section_path: Provinces/England and Scotland/Province of St. John Stone
section_name: Province of St. John Stone
paragraph_text: Province of St. John Stone
  
  In 1248 Richard de Clare, 6th Earl of Gloucester invited the Augustinians in Normandy to open their first English friary at Clare in Suffolk. In England and Ireland of the 14th century the Augustinian order had had over 800 friars, but these priories had declined to around 300 friars before the anti-clerical laws of the Reformation Parliament and the Act of Supremacy. The friaries were dispersed from 1538 in the dissolution of monasteries during the English Reformation. A partial List of monasteries dissolved by Henry VIII of England includes a number of Augustinian houses, including friaries at Leicester and Ludlow, in the Welsh Marches.
  
  The Augustinians were re-established in England in the 1860s with the creation of the priory, school and Church of St Monica in Hoxton Square, London, N1 (architect: E. W. Pugin) built 1864–66. Clare Priory – one of the houses dissolved by King Henry VIII – was re-acquired by the order in 1953, with help from the family who then owned it.