REVIEWS - Archaeologia Cantiana - Vol. 58 1945 pages 86 to 88

In the second part of his manuscript, the actual Register, Rough entered a selection of mandates received, letters issued under the common seal of the town and records of final concords in the town court. Among them are the elections of members of parliament, of the bailiffs for the Michaelmas fair at Yarmouth, processes for the recovery of debt, conveyances of property, plaints against the Archbishops of Canterbury, and questions relating to the laws of wreck, prize and salvage. These documents were followed by a Formulary of materials which Rough did not fit into the Register; and it includes many documents not taken from the town archives but from other sources. Among these are several ecclesiastical documents of considerable interest. Romney was linked by the Archbishops with the Cistercian monastery of Pontigny in the North of Burgundy, not far from the main road through France to Italy. Thomas Becket, Stephen Langton and Edmund Rich found a refuge in the monastery at times of struggle with the Crown. The stately abbey church of the thirteenth century is now the parish church of a village and the shrine of St. Edmund of Canterbury, canonized in 1248, is still the object of a pilgrimage. The Archbishops had the advowson of New Romney, and to mark their gratitude, Langton charged the benefice with a pension of £33 6s. 8d. to be paid by the rector to the proctor of Pontigny, Edmund Rich raised it to £40, and in 1264 Archbishop Boniface of

Savoy who had also received hospitality on his travels gave the benefice to Pontigny, reserving the right of ordaining a vicarage. In that ordination Pontigny was entitled to five-sixths of the revenues as assessed for taxation in 1291, and the vicar one-sixth. He was left with the responsibility of repairing the chancels of St. Laurence's and St. Martin's, the upkeep of lights, the salaries of chaplains in those churches and the chapel of St. Martin's, Northene, which stood on the north bank of the old channel of the Rother, and for St. Nicholas, and the rent of a clergy house. His undated petition to the Archbishop of Canterbury for a new ordination of the vicarage probably followed the Archbishop's commission of 1323 to investigate the plaint from the parishioners of St. Martin's about repairs to their chancel. Miss Murray attributes the later sad history of the churches of St. Lawrence and St. Martin, the one so out of repair that it was abandoned before 1540, the other deliberately dismantled about ten years later, to the illiberal policy of the abbot and monks of Pontigny as rectors. It must be remembered that from the beginning of the Hundred Years War with France in 1337, the benefice of Romney was taken into the King's hands as the possession of an enemy alien, and farmed out for a heavy rent to the Exchequer; it passed finally from Pontigny in 1413 and eventually to All Souls College, Oxford. No better provision was made for the vicar until 1403.