Thomas Becket had been dead barely three years when the canons of this place chose him as their patron. The blood was still fresh on the flagstones of Canterbury Cathedral, the king who had ordered the killing still doing public penance, the cult of the murdered archbishop spreading across Christendom like a fever. In Staffordshire, beside the slow brown water of the River Sow, a local burgess named Gerard fitz-Brian decided his new Augustinian priory would carry the name of the most controversial saint in England. The foundation charter was witnessed in 1175 by Ralph, Archdeacon of Stafford, who lost his office that same year. Eight centuries later the canons are gone, the relics are scattered, and the priory church stands roofless above a working farmyard.
Most pilgrims to medieval Staffordshire never noticed St Thomas. It was not a great pilgrimage church, not a destination for the desperate or the rich. It was a working religious house tucked into a bend of the Sow, surrounded by 70 acres of land granted by its founder, paying an annual rent of 8 shillings. Yet over the centuries the bishops of Lichfield and Coventry adopted it as their special project. Bishop Richard Peche, who held the see until 1182, gifted the canons land in Lichfield, Cannock, and Baswich, plus the right to fish the Sow and the Penk. When Peche resigned his bishopric he came here as a brother and was buried under the church the following year. The pattern repeated: gentry families like the de Muttons of Ingestre granted lands in Tixall and Stone. Henry III sent £10 in 1245 to buy a chasuble of red samite trimmed with orphreys. By the time of dissolution, the priory's possessions topped £180 a year, making it the wealthiest Augustinian priory in England.
In 1347 Bishop Roger Northburgh arrived for a visitation and found the place in mild disarray. The subprior was often absent. Several of the brothers had taken to keeping hounds. Some hunted with local laymen, wore secular clothing in the cloister, and slept outside the dormitory in ways the rule did not permit. Northburgh issued severe restrictions and ordered his decrees read aloud in chapter through the year. The reforms worked, briefly. When visitors returned in 1518 and 1524 they found similar indiscretions and issued similar decrees. The canons were not corrupt so much as comfortable, drawn by the wealth of the house into the easygoing rhythms of a country gentleman's life. They kept Florentine merchants in business buying their wool, accepted the advowsons of Weston-on-Trent and Bushbury, and slowly forgot what a priory was supposed to look like.
When Henry VIII began dissolving England's monasteries in 1536, St Thomas might have been an obvious target. Instead the prior paid £133 6s 8d to the Crown and bought his house an extra two years of life. The fine was crushing; payment had to be made in installments. By 1538 the money was running out and the rules had changed. The prior surrendered the priory in exchange for an annual pension of £26 13s 4d, with the brothers receiving £5 or £6 apiece. In October 1539 the king granted the dissolved priory to Rowland Lee, Bishop of Lichfield, the rough-mannered border official remembered for hanging Welshmen by the hundred during his presidency of the Council in the Marches. On Lee's death the property passed to his nephew Brian Fowler. The chasuble of red samite, the silver, the library, the relics of Saint Thomas: all gone.
A farm was built on the priory ruins, and the farm did what farms always do with old stone: it used what was useful. Conventual walls became barn walls. Cloister arches framed cart entrances. The eastern range of the cloister and the chapter house vanished entirely, demolished for building material or simply collapsed and cleared. But the priory church survives in fragments, its ruins still rising from the working yard, and parts of the rectangular cloister are still legible to anyone who knows where to look. Robert de Ferrers, 6th Earl of Derby, lies somewhere in the lost ground, along with Bishop Peche and centuries of canons whose names were not written down. The Sow still moves past the site as it did when Gerard fitz-Brian rode out from Stafford with his charter, looking for a meadow to give the church.
Located at 52.80N, 2.07W, on the south bank of the River Sow just east of Stafford town. From cruise altitude the priory ruins are nearly invisible among working farm buildings, but the curve of the Sow is a reliable landmark, with the M6 motorway running just to the west. East Midlands Airport (EGNX) lies about 35 nm east, Birmingham (EGBB) 27 nm south, and the small Cosford airfield (EGWC) 18 nm south-west. Best viewed at 2,500 feet on a clear morning when the low sun picks out the surviving walls against the farmyard.