Dissolution of the monasteries
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The dissolution of the monasteries, occasionally referred to as the suppression of the monasteries, was the set of administrative and legal processes between 1536 and 1541, by which
Though the policy was originally envisaged as increasing the regular income of the Crown, much former monastic property was sold off to fund Henry's military campaigns in the 1540s. He was given the authority to do this in England and Wales by the
Historian George W. Bernard argues that:
The dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s was one of the most revolutionary events in English history. There were nearly 900 religious houses in England, around 260 for monks, 300 for regular
canons, 142 nunneries and 183 friaries; some 12,000 people in total, 4,000 monks, 3,000 canons, 3,000 friars and 2,000 nuns. If the adult male population was 500,000, that meant that one adult man in fifty was in religious orders.[1]
Context
At the time of their suppression, a small number of English and Welsh religious houses could trace their origins to
Typically, 11th- and 12th-century founders had endowed monastic houses with both temporal income in the form of revenues from landed estates, and spiritual income in the form of
The 200 houses of
The dissolution of the monasteries in England and Ireland took place in the political context of other attacks on the ecclesiastical institutions of Western Roman Catholicism, which had been under way for some time. Many of these were related to the
The religious and political changes in England under Henry VIII and
Complaints
Dissatisfaction with the general state of regular religious life, and with the gross extent of monastic wealth, was near to universal amongst late medieval secular and ecclesiastical rulers in the Latin West. Bernard says there was:
widespread concern in the later 15th and early 16th centuries about the condition of the monasteries. A leading figure here is the scholar and theologian
Desiderius Erasmus who satirized monasteries as lax, as comfortably worldly, as wasteful of scarce resources, and as superstitious; he also thought it would be better if monks were brought more directly under the authority of bishops. At that time, quite a few bishops across Europe had come to believe that resources expensively deployed on an unceasing round of services by men and women in theory set apart from the world [would] be better spent on endowing grammar schools and university colleges to train men who would then serve the laity as parish priests, and on reforming the antiquated structures of over-large dioceses such as that of Lincoln. Pastoral care was seen as much more important and vital than the monastic focus on contemplation, prayer and performance of the daily office.[1]
Erasmus had made a threefold criticism of the monks and nuns of his day, saying that:
- in withdrawing from the world into their own communal life, they elevated man-made monastic vows of
- notwithstanding exceptional communities of genuine austere life and exemplary charity, the overwhelming majority of abbeys and priories were havens for idle drones, concerned only for their own existence, reserving for themselves an excessive share of the commonwealth's religious assets, and contributing little or nothing to the spiritual needs of ordinary people;[6]
- the monasteries, almost without exception, were deeply involved in promoting and profiting from the veneration of pilgrimages and purported miraculous tokens. The cult of relics was by no means specific to monasteries, but Erasmus was scandalised by the extent to which well-educated and highly regarded monks and nuns would participate in the perpetration of what he considered to be frauds against gullible and credulous lay believers.[7]
Summarising the state of monastic life across Western Europe, David Knowles said,[This quote needs a citation]
The verdict of unprejudiced historians at the present day would probably be—abstracting from all ideological considerations for or against monasticism—that there were far too many religious houses in existence in view of the widespread decline of the fervent monastic vocation, and that in every country the monks possessed too much of wealth and of the sources of production both for their own well-being and for the material good of the economy.
Reforms
Pilgrimages to monastic
]The monasteries were next in line. J. J. Scarisbrick remarked in his biography of Henry VIII:
Suffice it to say that English monasticism was a huge and urgent problem; that radical action, though of precisely what kind was another matter, was both necessary and inevitable, and that a purge of the religious orders was probably regarded as the most obvious task of the new regime—as the first function of a Supreme Head empowered by statute "to visit, extirp and redress".[10]
The stories of monastic impropriety, vice, and excess that were to be collected by
Otherwise in this later period, donations and legacies had tended to go instead towards parish churches, university colleges, grammar schools and collegiate churches, which suggests greater public approbation of such purposes. Levels of monastic debt were increasing, and average numbers of
From 1534 onwards, Cromwell and King Henry were constantly seeking ways to redirect ecclesiastical income to the benefit of the Crown—efforts they justified by contending that much ecclesiastical revenue had been improperly diverted from royal resources in the first place. Renaissance princes throughout Europe were facing severe financial difficulties due to sharply rising expenditures, especially to pay for armies, fighting ships and fortifications. Most tended, sooner or later, to resort to plundering monastic wealth, and to increasing taxation on the clergy. Protestant princes would justify this by claiming divine authority; Catholic princes would obtain the agreement and connivance of the papacy. Monastic wealth, regarded everywhere as excessive and idle, offered a standing temptation for cash-strapped secular and ecclesiastical authorities.[citation needed]
In consequence, almost all official action in respect of the dissolution in England and Wales was directed at the monasteries and monastic property. The closing of the monasteries aroused popular opposition, but recalcitrant monasteries and abbots became the targets of royal hostility. The surrender of the friaries, from an official perspective, arose almost as an afterthought, as an exercise in administrative tidiness once it had been determined that all religious houses would have to go. In terms of popular esteem, however, the balance tilted the other way. Almost all monasteries supported themselves from their endowments; in late medieval terms 'they lived off their own'. Unless they were notably bad landlords or scandalously neglected those parish churches in their charge, they tended to enjoy widespread local support; particularly as they commonly appointed local notables to fee-bearing offices. The friars, not being self-supporting, were by contrast much more likely to have been the objects of local hostility, especially since their practice of soliciting income through legacies appears often to have been perceived as diminishing anticipated family inheritances.[citation needed]
Precedents for confiscations
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By the time Henry VIII turned his mind to the business of monastery reform, royal action to suppress religious houses had a history of more than 200 years. The first case was that of the so-called 'alien priories'. As a result of the Norman Conquest, some French religious orders held substantial property through their daughter monasteries in England.
