Clare Priory was established in 1248 as the first house of the Augustinian Friars - the Hermits of St Augustine - in England, a friary and a cell of Bec Abbey in Normandy. Richard de Clare founded it as both a religious house and a piece of dynastic memory-making: the de Clares were among the richest baronial families in England, and the priory sat directly beneath the family's great castle. In 1326, Edward II reconstituted it as a cell of Westminster Abbey - cutting its tie to Norman Bec and tying it instead to the royal house in London. The friars depended on local people for their daily bread and ministered in turn to the spiritual and welfare needs of the parish, an arrangement that lasted until the Reformation.

The priory church became, in time, a Plantagenet mausoleum. Joan of Acre, daughter of Edward I and Countess of both Hertford and Gloucester, was buried here in 1307 in the Chapel of St Vincent that she had founded herself. Her funeral was one of the great public events of Clare's history, attended by royalty and nobility including her brother King Edward II. The grave was opened fifty-two years after her burial, and her body was reported to be incorrupt - a miracle in medieval terms. Edward de Monthermer, her youngest son, joined her in 1339. Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence and son of Edward III, was buried here in 1368 - his heart and bones brought back from Italy at his own request to rest beside his first wife. Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, died in 1425 and was the last great noble interred here.

In 1538, the priory was suppressed under Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. The friars departed, the church was unroofed, and the buildings began the long slide into ruin that swallowed so many English religious houses. The villagers of Clare did what villagers across England did with their local monasteries: they took the stone, the lead, the worked timber, and put them into their own walls and roofs. The property passed through many private hands across the following centuries - some careful, some indifferent. By the end of the nineteenth century, what survived was a patchwork of medieval ruin and later domestic accretion, with the old infirmary serving as a working barn.

In 1953, the Augustinians purchased Clare Priory back. The choice of date was deliberate - exactly 705 years after the original foundation, and a moment when the post-war Catholic Church in England was confident enough to begin reclaiming its medieval foundations. The barn was restored to become a chapel. A retreat centre opened in the surviving buildings. In recent years the priory has continued to evolve: a contemporary new church, completed in the 2010s, won the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors 2015 Building Conservation award and was declared Project of the Year. The annual Clare Priory Craft Fair, held each July, draws ten thousand visitors over two days, with proceeds going to charity. Eight centuries after Richard de Clare put friars on this riverbank, they are still here.