Qualla: Finchale Priory

Finchale Priory: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alison Stamp, CC BY-SA 2.0. Godric started life as a merchant. He sailed, he traded, he went on pilgrimage as far as Jerusalem and Rome. Then around 1112, in his early forties, he gave up the world. He had been working as a doorkeeper at the hospital church of St Giles in Durham when he persuaded Bishop Ranulf Flambard to grant him a small piece of land by the River Wear, four miles north of the city. There Godric built a hermitage and dedicated it to St John the Baptist. He lived there for fifty years, sleeping outdoors, rejecting comfortable cloth and good food, eating sparingly. He died on 21 May 1170, almost a hundred years old. The priory that grew up after his death never forgot whose grave it was built around.

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Image: Alison Stamp | CC BY-SA 2.0

Finchale Priory: The Hermit of Wolsingham

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Robinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Before Finchale, Godric had tried hermit life at Wolsingham in upper Weardale, sharing a remote cave with an older religious recluse. He had also spent time at Carlisle and on the island of Lindisfarne, drawn to places where the inhabited world thinned out into wilderness. The Du...

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Image: David Robinson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Finchale Priory: The Bedridden Saint

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. For almost a decade before his death in 1170, Godric was confined to his bed, possibly because of damage done to his body by fifty years of ascetic practice. The monks of Durham Cathedral took over his care. He had become a celebrity by then, a man whose visions and prophecies we...

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Image: Public domain

Finchale Priory: Priory and Rest House

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Glen Bowman from Newcastle, England, CC BY 2.0. In 1196, Bishop Hugh Pudsey and his son Henry endowed Finchale as a priory dependent on Durham Cathedral. The first prior was Thomas, formerly the sacrist of Durham. The priory was small, never wealthy, but by the mid-15th century it had become the richest of Durham's dependent h...

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Image: Glen Bowman from Newcastle, England | CC BY 2.0

Finchale Priory: Stone Carving and Stillness

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Abbott, CC BY-SA 2.0. What survives at Finchale today is mostly the late medieval phase of the priory. The ruins show heavily decorated capitals on the original arcade columns, tracery in the filled-in nave arches of the church, and on the south wall a double piscina and two carved sedilia seats where...

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Image: Brian Abbott | CC BY-SA 2.0

Finchale Priory: Dissolution and Afterlife

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Glen Bowman from Newcastle, England, CC BY 2.0. Finchale lasted until 1536, when Henry VIII's dissolution of the lesser monasteries ended its life as a religious community. Across its history the priory had 52 priors, and accounting records survive for much of the period from 1303 to 1535. Several of its priors went on to high...

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Image: Glen Bowman from Newcastle, England | CC BY 2.0