Some of these were merely granges, agricultural estates with a single foreign monk in residence to supervise things; others were rich foundations in their own right (e.g., Lewes Priory was a daughter of Cluny and answered to the abbot of that great French house).
Owing to the fairly constant state of war between England and France in the late Middle Ages, successive English governments had objected to money going overseas to France from these alien priories, as the hostile French king might get hold of it. They also objected to foreign prelates having jurisdiction over English monasteries.[citation needed]
Furthermore, after 1378, French monasteries (and hence alien priories dependent on them) maintained allegiance to the continuing
Those alien priories that had functioning communities were forced to pay large sums to the king, while those that were mere estates were confiscated and run by royal officers, the proceeds going to the king's pocket. Such estates were a valuable source of income for the Crown in its French wars. Most of the larger alien priories were allowed to become naturalised (for instance Castle Acre Priory), on payment of heavy fines and bribes, but for around ninety smaller houses and granges, their fates were sealed when Henry V dissolved them by act of Parliament in 1414.[citation needed]
The properties were taken over by the Crown; some were kept, some were subsequently given or sold to Henry's supporters, others were assigned to his new monasteries of Syon Abbey and the Carthusians at Sheen Priory; others were used for educational purposes. All these suppressions enjoyed papal approval but successive 15th-century popes continued to press for assurances that, now that the Avignon Papacy had been defeated, the confiscated monastic income would revert to religious and educational uses.[citation needed]
The medieval understanding of religious houses as institutions associated monasteries and nunneries with their property, that is to say, their endowments of land and spiritual income, and not with their current personnel of monks and nuns. If the property with which a house had been endowed by its founder were to be confiscated or surrendered, then the house ceased to exist, whether its members continued in the religious life or not. Consequently, the founder, and their heirs, had a continuing (and legally enforceable) interest in certain aspects of the house's functioning; their nomination was required at the election of an abbot or prior, they could claim hospitality within the house when needed, and they could be buried within the house when they died. In addition, though this scarcely ever happened, the endowments of the house would revert to the founder's heirs if the community failed or dissolved. The status of 'founder' was considered in
The founders of the alien priories had been foreign monasteries refusing allegiance to the English Crown. These property rights were therefore automatically forfeited to the Crown when their English dependencies were dissolved by Act of Parliament but the example created by these events prompted questions as to what action might be taken should houses of English foundation cease for any reason to exist. Much would depend on who, at the time the house ended, held the status of founder or patron; and, as with other such disputes in real property, the standard procedure was to empanel a jury to decide between disputing claimants. In practice, the Crown claimed the status of 'founder' in all such cases that occurred. Consequently, when a monastic community failed (e.g., through the death of most of its members, or through insolvency), the bishop would seek to obtain papal approval for alternative use of the house's endowments in canon law. This, with royal agreement claiming 'foundership', would be presented to an 'empanelled jury' for consent to disposal of the property of the house in civil law.[citation needed]
The royal transfer of alien monastic estates to educational foundations inspired bishops and, as the 15th century waned, they advocated more such actions, which became common. The subjects of these dissolutions were usually small, poor, and indebted
The consequent new foundations were most often
In the following century, Lady Margaret Beaufort obtained the property of Creake Abbey (whose religious had all died of sweating sickness in 1506) to fund her works at Oxford and Cambridge. She was advised in this action by the staunch traditionalist John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester.[citation needed]
In 1522, Fisher himself dissolved the women's monasteries of
The conventional wisdom of the time was that the proper daily observance of the Divine Office of prayer required a minimum of twelve professed religious, but by the 1530s, only a minority of religious houses in England could provide this. Most observers were in agreement that a systematic reform of the English church must necessarily involve the drastic concentration of monks and nuns into fewer, larger houses, potentially making much monastic income available for more productive religious, educational and social purposes.[citation needed]
However, this apparent consensus often faced strong resistance in practice. Members of religious houses proposed for dissolution might resist relocation; the houses invited to receive them might refuse to co-operate; and local notables might resist the disruption in their networks of influence. Moreover, reforming bishops found they faced intractable opposition when urging the heads of religious houses to enforce rigorous observation of their monastic rules, especially in respect of requiring monks and nuns to remain within their cloisters. Monks and nuns in almost all late medieval English religious communities, although theoretically living in religious poverty, were nevertheless paid an annual cash wage (peculium) and were in receipt of other regular cash rewards and pittances, which accorded considerable effective freedom from claustral rules for those disinclined to be restricted by them. Religious superiors met their bishops' pressure with the response that the austere and cloistered ideal was no longer acceptable to more than a tiny minority of regular clergy, and that any attempt on their part to enforce their order's stricter rules could be overturned in counter-actions in the secular courts, were aggrieved monks and nuns to obtain a writ of praemunire.[citation needed]
The King actively supported Wolsey, Fisher and
Continental precedents
While these transactions were going on in England, elsewhere in Europe events were taking place which presaged a storm. In 1521,
News of these events did not take long to spread among Protestant-minded rulers across Europe, and some, particularly in Scandinavia, moved very quickly. In the
In Denmark–Norway, King Frederick I made a similar act in 1528, confiscating 15 of the houses of the wealthiest monasteries and convents. Further laws under his successor over the course of the 1530s banned the friars and forced monks and nuns to transfer title to their houses to the Crown, which passed them out to supportive nobles who soon acquired former monastic lands. Danish and Norwegian monastic life was to vanish in a way identical to that of Sweden.[citation needed]
In Switzerland, too, monasteries were under threat. In 1523, the government of the city-state of
In France and Scotland, by contrast, royal action to seize monastic income proceeded along entirely different lines. In both countries, the practice of nominating abbacies in
It is inconceivable that these moves went unnoticed by the English government and particularly by
Process
Declaration as Head of the Church
