For years, official surveys listed a friary and an abbey as separate sites, when in fact they refer to the same place, the confusion originating in an Ordnance Survey mapping error that labelled the spot "Abbey (Site of)" independently of the existing friary entry.

What the records are circling around is a Franciscan friary founded at Strade in the thirteenth century. The Franciscans, a mendicant order established in the early 1200s and dedicated to poverty and itinerant preaching, did not hold the site for long. By 1252 or 1253, the house had been transferred to the Dominicans, another mendicant order whose members were sometimes known as the Black Friars, and it continued under their stewardship. The result of this early handover is a place with a layered institutional identity, Franciscan in its origins, Dominican in its longer history, and catalogued under both an erroneous abbey designation and a separate friary record for much of the modern era.