the Duke of Norfolk could transfer the priory and its lands out of nominally French hands, to become a house of the Carthusian Abbey established on the Duke's estates at the Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire. The Carthusians practised a strict monastic lifestyle and the revenues of Monks Kirby Priory provided most of their income but only two priests, and no monks, were maintained at Monks Kirby. The church was again altered in the late fifteenth century, and an octagonal spire was added which must have been an imposing local landmark. 1500-1700 The Newnham Paddox Estate was held by a number of different families in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century until, on 11 November 1433, John Fildyng, or Feilding bought the estate; he was a descendent of the earlier owners, the Newnham family. The Feildings expanded their estate by buying parts of the Monks Kirby manor (i.e. the lands that belonged to Monks Kirby priory) from the monks at Axholme in the late 1400s and early 1500s. In the Reformation of the 1540s, King Henry VIII confiscated the assets of the Axholme priory, granting the remaining lands of the Monks Kirby Manor to the Bishop of Ipswich. At the same time he granted the rectory and the advowson of the vicarage and the income from the collection of local tithes to his foundation of Trinity College, Cambridge. In the 1600s the Feildings' status rose when William Feilding's handsome brother-in-law, George Villiers, became King James I's favourite: Villiers ended up as the immensely powerful Duke of Buckingham. Villiers' friends and family rose with him and William Feilding was made the first Earl of Denbigh. Even William's eight year old second son George (named after his important uncle) was given the right to his own earldom. Meanwhile, the Manor of Monks Kirby had not stayed with the Bishop of Ipswich. There were several owners over the following 80 years before the Manor was bought by the Countess of Buckingham (George Villiers' mother) who passed it to her grandson Basil Feilding, the second Earl of Denbigh. The Feilding family thus came to own much of Monks Kirby, both the historic Newnham Paddox estate and the lands that in the medieval period had belonged to the Priory Church of Monks Kirby. 1700 to 21st century The Church's spire blew down in a storm on Christmas Night 1701. The enclosure of farming land in the