On famously failing to receive from the Pope a declaration of nullity regarding his marriage, Henry had himself declared
G. W. O. Woodward concluded that:
All but a very few took it without demur. They were, after all, Englishmen, and shared the common prejudice of their contemporaries against the pretensions of foreign Italian prelates.[17]
Visitation of the monasteries
In 1534, Cromwell undertook, on behalf of the King, an inventory of the endowments, liabilities and income of the entire ecclesiastical estate of England and Wales, including the monasteries (see
Reports and further visitations
In the autumn of 1535, the visiting commissioners were sending back to Cromwell written reports of all the lurid doings they claimed to have discovered, enclosing with them bundles of purported miraculous wimples, girdles and mantles that monks and nuns had been lending out for cash to the sick, or to mothers in labour. The commissioners appear consistently to have instructed houses to reintroduce the strict practice of common dining and cloistered living, urging that those unable to comply should be encouraged to leave; and considerable numbers appear to have taken up the opportunity offered to be released from their monastic vows, so as to make a life elsewhere. The visitors reported the number of professed religious persons continuing in each house. In the case of seven houses, impropriety or irreligion had been so great, or the numbers remaining so few, that the commissioners had felt compelled to suppress it on the spot; in others, the abbot, prior or noble patron was reported to be petitioning the King for a house to be dissolved. Such authority had formerly rested with the Pope, but now the King would need to establish a legal basis for dissolution in statutory law. Moreover, it was by no means clear that the property of a surrendered house would automatically be at the disposal of the Crown; a good case could be made for this property to revert to the heirs and descendants of the founder or other patron. Accordingly, Parliament enacted the Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1535 ("Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries Act") in early 1535, relying in large part on the reports of "impropriety" Cromwell had received, establishing the power of the King to dissolve religious houses that were failing to maintain a religious life, consequently providing for the King to compulsorily dissolve monasteries with annual incomes declared in the Valor Ecclesiasticus of less than £200 (of which there were potentially 419) but also giving the King the discretion to exempt any of these houses from dissolution at his pleasure. All property of the dissolved house would revert to the Crown. Accordingly, many monasteries falling below the threshold forwarded a case for continuation, offering to pay substantial fines in recompense. Many such cases were accepted, so that only around 330 were referred to suppression commissions, and only 243 houses were actually dissolved at this time. The choice of a £200 threshold as the criterion for general dissolution under the legislation has been queried, as this does not appear to correspond to any clear distinction in the quality of religious life reported in the visitation reports, and the preamble to the legislation refers to numbers rather than income. Adopting a financial criterion was most likely determined pragmatically; the Valor Ecclesiasticus returns being both more reliable and more complete than those of Cromwell's visitors.[citation needed]
The smaller houses identified for suppression were then visited during 1536 by a further set of local commissions, one for each county, charged with creating an inventory of assets and valuables, and empowered to obtain prompt co-operation from monastic superiors by the allocation to them of pensions and cash gratuities. It was envisaged that some houses might offer immediate surrender, but in practice few did; consequently, a two-stage procedure was applied, the commissions reporting back to Cromwell for a decision as to whether to proceed with dissolution. In a number of instances these commissioners supported the continuation of a house where they found no serious current cause for concern; arguments that Cromwell, as vicegerent, appears often to have accepted. Around 80 houses were exempted, mostly offering a substantial fine. Where dissolution was determined on, a second visit would affect the arrangements for closure of the house, disposal of its assets and endowments and provisions for the future of the members of the house; otherwise, the second visit would collect the agreed fine. In general, the suppression commissioners were less inclined to report serious faults in monastic observance within the smaller houses than the visiting commissioners had been, although this may have been coloured by an awareness that monks and nuns with a bad reputation would be more difficult to place elsewhere. The 1536 Act established that, whatever the claims of founders or patrons, the property of the dissolved smaller houses reverted to the Crown; and Cromwell established a new government agency, the Court of Augmentations, to manage it. However, although the property rights of lay founders and patrons were legally extinguished, the incomes of lay holders of monastic offices, pensions and annuities were generally preserved, as were the rights of tenants of monastic lands. Ordinary monks and nuns were given the choice of secularisation (with a cash gratuity but no pension), or of transfer to a continuing larger house of the same order. The majority of those then remaining chose to continue in the religious life; in some areas, the premises of a suppressed religious house was recycled into a new foundation to accommodate them, and in general, rehousing those seeking a transfer proved much more difficult and time-consuming than appears to have been anticipated. Two houses, Norton Priory in Cheshire and Hexham Abbey in Northumberland, attempted to resist the commissioners by force, actions which Henry interpreted as treason, resulting in his writing personally to demand the summary brutal punishment of those responsible. The prior and canons of Norton were imprisoned for several months and were fortunate to escape with their lives; the canons of Hexham, who made the further mistake of becoming involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace, were executed.
Initial round of suppressions
The first round of suppressions initially aroused considerable popular discontent, especially in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire where they contributed to the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, an event which led to Henry increasingly associating monasticism with betrayal, as some of the spared religious houses in the north of England (more or less willingly) sided with the rebels, while former monks resumed religious life in several of the suppressed houses. Clauses within the Treasons Act 1534 provided that the property of those convicted of treason would automatically revert to the Crown, clauses that Cromwell had presciently drafted with the intention of effecting the dissolution of religious houses whose heads were so convicted, arguing that the superior of the house (abbot, abbess, prior or prioress) was the legal "owner" of all its monastic property. The wording of the First Suppression Act had been clear that reform, not outright abolition of monastic life, was being presented to the public as the objective of the legislative policy; and there has been continuing academic debate as to whether a universal dissolution was nevertheless being covertly prepared for at this point.
