Lilleshall. It seems that legends of early Lilleshall have developed by confusion with the collegiate church of St Alkmund in Shrewsbury, which was dissolved to provide the funding for the abbey. More recent accounts, from Robert William Eyton's of 1856 to the Victoria County History of 1973, entirely skip the Anglo-Saxon period and set the origins of the monastery securely in the years 1145–8, during the reign of King Stephen. These accounts agree that Lilleshall was founded on the initiative of two brothers: Richard de Belmeis, at that time Archdeacon of Middlesex and dean of the college of St Alkmund in Shrewsbury, and Philip de Belmeis, lord of Tong, Shropshire. Both were nephews of Richard de Beaumis, a Bishop of London who had died in 1127, sons of his brother Walter. The younger Richard was later also to become Bishop of London.
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