This house stood on the north side of Priory Lane, which took its name from it; but it took up a considerable part of the ground between that lane and the church, and seems to have been a pretty extensive building. Its prior, though subordinate to him of Norwich, and removable by him and his monks at their pleasure, was yet a person of no small consequence among the monks of Lynn, as well as in the estimation of the inhabitants. He was, no doubt, looked up to, for many ages, and esteemed among the principal personages of the place: but he is no longer remembered; and in a few years the present heads of the town will be as little thought of. After the dissolution, the Lynn Priory was partly pulled down, to enlarge the church yard. What was then left was in time removed, and scarcely any remains of it now exist, except what may be discovered in some of the walls of the old dwellings on the north side of the lane. The monks of this house, at one time, according to Parkin, were grown so rich, beyond the design of the founder, as to endanger the bishop’s preponderance in the place; which occasioned bishop De Grey, who then filled the see, to take measures for reducing their power and securing his own, by making an exchange with the priory of Norwich, of lands or possessions belonging to them here, for other lands belonging to his see elsewhere. A copy of the bishop’s deed for this purpose has been preserved by Parkin, {491a} as have been also many particulars relating to this priory, which, though not altogether uninteresting, must be here omitted. The Benedictine order, to which the monks of this house belonged, is of considerable antiquity. It was instituted, according to Mosheim {491b} A.D. 529, by BENEDICT of _Nursia_, a man of piety and reputation for the age he lived in. From his _rule_ of discipline, which is yet extant, we learn that it was not his intention to impose it upon all the monastic societies, but to form an order whose discipline should be milder, their establishment more solid, and their manners more regular, than those of the other monastic bodies; and whose members during the course of a holy and peaceful life, were to divide their time between prayer, reading, the education of youth, and other pious and learned labours. But in process of time the followers of this celebrated ecclesiastic degenerated sadly from the piety of their founder, and lost sight of the duties of their station and the great end of their establishment.