The predominant academic opinion is that the extensive care taken to provide for monks and nuns from the suppressed houses to transfer to continuing houses if they wished, demonstrates that monastic reform was still, at least in the mind of the King, the guiding principle; but that further large-scale action against substandard richer monasteries was always envisaged. By definition, the selection of poorer houses for dissolution in the First Act minimised the potential release of funds to other purposes; and once pensions had been committed to former superiors, cash rewards paid to those wishing to leave the religious life, and appropriate funding allocated for refounded houses receiving transferred monks and nuns, it is unlikely that there was much if any profit at this stage other than from the fines levied on exempted houses. Nevertheless, there was during most of 1537 (possibly conditioned by concern not to re-ignite rebellious impulses) a distinct standstill in official action towards any further round of dissolutions. Episcopal visitations were renewed, monasteries adapted their internal discipline in accordance with Cromwell's injunctions, and many houses undertook overdue programmes of repair and reconstruction.[citation needed]
The remaining monasteries required funds, especially those facing a new need to pay fines for exemption. During 1537 and 1538, there was a large increase in monastic lands and endowments being leased out; and in lay notables being offered fee-paying offices and annuities in return for cash and favours. By establishing additional long-term liabilities, these actions diminished the eventual net return to the Crown from each house's endowments, but they were not officially discouraged; indeed, Cromwell obtained and solicited many such fees in his own personal favour. Crucially, having created the precedent that tenants and lay recipients of monastic incomes might expect to have their interests recognised by the Court of Augmentations following dissolution, the government's apparent acquiescence to the granting of additional such rights and fees helped establish a predisposition towards dissolution amongst local notables and landed interests. At the same time however, and especially once the loss of income from shrines and pilgrimages was taken into account, the long-term financial sustainability of many of the remaining houses was increasingly in question.[citation needed]
Although Henry continued in public to maintain that his sole objective was monastic reform, it became increasingly clear, from around the end of 1537, that official policy was now envisaging the general extinction of monasticism in England and Wales; but that this extinction was now expected to be achieved through individual applications from superiors for voluntary surrender rather than through a systematic statutory dissolution. One major Abbey whose monks had been implicated in the Pilgrimage of Grace was that of Furness in Lancashire; the abbot, fearful of a treason charge, petitioned to be allowed to make a voluntary surrender of his house, which Cromwell happily approved. From then on, all dissolutions that were not a consequence of convictions for treason were legally "voluntary" – a principle that was taken a stage further with the voluntary surrender of Lewes priory in November 1537 when, as at Furness, the monks and were not accorded the option of transfer to another house, but with the additional motivating consideration that this time (and on all future occasions) ordinary monks were offered life pensions if they co-operated. This created a pairing of positive and negative incentives in favour of further dissolution: Abbots and priors came under pressure from their communities to petition for voluntary surrender if they could obtain favourable terms for pensions; they also knew that if they refused to surrender, they might suffer the penalty for treason and their religious house would be dissolved anyway. Where the King had been able to establish himself as founder, he exploited his position to place compliant monks and nuns as the head of the house while non-royal patrons and founders also tended to press superiors for an early surrender, hoping thereby to get preferential treatment in the disposal of monastic rights and properties. From the beginning of 1538, Cromwell targeted the houses that he knew to be wavering in their resolve to continue, cajoling and bullying their superiors to apply for surrender. Nevertheless, the public stance of the government was that the better-run houses could still expect to survive, and Cromwell dispatched a circular letter in March 1538 condemning false rumours of a general policy of dissolution while also warning superiors against asset-stripping or concealment of valuables, which could be construed as treasonable action.
Second round of dissolutions
As 1538 proceeded, applications for surrender flooded in. Cromwell appointed a local commissioner in each case to ensure rapid compliance with the King's wishes, to supervise the orderly sale of monastic goods and buildings, to dispose of monastic endowments, and to ensure that the former monks and nuns were provided with pensions, cash gratuities and clothing. The second time round, the process proved to be much quicker and easier. Existing tenants would have their tenancies continued, and lay office holders would continue to receive their incomes and fees (even though they now had no duties or obligations). Monks or nuns who were aged, handicapped or infirm were marked out for more generous pensions, and care was taken throughout that there should be nobody cast out of their place unprovided for (who might otherwise have increased the burden of charity for local parishes). In a few instances, even monastic servants were provided with a year's wages on discharge.[citation needed]
The endowments of the monasteries landed property and appropriated parish
Pensions granted to nuns were notably less generous, averaging around £3 per annum. During Henry's reign, former nuns, like monks, continued to be forbidden to marry, therefore it is more possible that genuine hardship resulted, especially as former nuns had little access to opportunities for gainful employment. Where nuns came from well-born families, as many did, they seem commonly to have returned to live with their relatives. Otherwise, there were a number of instances where former nuns of a house clubbed together in a shared household. Moreover, there were no retrospective pensions for those monks or nuns who had already sought secularisation following the 1535 visitation, nor for those members of the smaller houses dissolved in 1536 and 1537 who had not then remained in the religious life, nor for those houses dissolved before 1538 due to the conviction for treason of their superior, and no friars were pensioned.[citation needed]
