The Lands of a Medieval Devon Nunnery: The Extents of Canonsleigh Abbey

In 1323, Canonsleigh Abbey's estates were surveyed manor by manor. The records name tenants, describe crops and fields, and set down the rents and labour owed to a religious house in East Devon. The abbey's holdings reached well beyond its immediate neighbourhood, from Devon and Somerset to Suffolk and the Essex town of Manningtree. Taken together, these entries offer an unusually close view of rural communities a generation before the Black Death.

Desmond Atkinson brings the medieval surveys into English and sets them against the abbey's history and the agricultural difficulties of the fourteenth century. The contrast between its western and eastern manors is especially revealing: the records show how landholding and obligations could differ even within one institution's estates. What began as an account of property and income now preserves the names and work of people who seldom appear so clearly in medieval history.