Where meat was cooked. Spalding's Prior's Oven. Source

Two hundred years after the Dissolution of the monasteries, and one hundred years after the English civil war, Lincoln's Monks Abbey ruins still contained interesting remnants.

From 18th Century Recollections of Lincolnshire by Mary Pilkington:

The Monk’s House had had several pieces of old tapestry still on the walls. There had been a large iron fireplace and there were still some pieces of coloured glass in the chapel, the roof of which had been destroyed by fire. Several ovens had remained well into the 18th C. ¹

A coy, seemingly out of place comment tips us off to the difficulties of trying to survive at Temple Bruer ten miles further south.

From History of the Holy Trinity Guild Church at Sleaford, Rev George Oliver, 1837, p33, footnote 73:

The preceptor had a warren house, near the Grange, which had a vault beneath it, and the place where it stood is at present, indicated by a willow tree, which, according to tradition, grew originally "out of the prior's oven." ²

In A History of Cranwell, p11, Cranwell RAF base historian Captain R. de la Bere ³ implies the monks of Templar Bruer turned their holding into a well-defended militarised base around 1306. He says:

Kings were envious of them, priests were jealous, and the common people frightened.

De la Bere didn't add that "around 1306" is when the Knights Templar were re-branded the Knights Hospitaller.

In History of the Holy Trinity Guild Church at Sleaford, Rev George Oliver notes physical evidence of the hatred commoners developed for the landlords of Temple Bruer. Oliver cites damaged memorials and portraits in the nearby Green Man Inn, widespread contempt for the nearby Dunston Pillar complex, and the many, many destroyed market crosses in the fields and villages around Temple Bruer.

Commoners frightened of a religious order? Hating their symbols? Why?

On page 15, Oliver says the hostility went beyond Lincolnshire. He tells us:

Then fortified castles and manor houses frowned in every part of the country ; and towers and battlements bristled up their warlike heads for the protection, alike of noble and churchman ; to which they retreated in times of danger, and whence they dictated their arbitrary edicts to trembling tenants and retainers. These fortresses of terror are no more,

And in Secrets in Stone: The Story of the Templars, p44, John Ivory says the problem was international. He writes:

The Templar's battle flag at sea was a white skull and crossbones on a black flag which was revised and used reused some two hundred and eighty years later by the pirates.

Spalding museum curator Richard Buck gets a little closer to the problem in his dissertation The Demise of Spalding Priory.

Buck drops hints about Spalding's Prior's Oven on p24:

has been used for a variety of functions including a prison, a cafe

there is no obvious clue to its history or purpose (Snowden 2005 p.11) ⁴.

The interior consists of a single room with a vaulted ceiling with eight concentric arches with beams meeting at its centre. A small spiral stone staircase leads to the cellars below, and rumours of tunnels still persist amongst local residents (Hoskins 1936 p.2) ⁵.

What is generally accepted is that the structure, sometimes referred to as the 'Turris' is at least seven hundred years old, and built around AD1230. The local name of Prior's Oven appears to have been adopted because of its unusual shape. It was once the Monastic Prison, where monks and laymen were punished, often with severity.

A tower was later added containing a bell which tolled at the time of an execution

Small Brass Dinner Bell Source: Small Brass Dinner Bell

Rev George Oliver's full footnote about the site of "prior's oven" near Temple Bruer from History of the Holy Trinity Guild Church, at Sleaford, 1837:

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