Once it had become clear that dissolution was now to be the general expectation, the future of the ten monastic cathedrals came into question. For two of these, Bath and Coventry, there was a second secular cathedral church in the same diocese, and both surrendered in 1539; but the other eight would necessarily need to continue in some form. It remained to determine what that form might be. A possible model was presented by the collegiate church of Stoke-by-Clare, Suffolk, where, in 1535 the evangelically minded Dean, Matthew Parker, had recast the college statutes away from the saying of chantry masses and towards preaching, observance of the office, and children's education. [18]
In May 1538, the monastic cathedral community of
The Lord Chancellor, Thomas Audley, proposed Colchester and St Osyth's Priory as a possible future college. Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk and Lord Treasurer proposed Thetford Priory, making extensive preparations to adopt statutes similar to those from Stoke-by-Clare, and expending substantial sums into moving shrines, relics and architectural fittings from the dissolved Castle Acre Priory into Thetford priory church. Cromwell himself proposed Little Walsingham (once purged of its "superstitious" shrine), and Hugh Latimer, the evangelical bishop of Worcester, wrote to Cromwell in 1538 to plead for the continuation of Great Malvern Priory, and of "two or three in every shire of such remedy".[19] By early 1539, the continuation of a selected group of great monasteries as collegiate refoundation had become an established expectation; and when the Second Suppression Act was presented to Parliament in May 1539, it was accompanied by an Act giving the King authority to establish new bishoprics and collegiate cathedral foundations from existing monastic houses. But while the principle had been established, the numbers of successor colleges and cathedrals remained unspecified.[citation needed]
King Henry's enthusiasm for creating new bishoprics was second to his passion for building fortifications. When an apparent alliance of France and the Empire against England was agreed at Toledo in January 1539, this precipitated a major invasion scare. Even though, by midsummer, the immediate danger had passed, Henry still demanded from Cromwell unprecedented sums for the coastal defence works from St Michael's Mount to Lowestoft; and the scale of the proposed new foundations was drastically cut back.[19] In the end, six abbeys were raised to be cathedrals of new dioceses; and only a further two major abbeys, Burton-on-Trent and Thornton, were re-founded as non-cathedral colleges. To the intense displeasure of Thomas Howard, Thetford was not spared, and was amongst the last houses to be dissolved in February 1540, while the Duke was out of the country on a hastily arranged embassy to France. [20]
Even late in 1538, Cromwell himself appears to have envisaged that a select group of nunneries might be allowed to continue in the religious life, where they were able to demonstrate both a high quality of regular observance and a commitment to the principles of religious reform. One such was Godstow Abbey near Oxford, whose abbess, Lady Katherine Bulkeley, was one of three whom Cromwell had, in 1535, personally promoted to be elected to the headship of richer nunneries. Godstow was invaded by Dr John London, Cromwell's commissioner, in October 1538, demanding the surrender of the abbey; but following a direct appeal to Cromwell himself, the house was assured that it could continue. In response, Lady Katherine assured Cromwell that "there is neither pope nor purgatory, image nor pilgrimage nor praying to dead saints used or regarded amongst us".[21] Godstow Abbey was providing highly regarded boarding and schooling for girls of notable families; and this was the case for several other nunneries amongst the houses still standing, a factor which may have accounted for their surviving so long. Diarmaid MacCulloch further suggests that "customary male cowardice" was also a factor in the reluctance of the government to confront the heads of female religious houses.[22] But the stay of execution for Godstow Abbey lasted only just over a year: the abbey was suppressed in November 1539 along with all other nunnery survivors, as Henry was determined that none should continue. [23]
Later dissolutions
None of this process of legislation and visitation had applied to the houses of the friars. At the beginning of the 14th century there had been around 5,000 friars in England, occupying extensive complexes in all towns of any size. There were still around 200 friaries in England at the dissolution. But, except for the Observant Franciscans, by the 16th century the friars' income from donations had collapsed, their numbers had shrunk to less than 1,000 and their conventual buildings were often ruinous or leased out commercially, as too were their enclosed vegetable gardens. No longer self-sufficient in food and with their cloistered spaces invaded by secular tenants, almost all friars, in contravention of their rules, were now living in rented lodgings outside their friaries, and meeting for divine service in the friary church. Many friars now supported themselves through paid employment and held personal property.[citation needed]
By early 1538, suppression of the friaries was widely being anticipated; in some houses all friars save the prior had already left, and realisable assets (standing timber, chalices, vestments) were being sold off. Cromwell deputed Richard Yngworth, suffragan Bishop of Dover and former Provincial of the Dominicans, to obtain the friars' surrender, which he achieved rapidly by drafting new injunctions that enforced each order's rules and required friars to resume a strict conventual life within their walls. In effect, failure to accede to the king's wish for voluntary surrender would result, for most, in enforced homelessness and starvation. Once surrender had been accepted, and formally witnessed, Yngworth reported briefly to Cromwell on his actions, noting, for each friary, who was the current tenant of the gardens, what was the general state of the friary buildings, and whether the friary church had valuable lead on roofs and gutters. Mostly he had found poverty, derelict buildings, and leased-out gardens as the only income-bearing asset.[24]
Yngworth had no authority to dispose of lands and property and could not negotiate pensions; so the friars appear simply to have been released from their vows and dismissed with a gratuity of around 40 shillings each, which Yngworth took from whatever cash resources were in hand. He listed by name the friars remaining in each house at surrender so that Cromwell could provide them with capacities, legal permission to pursue a career as a secular priest. Furthermore, Yngworth had no discretion to maintain use of the friary churches, even though many had continued to attract congregations for preaching and worship; and these mostly were disposed of rapidly by the Court of Augmentations. Of all the friary churches in England and Wales, only
