Sheen Priory

Sheen Priory (ancient spelling: Shene, Shean, etc.) in Sheen, now Richmond, London, was a former Carthusian monastery founded in 1414 within the royal manor of Sheen, on the south bank of the Thames, upstream and approximately 9 miles southwest of the Palace of Westminster. It was built on a site approximately half a mile to the north of Sheen Palace, which itself also occupied a riverside site, that today lies between Richmond Green and the River Thames. All above-ground traces of the priory have disappeared, yet it is known that the foundations of the priory church lie to the immediate southwest of Kew Observatory, under the fairway of the 14th hole of the Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Course, in Richmond Old Deer Park. It is sometimes incorrectly referred to as Richmond Priory, due to the subsequent renaming of Sheen Manor in 1501, which confusion merits early examination.

Sheen Priory was built as part of King Henry V's "The King's Great Work" centred on Sheen Palace (renamed Richmond Palace in 1501). The royal manor of Sheen lay on the right (south), Surrey, bank of the River Thames, opposite the parish of Twickenham and the royal manor of Isleworth on the left, Middlesex, bank. Sheen had been a favourite residence of the last Plantagenet king Richard II (1377–1399) and his beloved wife Anne of Bohemia. When Anne died there of plague in 1394, Richard cursed the place where they had found great happiness and razed the palace to the ground. His throne was usurped by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, who ruled as Henry IV (1399–1413). Henry IV had been involved in the murder of Richard in 1400, and in that of Archbishop Richard le Scrope, and made a vow to expiate his guilt by founding three monasteries, but died before he could fulfil his vow. Henry IV had shown little interest in the ruined Sheen but his son Henry V (1413–1422) saw its reconstruction as a means of emphasising the dynastic link between his own House of Lancaster and that of Plantagenet, of unquestioned legitimacy, and decided at the same time to found the three monasteries pledged by his father all within one great building scheme, known as "The King's Great Work". This "Great Work" commenced in the winter of 1413–14, comprising the new Sheen Palace and the following monasteries nearby:

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