In our story, we introduce the Priory at Melwood. Today, all that remains are ruins on Low Melwood Farm, between Owston Ferry and Epworth in the Isle of Axholme.
This historic site, known as Axholme Priory or the Axholme Charterhouse, is believed to have been built on the site of a 12th-century Premonstratensian chapel. A papal document from 1398 records that this earlier chapel ‘was called anciently the Priory of the Wood’ and may have been dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Over time, its name evolved into the Priory of the Methelwude.
The Carthusian monastery itself was founded around 1395 or 1396 by Thomas Mowbray, the Earl of Nottingham (who later became the Duke of Norfolk), though actual building work didn't begin until 1397–1398. The Carthusians are a strictly enclosed Catholic order founded by Saint Bruno in 1084. They derive their name from the Chartreuse Mountains in the French Alps, where Bruno established his first remote hermitage—and this is also where we get the English word ‘charterhouse’ for their monasteries.
Axholme Priory was built around the same time as Mount Grace Priory in North Yorkshire. It belonged to a small wave of British monasteries founded between the devastating Black Death (1349–1350) and the Protestant Reformation. During this period, traditional monasteries were losing their appeal, but the Carthusians were gaining ground. Their monasteries were designed for a small community of hermits, modelled on ancient 4th-century desert hermitages in Palestine. Instead of communal living, a charterhouse featured a collection of individual cells arranged around a central courtyard or cloister, linked by a long corridor. Each monastery was run by a prior and made up of two distinct groups: the choir monks, who lived as hermits, and the lay brothers, who took care of the physical chores and the day-to-day running of the estate.
The priory faced a major financial setback in 1401 when Pope Boniface IX and King Henry IV stripped it of most of its funding and property. Although this wealth was eventually returned in 1415, the financial crisis meant that, early on, the community was likely limited to a prior, a maximum of 12 monks, and a handful of lay brothers, all following the strict rules of their order. Axholme was officially integrated into the wider Carthusian Order in 1432, and by 1447 a new wave of construction began to accommodate more monks. By 1449, the community was thriving, and they ran out of cells, even though construction was still underway on buildings described as being crafted ‘with wondrous skill and great cost’. Each monk's cell was a self-contained, two-storey miniature house with its own small garden.
Today, the site of the Axholme Charterhouse between Owston Ferry and Epworth is marked by a square island, about 148 metres across, surrounded on at least three sides by a 10-metre-wide moat. This protected island served as the monastery's inner courtyard. It still contains beautifully preserved earthworks that show where the central cloister and the main buildings once stood. Outside this island, to the north, east, and northwest, further earthworks trace what was likely the complex's outer courtyard.
In 1535 the prior Augustine Webster, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for refusing the Oath of Supremacy to King Henry VIII and was later martyred and canonised.
The priory’s religious life ended in June 1538, when it was closed as part of King Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries. By then, the number of residents had dwindled to no more than 12 monks. The crown granted the property to John Candish of West Butterwick. Around 1539, the renowned Tudor historian John Leland recorded that Candish ‘turned the same into a goodly manor house’.