During the palmy days of its prosperity the head of the house at Cartmel was an important personage; his priory not only held the privilege of exemption from general interdicts, but he himself was free from the various spiritual and temporal ills that monastic flesh was heir to, and had, moreover, the right of holding his court and trying and deciding disputes within the manor, with liberty to inflict punishment upon offenders; and when his claim was disputed, as it was in 1292, though the rights to wreck of the sea and waifs which he had claimed were declared forfeit to the King, his demand of the privileges of sok, sak, tol, theam, infangthef, and utfangthef, as they are expressed in the jargon of the day, was conceded, which means that he was entitled to the privileges of a manorial lord to hold the pleas in his own court in matters arising out of disputes with his own tenants; of imposing fines therein and enforcing his decrees; of judging bondsmen and villeins as well as of punishing thieves found within his own lands, and requiring that those dwelling within his manor, if taken for felony beyond, be tried within his own court. The time was, however, approaching when the iron rod of this disposer of the lives and liberties of those settled around him was to be broken in pieces and the people delivered from priestly domination. A mighty change in religious thought and action was taking place which gradually gained strength, and culminated in that great event which swept like a tornado over the land when the once zealous champion of the Romish system, to replenish his exhausted exchequer, became the plunderer of the Church that had bestowed on him the title of "Defender of the Faith," and swept away prior and abbot, pride, pomp and power, and shrines and relics from their ancient and accustomed places. In 1535 the King ordered a general visitation of the religious houses. In the autumn of that year Leyton, Lee, and Petre, with Dr. John London, Dean of Wallingford, the commissioners, made their appearance and summoned the prior and monks to give an account of their worldly possessions. In the MS. surveys then made the total income varies in amount from £89 4s. 7d. to £91 6s. 3d., while Speed, the antiquary, rates it at £124 2s. 1d., the lowest computation being equal to an annual income of £2,141 10s. at the present day. In the following year the Act was passed confiscating to the Crown all the religious houses whose yearly income did not amount to £200, and Cartmel was included in the list of those doomed by the King. We need not dwell upon the way in which the Royal tyrant's edict went forth, or how the good and the bad, the honest and the corrupt, among the religious houses were ordered to be dismantled.