Ilchester Nunnery, in Ilchester

Ilchester

Ilchester is a village and civil parish, situated on the River Yeo or Ivel, five miles north of Yeovil, in the English county of Somerset. The parish, which includes the village of Sock Dennis and the old parish of Northover, has a population of 2,021...

, Somerset

Somerset

The ceremonial and non-metropolitan county of Somerset in South West England borders Bristol and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. It is partly bounded to the north and west by the Bristol Channel and the estuary of the...

, England, was founded around 1217-1220 as the Whitehall Hospital of the Holy Trinity, after the gift of a house and other property by William Dennis (Dacus) of Sock Dennis. By 1281, it had been converted into an Augustinian nunnery which may also have been called Blanchesale.

In the early 14th century concerns were raised about the management of the nunnery and the poverty of the nuns. The building was expanded in 1370. By 1463 the nunnery had been dissolved and its chapel become a free chapel, which itself was dissolved in 1548.

A ruined building still existed in 1791 but the stone was then used to build the nearby Castle Farm.

Prioresses

• Alice Atteyerde, 1315
• Alice de Chilthorne, 1316
• Cecilia de Draycote, 1325
• Mary, 1370
• Matilda, occurs 1377
• Margaret, otherwise Marjory, 1377
• Christina, 1423

Further reading

• Thomas Hugo, Whitehall Hospital, Nunnery, Free Chapel, 12th-18th Century (1867) (Ilchester and District Occasional Papers (Guernsey) 52, 45-84)
• James Stevens Cox, Whitehall hospital, nunnery, free chapel, Ilchester (J. S. Cox, Ilchester Historical Monographs no. 6, 1950)