Flixton Priory was a nunnery under a prioress following the Augustinian rule, which formerly stood in the parish of Flixton in the north of the English county of Suffolk, about south-west of Bungay. It was founded by Margery de Creke in 1258, and was dissolved in 1536–37. It was the poorest of the nunneries within the Diocese of Norwich. The site of the priory, which was enclosed by a moat, was at the present Abbey Farm, where little apart from the position in the landscape and a small section of standing wall remain to be seen. It was scheduled as an ancient monument in 1953. It is privately owned and is not open to the public. It is suggested that some parts of the masonry may have been re-used in St Peter's Hall at St Peter, South Elmham.
There are plentiful charters and other deeds and documents relating to the history of the priory. Eighty-four charters collected by Thomas Martin of Palgrave which were purchased by Thomas Astle entered the Stowe Collection, and passed from the Ashburnham Collection to the British Library. An 18th-century abstract of their contents is bound into the miscellaneous volume Stowe MS 1083, at fols. 56–84. Other Flixton charters owned by Thomas Astle are in the British Library "Carta Antiqua"; there is also a small but important series in the Lord Frederick Campbell collection. Several manorial rolls, rentals and other documents are among the Adair papers in the Suffolk Record Office at Lowestoft.
Flixton was among the feudal possessions of the Bishop of East Anglia at the time of the Domesday Survey, and together with Homersfield "is embedded in the tight-knit bundle of estates and churches of the bishop's fee known as South Elmham." The claim thus laid by Norman Scarfe is that this historic endowment of the bishops originated in a 7th-century grant to the first East Anglian bishop, St Felix, Bishop of Dommoc c. 631–648, and that Flixton itself (and also the other Flixton, in Lothingland) take their names from him. While this does not decide the various claims of South Elmham in Suffolk and North Elmham in Norfolk to be the seat of the second East Anglian Episcopal see of Helmham established by Archbishop Theodore, it does provide a context which in the 13th century may have recommended Flixton as an appropriate site for a religious foundation, in a commanding manorial seat a short distance from the pre-conquest parochial church.
The patron family
Margery de Hanes (de Anos), daughter of Geoffrey de Hanes of Hillington, Norfolk, by her marriage to Bartholomew de Creke brought her inheritance to the principal heir of a house associated with the formerly rival powers of the Bigod and Glanvill families. The de Creke family were lords of the manor of Creak at North Creake, Norfolk, adjacent to the estate upon which Sir Robert de Nerford established a Hospital of St Bartholomew after 1217, which his widow Dame Alice developed as the Augustinian abbey of Creake.
Bartholomew de Creke, and his sisters Margaret and Isabel, were the children of Robert de Creke and his wife Agnes de Glanvill, daughter and heir of William, son of Hervey de Glanvill. Agnes had first married Thomas Bigod, son of Roger Bigod, 2nd Earl of Norfolk. Roger Bigod's father Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk (died 1177) made a second marriage to Gundreda, daughter of Roger de Beaumont, 2nd Earl of Warwick. This Countess, in her widowhood, married Roger de Glanvill, the uncle of Agnes, and with his assistance founded her nunnery at Bungay Priory. When Glanvill died, around 1195, certain Glanvill estates descended to Agnes as his heir, and Gundreda sued her for a share of them as her dower. At much the same time Thomas Bigod died and Agnes remarried to Robert de Creke. Roger de Glanvill's lands were, however, tied up in grants to Ranulf de Glanvill's monastery at Leiston Abbey, or else not disponible owing to Roger's debts to the crown.