In April 1539, Parliament passed a new law retrospectively legalising acts of voluntary surrender and assuring tenants of their continued rights, but by then the vast majority of monasteries in England and Wales had already been dissolved or marked out for a future as a collegiate foundation. Some still resisted, and that autumn the abbots of Colchester, Glastonbury, and Reading were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, their houses being dissolved and their monks, on these occasions, receiving a basic pension of £4 per year.[citation needed]
St Benet's Abbey in Norfolk was the only abbey in England which escaped formal dissolution. As the last abbot had been appointed to the see of Norwich, the abbey endowments were transferred alongside him directly into those of the bishops. The last two abbeys to be dissolved were Shap Abbey, in January 1540, and Waltham Abbey, on 23 March 1540, and several priories also survived into 1540, including Bolton Priory in Yorkshire (dissolved 29 January 1540) and Thetford Priory in Norfolk (dissolved 16 February 1540). It was not until April 1540 that the cathedral priories of Canterbury and Rochester were transformed into secular cathedral chapters.[citation needed]
Effects on public life
The surrender of monastic endowments was recognised automatically as terminating all regular religious observance by its members, except in the case of a few communities, such as Syon, who went into exile. There are several recorded instances where groups of former members of a house set up residence together, but no cases where an entire community did so; and there is no indication that any such groups continued to pray the Divine Office. The dissolution Acts were concerned solely with the disposal of endowed property, at no point do they explicitly forbid the continuance of a regular life. However, given Henry's attitude to those religious who resumed their houses during the Pilgrimage of Grace, it would have been most unwise of any former community of monks or nuns within his dominions to have maintained covert monastic observance.[citation needed]
The local commissioners were instructed to ensure that, where portions of abbey churches were also used by local parishes or congregations, this use should continue. Accordingly, parts of
There was no general policy of destruction, except in Lincolnshire where the local government agent was so determined that the monasteries should never be restored that he razed as many as he could to the ground. More often, the buildings have simply suffered from unroofing and neglect, or by quarrying.[25]
Once the new and re-founded cathedrals and other endowments had been provided for, the Crown became richer to the extent of around £150,000 (equivalent to £102,817,100 in 2021),[26] per year, although around £50,000 (equivalent to £34,272,400 in 2021)[26] of this was initially committed to fund monastic pensions. Cromwell had intended that the bulk of this wealth should serve as regular income of government. However, after Cromwell's fall in 1540, Henry needed money quickly to fund his military ambitions in France and Scotland; and so monastic property was sold off, representing by 1547 an annual value of £90,000 (equivalent to £55,802,000 in 2021).[26] Lands and endowments were not offered for sale, let alone auctioned; instead, the government responded to applications for purchase, of which had indeed been a continual flood ever since the process of dissolution got under way. Many applicants had been founders or patrons of the relevant houses and could expect to be successful subject to paying the standard market rate of twenty years' income. Purchasers were predominantly leading nobles, local magnates and gentry; with no discernible tendency in terms of conservative or reformed religion, other than a determination to maintain and extend their family's position and local status. The landed property of the former monasteries included large numbers of manorial estates, each carrying the right and duty to hold a court for tenants and others. Acquiring such feudal rights was regarded as essential to establish a family in the status and dignity of the late medieval gentry; but for a long period, freehold manorial estates had been very rare in the market; and families of all kinds seized on the opportunity now offered to entrench their position in the social scale. Nothing would subsequently induce them to surrender their new acquisitions. The Court of Augmentations retained lands and spiritual income sufficient to meet its continuing obligations to pay annual pensions; but as pensioners died off, or as pensions were extinguished when their holders accepted a royal appointment of higher value, then surplus property became available each year for further disposal. The last surviving monks continued to draw their pensions into the reign of James I (1603–1625), more than 60 years after the dissolution's end.[citation needed]
The dissolution of the monasteries impinged relatively little on English parish church activity. Parishes that had formerly paid their tithes to support a religious house now paid them to a lay impropriator, but rectors, vicars and other incumbents remained in place, their incomes unaffected and their duties unchanged. Congregations that had shared monastic churches for worship continued to do so; the former monastic parts now walled off and derelict. Most parish churches had been endowed with
Ireland
The dissolutions in Ireland followed a very different course from those in England and Wales. There were around 400 religious houses in Ireland in 1530—many more, relative to population and material wealth, than in England and Wales. In marked distinction to the situation in England, in Ireland the houses of friars had flourished in the 15th century, attracting popular support and
. Outside this area, he could only proceed by tactical agreement with clan chiefs and local lords.Nevertheless, Henry was determined to carry through a policy of dissolution in Ireland—and in 1537 introduced legislation into the Irish Parliament to legalise the closure of monasteries. The process faced considerable opposition, and only sixteen houses were suppressed. Henry remained resolute however, and from 1541 as part of the Tudor conquest of Ireland he continued to press for the area of successful dissolution to be extended. For the most part, this involved making deals with local lords, under which monastic property was granted away in exchange for allegiance to the new Irish Crown; and consequently, Henry acquired little if any of the wealth of the Irish houses.
By the time of Henry's death (1547) around half of the Irish houses had been suppressed; but many continued to resist dissolution until well into the reign of Elizabeth I, and some houses in the West of Ireland remained active until the early 17th century. In 1649, Oliver Cromwell led a Parliamentary army to conquer Ireland, and systematically sought out and destroyed former monastic houses. Subsequently, however, sympathetic landowners housed monks or friars close to several ruined religious houses, allowing them a continued covert existence during the 17th and 18th centuries, subject to the dangers of discovery and legal ejection or imprisonment.
