ABSTRACT
The significance of the Priory site in manorial life was further strengthened when the manor house was moved to the priory precinct. The manorial seat of Earls Colne had originally been located beside St Andrew's Church, but the increasing physical presence of the Priory on the landscape from the fourteenth century onwards convinced the de Veres to abandon this site in favour of one within the priory precinct. By the seventeenth century, these pre-Reformation rituals were silenced, and all that remained of this lavish pre-Reformation soundscape of ritual worship were two disparate leaves of a Colne Priory missal reused as part of the Colne Priory manorial records. Roman Catholic England had built an impressive footprint into the landscape and memory of Earls Colne. The Priory would prove to be a liminal space where contested religious ideological battles would take place. It was a place for both remembering and forgetting.
