Ashridge Priory was a medieval abbey of the Brothers of Penitence. In 1283 Edmund son of Richard, Earl of Cornwall holders of Berkhamsted Castle (two and half miles away) founded a monastery at Ashridge, Hertfordshire. The monastery was built for a rector and twenty canons who formed, according to the sixteenth-century historian Polydore Vergil, "a new order not before seen in England, and called the Boni homines". It was finished in 1285. One such visitor was King Edward I. In 1290 he held parliament at the abbey while he spent Christmas in Pitstone.