Consequences
Social and economic
The abbeys of England, Wales and Ireland had been among the greatest landowners and the largest institutions in the kingdoms, although by the early 16th century, religious donors increasingly tended to favour parish churches, collegiate churches, university colleges and grammar schools, and these were now the predominant centres for learning and the arts. Nevertheless, and particularly in areas far from London, the abbeys, convents and priories were centres of hospitality and learning, and everywhere they remained a main source of charity for the old and infirm. The removal of over eight hundred such institutions left great gaps in the social fabric.[citation needed]
In addition, about a quarter of net monastic wealth on average consisted of "spiritual" income arising where the religious house held the
On the dissolution these spiritual income streams were sold off on the same basis as landed endowments, creating a new class of lay impropriators, who thereby became entitled to the patronage of the living together with the income from tithes and glebe lands; albeit that they also as lay rectors became liable to maintain the fabric of the parish chancel. The existing incumbent rectors and vicars serving parish churches formerly the property of the monasteries continued in post, their incomes unaffected. However, in those of the canons' parish churches and chapels of ease which had become unbeneficed, the lay rector as patron was additionally obliged to establish a stipend for a perpetual curate. [citation needed]
It is unlikely that the monastic system could have been broken simply by royal action had there not been the overwhelming bait of enhanced status for gentry large and small, and the convictions of the small but determined Protestant faction. Anti-clericalism was a familiar feature of late medieval Europe, producing its own strain of satiric literature that was aimed at a literate middle class.[30]
Arts and culture
Along with the destruction of the monasteries, some of them many hundreds of years old, the related destruction of the monastic libraries was perhaps the greatest cultural loss caused by the English Reformation. Worcester Priory (now Worcester Cathedral) had 600 books at the time of the dissolution. Only six of them are known to have survived intact to the present day.[31] At the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York, a library of 646 volumes was destroyed, leaving only three known survivors. Some books were destroyed for their precious bindings, others were sold off by the cartload. The antiquarian John Leland was commissioned by the King to rescue items of particular interest (especially manuscript sources of Old English history),[32] and other collections were made by private individuals, notably Matthew Parker. Nevertheless, much was lost, especially manuscript books of English church music, none of which had then been printed.[citation needed]
A great nombre of them whych purchased those supertycyous mansyons, resrved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes, some to scoure candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and soapsellers.
— John Bale, 1549
Health and education
The
Monasteries had also supplied free food and alms for the poor and destitute, and it has been argued that the removal of this and other charitable resources, amounting to about 5 per cent of net monastic income, was one of the factors in the creation of the army of "sturdy beggars" that plagued late Tudor England, causing the social instability that led to the Edwardian and Elizabethan Poor Laws. This argument has been disputed, for example, by G. W. O. Woodward, who summarises:
No great host of beggars was suddenly thrown on the roads for monastic charity had had only marginal significance and, even had the abbeys been allowed to remain, could scarcely have coped with the problems of unemployment and poverty created by the population and inflationary pressures of the middle and latter parts of the sixteenth century.[34]
Monasteries had necessarily undertaken schooling for their novice members, which in the later medieval period had tended to extend to cover choristers and sometimes other younger scholars; all this educational resource was lost with their dissolution. By contrast, where monasteries had provided grammar schools for older scholars, these were commonly refounded with enhanced endowments; some by royal command in connection with the newly re-established cathedral churches, others by private initiative. Monastic orders had maintained, for the education of their members, six colleges at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge, of which five survived as refoundations. Hospitals too were frequently to be re-endowed by private benefactors; and many new almshouses and charities were to be founded by the Elizabethan gentry and professional classes (London Charterhouse/Charterhouse School being an example which still survives). Nevertheless, it has been estimated that only in 1580 did overall levels of charitable giving in England return to those before the dissolution. On the eve of the overthrow, the various monasteries owned approximately 2,000,000 acres (8,100 km2), over 16 percent of England, with tens of thousands of tenant farmers working those lands, some of whom had family ties to a particular monastery going back many generations.[citation needed]
Religion
It has been argued[
In the medieval church, there had been no
In the knowledge that alternative arrangements for sponsorship and title would now need to be made, the dissolution legislation provided that the lay and ecclesiastical successors of the monks in former monastic endowments could in the future provide valid title for ordinands. However, these new arrangements appear to have taken a considerable period to gain general acceptance, and the circumstances of the church in the late 1530s may not have encouraged candidates to come forward. Consequently, and for 20 years afterwards until the succession of Elizabeth I, the number of ordinands in every diocese in England and Wales fell drastically below the numbers required to replace the mortality of existing incumbents. At the same time, the restrictions on 'pluralism' introduced through legislation in 1529 prevented the accumulation of multiple benefices by individual clergy, and accordingly by 1559 some 10 per cent of benefices were vacant and the former reserve army of Mass priests had largely been absorbed into the ranks of beneficed clergy. Monastic successors tended thereafter to prefer to sponsor university graduates as candidates for the priesthood; and, although the government signally failed to respond to the consequent need for expanded educational provision, individual benefactors stepped into the breach, with the refoundation as university colleges of five out of the six former monastic colleges of Oxford and Cambridge; while Jesus College, Oxford and Emmanuel College, Cambridge were newly founded with the express purpose of educating a Protestant parish clergy. Consequently, one unintended long-term consequence of the dissolution was the transformation of the parish clergy in England and Wales into an educated professional class of secure beneficed incumbents of distinctly higher social standing; one that furthermore, through intermarriage of one another's children, became substantially self-perpetuating.[citation needed]
Even while it had been stated that King's increased riches would make it possible to build or better fund religious, philanthropic, and educational institutions, only around 15% of the entire monastic money was really used for these reasons in actual reality. This included refounding eight out of nine previous monastic cathedrals (Coventry being the exception), as well as six completely new bishoprics (Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford, Peterborough, Westminster) with its associated cathedrals, chapters, choirs, and grammar schools; refounding monastic institutions at Brecon, Thornton, and Burton on Trent as secular colleges; and endowing five Regius Professorships at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the endowment of the colleges of
Politics
The dissolution and destruction of the monasteries and shrines was very unpopular in many areas. In the north of England, centering on Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, the suppression of the monasteries led to a popular rising, the Pilgrimage of Grace, that threatened the Crown for some weeks. In 1536, there were major, popular uprisings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and a further rising in Norfolk the following year. James Clark claims in The Dissolution of the Monasteries:
The Lincolnshire rising lasted less than a week but before its end their cause was carried across the county's northern border. Now, there were copycat musterings passing up through Yorkshire as far as Northumberland, and to the west as far as the gateway into Wales.[35]
There were rumors that the King would tax livestock and calves in addition to stripping parish churches. The rebels demanded that Cromwell be removed and that the monasteries not be dissolved. Henry used promises to calm the unrest before swiftly beheading some of the leaders.[citation needed]
When Henry VIII's Catholic daughter,
See also
- Cestui que
- Charter of Liberties
- Compendium Competorum
- Dissolution (Sansom novel)
- List of monasteries dissolved by Henry VIII of England
- Little Jack Horner, a children's rhyme allegedly based on the episode.
