The Priory that gave us our name

On 18 February 1378 Michael de la Pole put his name to a document setting out his establishment of a Carthusian priory outside the walls of Kingston upon Hull.  He was following, he said, the intentions of his late father William, who had wanted to build " a certain Religious House of Nuns, or Poor Sisters Minoresses Regular, of the Order of St. Clare" instead of the hospital for the poor he had originally planned. Michael preferred a priory for males of the Carthusian order because "their Rules will be kept more safely, and with more Vigilance and Devotion, than by Women". Walter de Kele was to be the first Prior. Michael lists the lands with which he is endowing the Priory.
As with the 1384 document founding the Maison Dieu, there is confusion about whether the hospital, or Maison Dieu, already existed, but we will skip that argument here.
Two religious houses already existed in Hull. The White Friars, or Carmelites, were established here in around 1290, and the Black Friars, or Austin Friars, in 1317. Both friaries are still remembered in Hull street names. The Carthusians were a very different order. They were founded 1084 by Bishop Bruno of Grenoble in the Chartreuse mountains and, to quote from the English Heritage website,       "The purpose of Carthusian life was total withdrawal from the world to serve God by personal devotion and privation. While other monks lived communally, Carthusians rarely met one another, passing the long day in the isolation of their cells and The monks’ lives were ordered by a strict timetable. They followed the same daily round of eight offices (or prayers) as monks of other religious orders. But uniquely, they only celebrated the night offices and the afternoon office of Vespers together regularly in the church, and Mass less frequently. Otherwise they said their offices and celebrated Mass alone in their cells. Only on Sundays and feast days was the monastic day different. On these days, the monks dined together, met to discuss business and discipline, and celebrated all offices in the church."
It was an unusual choice by Michael; there were only ever 10 Carthusian houses in England.  There is no contemporary description of the priory.  The earliest picture of it comes from the Cotton MSS and is dated to around 1538.

The orientation of it is thought to be skewed.
A century later the Hollar plan gives us more detail but the central tower has gone.

(This comes from a conservation document produced by the Hull City Council.  This document also reproduces a drawing purporting to be the ruined gateway to the priory done by Thomas Tindall Wildridge and published in Cook's 1882 history of the Charterhouse, but we now know that it is a fake, a copy of a much earlier etching of Coverham Abbey gateway.)
We can be confident about where the priory was; it was situated just to the west of our current buildings.  Some physical evidence of that was uncovered in 1805 by those digging the foundations of a housing development on the site.  They found skeletons but no coffins.  Carthusians bury their dead wrapped in simple shrouds and without coffins.  But no archaeology has ever been done on the area, and post-war building work may mean that nothing remains.
At its peak the Hull Priory would have had a similar lay-out to Mount Grace Priory near Allerton.  Enough remains of that to reconstruct it.

Although Michael de la Pole stipulated in the founding document of his Maison Dieu in 1384 that the Prior was to have supervision over the Master, there was probably little interaction between the two establishments.  One of the few insights we have into the life of the Priory comes from a document in the archives of Ewelme in Oxfordshire, the home of William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk and grandson of Michael, and his wife Alice (granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer).  It is an indenture given by the widowed Duchess.  It tells us, incidentally, that the Duke had granted the Priory the manor of Rimswell in 1439, but the meat of it is that the instruction that a monk was to say a daily mass and prayers for the Duchess and her son john, the Duke; images of the Duchess and the late Duke to a particular design were to be set up in the refectory of the Priory; and the monks were to give bread and ale to two "almsfolk" every day, on pain of forfeiting Rimswell.  One other surprise comes from this document; it refers consistently to the priory "and convent".  This is the only indication I have seen that at some stage the priory included a section for Carthusian nuns.  Whether this involvement of the de la Poles was maintained for long after Alice's death is doubtful.
Little more is recorded of the priory's history until 1535.  Henry VIII had begun his closure of the monasteries and confiscation of their property, and was said to have a particular dislike of Carthusians.  Hull's priory had a total annual value of the house in 1535 was £231 17s. 3d., and the clear annual value only £174 18s. 3d.  It therefore came under the operation of the Act for the suppression of the lesser monasteries, but it received the king's licence to continue.  Why it was selected for exemption is not known, but the breathing space meant that it could give shelter to two refugees from the London Charterhouse.  The monks there had refused to acquiesce in Henry's Act of Supremacy and most were executed in the spring of 1535.  Two, John Rochester and James Walworth, were seized and brought to the Hull priory.  Both are listed among the 13 members of the community listed in the Suppression Papers in 1536.  However, following the uprising of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, the King felt the need to demonstrate his power in one of its flashpoints, York.  Rochester and Walworth were taken from Hull to York and executed on 11 May 1537.

A commemorative plaque was placed on the wall of our main building 20 years ago.  It is somewhat misleading about where the Priory actually stood.
















The King's enforcers finally came for the Priory late in 1539.  Seven members were given pensions, including the Prior Ralph Mauleverey.  At least two of these are known to have found refuge in Charterhouses in Europe.  The land owned by the Priory, including the land on which it stood, was confiscated by the Crown.  But the hospital, as a separate foundation with its own endowment, was not affected.
A year or two later John Leland in his Itinerary tells us:

If those "trowehes of Leade" did indeed contain the bones of members of the de la Pole family it is not known what happened to them.  The land was leased to Thomas Alured who had come to Hull in the 1540s as paymaster of the garrison, and stayed as a customer of the port.  Both he and his eldest son represented Hull as MPs, and later generations followed suit.  Their official address was "the Charterhouse" and it was not until the rebuilding of the hospital after the Civil War that the term began to be applied to it.

Useful sources include https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/yorks/vol3/pp190-192  and  http://www.histparl.ac.uk/volume/1604-1629/member/alured-thomas-1583-1638.