- Religion in the United Kingdom
References
- ^ a b Bernard 2011, p. 390.
- ^ Dickens 1989, p. 175.
- ^ Dickens 1989, p. 75.
- ^ Keen 1999.
- ^ Counter-Reformation at the Encyclopædia Britannica
- ^ a b Knowles 1959, p. 150.
- ^ Marshall 2017, pp. 29–30.
- ^ "Six Articles". Oxford Reference. Retrieved 19 April 2022.
- ^ Marshall 2017.
- ^ Scarisbrick 1968, p. 337.
- ^ Dickens 1989, p. 79.
- ^ Dickens 1989, p. 74.
- ^ Dickens 1989, p. 77.
- ^ Lutherus, Martinus (1521). On Monastic Vows – De votis monasticis. Melchior Lotter d.J. / World Digital Library. Retrieved 1 March 2014.
- ^ Andersson & Jörälv 2003.
- ^ Cummings, Thomas (17 October 2016). "Erasmus and the Second Vatican Council". Church Life Journal. Retrieved 5 May 2022.
- ^ Woodward 1974, p. 19.
- ^ MacCulloch 2018, p. 489.
- ^ a b MacCulloch 2018, p. 490.
- ^ MacCulloch 2018, p. 511.
- ^ Erler 2013, pp. 60–72.
- ^ MacCulloch 2018, p. 463.
- ^ MacCulloch 2018, p. 491.
- ^ a b Salter 2010
- ^ Woodward 1974, p. 23.
- ^ a b c UK Retail Price Index inflation figures are based on data from Clark, Gregory (2017). "The Annual RPI and Average Earnings for Britain, 1209 to Present (New Series)". MeasuringWorth. Retrieved 11 June 2022.
- ^ Knowles 1955, p. 290.
- ^ Knowles 1955, p. 291.
- ^ Knowles 1955, p. 292.
- Chaucer's Pardoner and other Chaucerian anticlerical satire, see Peter, John (1956). Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- ^ Murray 2009, p. 94.
- ^ Carley 1997.
- ^ Clark 2021, pp. 440–441.
- ^ Woodward 1974, p. 24.
- ^ Clark 2021, pp. 284–285.
- ^ Bucholz & Key 2009, pp. 110–111.
Bibliography
- Andersson, Erika; Jörälv, Lennart (2003). Reliker och mirakel. Den heliga Birgitta och Vadstena (in Swedish). Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand.
- Clark, James G. (2021). The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History. London. OCLC 1273001858.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - Baskerville, Geoffrey (1937). English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
- Bernard, G. W. (October 2011). "The Dissolution of the Monasteries". History. 96 (324): 390–409. .
- Bradshaw, Brendan (1974). The Dissolution of the Religious Orders in Ireland under Henry VIII. London: Cambridge University Press.
- Bucholz, R. O.; Key, N. (2009). Early Modern England 1485–1714: a narrative history (2nd ed.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-6275-3.
- Carley, James P. (December 1997). "Marks in Books and the Libraries of Henry VIII". The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. 91 (4): 583–606. S2CID 164047873.
- Cornwall, J.C.K. (1988). Wealth and Society in Early Sixteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Dickens, A. G. (1989). The English Reformation (2nd ed.). London: B. T. Batsford.
- ISBN 0-300-06076-9.
- Erler, Mary.C. (2013). Reading and Writing During the Dissolution. Cambridge University Press.
- Gasquet, F. A. (1925). Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (8th ed.). London.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Haigh, Christopher (1969). The Last Days of the Lancashire Monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace. Manchester: Manchester University Press for Chetham Society.
- Keen, Laurence (1999). Studies in the Early History of Shaftesbury Abbey. Dorchester: Dorset County Council. ISBN 9780852168875.
- Knowles, David (1955). The Religious Orders in England. Vol. II. Cambridge University Press.
- Knowles, David (1959). The Religious Orders in England. Vol. III. Cambridge University Press.
- MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2018). Thomas Cromwell: A Life. Allen Lane. ISBN 9781846144295.
- Marshall, Peter (2017). Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation. New Haven: Yale University Press. OCLC 961308356.
- Murray, Stuart (2009). The Library: An Illustrated History. Skyhorse Publishing.
- Salter, M. (2010). Medieval English Friaries. Malvern: Folly Publications. ISBN 978-1-871731-87-3.
- Savine, Alexander (1909). English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolution. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
- Scarisbrick, J. J. (1968). Henry VIII. University of California Press.
- White, Newport B. (1943). Extents of Irish Monastic possessions 1540–1. Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission. Retrieved 19 May 2017.
- Willmott, Hugh (2020). The Dissolution of the Monasteries in England and Wales. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing.
- Woodward, G.W.O. (1974). The Dissolution of the Monasteries. London: Pitkin Pictorials Ltd. Concentrates on England and Wales.
- Youings, J. (1971). The Dissolution of the Monasteries. London: Allen and Unwin.
External links
- The Dissolution and Westminster Abbey (2007) Barbara Harvey; a detailed survey of the dissolution process at Westminster, in the context of overall government policy.
- Dissolution of the Monasteries on In Our Time at the BBC
- Dissolution of the Monasteries
- Dissolution of the Monasteries and historical records of some of the abbeys dissolved
- BBC Timeline: Tudors
- BBC History: English Reformation
- Catholic Encyclopedia: Suppression of English Monasteries
- Dissolution of the monasteries in England 1536–1541: on website The History Notes
- The Protestant Reformation in England by William Cobbett (1763–1835), Letter VI. Confiscation of the Monasteries.