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DESTRUCTION OF THE MONASTERIES

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the monastery were supplied with priests' dress, if they were men, or secular dresses, if women. There seem to have been a considerable number who availed themselves of this permission. We find Legh writing to ask Cromwell :-" Also I desire you to send me word what shall be done with these religious persons, which, kneeling on their knees, holding up their hands, instantly with humble petition desire of God, the King, and you, to be dismissed from their religion, saying they live in it contrary to God's law and their conscience."1 Again, Margaret Vernon, an abbess, writes to ask "what way shall be best for me to take, seeing there shall be none left here but myself and this poor maiden."2 When the monastery was thus cleared of its unwilling inhabitants, all the rest were shut up. Such were the injunctions given; there seems to have been some little difference in practice, for we find, among others, Legh complaining that "Mr. Doctor Leyton hath not done the same in places where he hath been, but licensed the heads and masters to go abroad, which I suppose maketh the brethren to grudge the more." This restriction was no doubt very irksome, as was also the closing up of all private entrances to the monasteries, one entrance alone being allowed. When they were thus secured in their houses, evidence was taken of all sorts, inventories of their property made, their accounts and leases carefully examined, and their morality sifted. Evidence of a very poor kind was accepted, and informers were no doubt plentiful. Nor was this all,—the more zealous visitors at all events set to work with a preconceived notion of the guilt of the monks, and as experience strengthened this belief, no denial would avail. At the College of Newark, in Leicester, the monks would not confess-"The abbess here is confederate, we suppose, and nothing will confess. The abbot is an honest man and doth very well, but he hath here the most obstinate and factious canons that ever I knew." And so Dr. Leyton says he will bring against them specific charges, which he confesses he had never heard brought against any of them, but confession of which he hopes to wring from them. If after such examination much was found amiss, whether gross immorality or gross mismanagement, which seems to have been very common, the visitors had power to compel surrender at once. The mismanagement is curious, the living being often beyond the income of the monastery, and the lands being let on

1 Sup. Mon. xxxvi.

2 Sup. Mon., Letter xxii.

3 Thus in Kent the Commissioners report, "We have been at the monasteries of Laydon, Dover and Folkestone, and have taken a clear surrender of every of the same monasteries."

ridiculous leases. In the Charterhouse, for instance, the yearly revenue of the house is put at £642, Os. 4d., and the provision for living as amounting to £658, 7s. 4d. “I learn here," says the visitor, "that heretofore, when all victual was at a convenient price, and also when they were fewer persons in number than they now be, the proctor hath accounted for a thousand pounds a year, their rental being but as above, which costly fare, buildings and others, were then borne by the benevolence and charity of the city of London." He also complains that "to the cloistered door there are no less than fourand-twenty keys in four-and-twenty persons' hands; also to the buttery door there be twelve sundry keys in twelve men's hands, wherein seemeth to be small husbandry." The causes on which they insisted on surrenders were sometimes trivial enough. There is an excellent letter from the Abbot of Faversham, urging that his age was no valid reason for surrendering his monastery.

By February 1536 sufficient evidence was collected, and many surrenders and dissolutions already effected. Here and there abbeys were well reported of, though scarcely any by either Legh or Leyton. Thus the Abbot and convent of Ramsay was praised. George Giffard begs that Woolstrope Abbey may be unsuppressed. The nuns of Polesworth are declared pure, and Latimer entreats for the Priory of Great Malvern. Enough, however, had been collected to show that there was really a vast amount of wickedness in the monasteries, and the King and Parliament being alike interested in the matter, a statute was passed declaring the dissolution of all monasteries under two hundred a year rental, excepting any which the King might except; their property, saving the vested rights of leaseholders, was the King's absolutely. The monks who still wished to keep their orders were drafted into the larger abbeys. There was at once a scramble for the prey. Abbots clamoured to be placed in the list of exceptions. Founders, or founders' kin, begged for their foundations, or that the temporality should be returned to them, or that at least they should have the right of pre-emption. Needy courtiers begged for grants of the confiscated land. Sir Thomas Elliot, a scholar and a diplomatist, begs Cromwell in cringing terms " so to bring me into the King's most noble remembrance, that of his most bounteous liberality it may like his highness to reward me with some convenient portion of the suppressed lands." Humphrey Stafford writes, "And if it would please your mastership to be so good master unto me as to help me to Warspryng Priory, I were and will be whilst I live your bedeman."

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But Cromwell saw before him a still larger prey. It did not suit him to proceed so arbitrarily with the larger foundations as he had done with the smaller ones; but their fate was sealed. In the course of the next few years the larger number of them were frightened or cajoled into voluntary surrender. If voluntary surrender seemed impossible, there was nearly always some cause found to give colour to the deposition of the abbot, and his place was occupied by some one ready to please the King by immediate surrender. The monks of the Charterhouse had been particularly obnoxious to the Crown. Thomas Bedyll, one of the commissioners, after congratulating Cromwell on the death of most of them, begs him to have pity on the Lord Prior of the same," which is as honest a man as ever was in that habit. . . and now at last, at mine exhortation and instigation, constantly moved and finally persuaded his brethren to surrender their house, lands and goods into the King's hands, and to trust only to his mercy and grace. I beseech you, my Lord, that the said Prior may be so entreated by your help that he be not sorry and repent that he hath feared and followed your sore words and my gentle exhortation made unto him to surrender his said house." The Abbot of St. Alban's was a most obstinate patient: "In all communications and motions made concerning any surrender, he showeth himself so stiff that, as he saith, he would rather choose to beg his bread all the days of his life than consent to any surrender." Legh and Petre, the commissioners, ask, therefore, whether they shall go on with the process of deprivation, "for manifest dilapidation, making of shifts, etc., which done, the house will be in such debt, that we think no man will take the office of abbot here upon him, except any do it only for that purpose to surrender the same into the King's hands." When the surrenders were made, the houses were treated as at once belonging entirely to the Crown. The prior and the monks were pensioned, but the pensions were very small, and the clear profit to the Crown great. Thus the Abbey of St. Andrew's, Northampton, had an income of about four hundred a year; the prior's and subprior's pensions were left "till the Lord Privy Seal's pleasure was known therein." One of the monks, aged thirty-six, was given a small vicarage in Northampton, of the yearly income of seven pounds, which was in the gift of the abbey, and happened to be vacant. Four above the age of forty were given four pounds a year apiece: two about thirty, sixty-six shillings and eightpence each; and three younger than that, fifty-three and fourpence. Thirty-five pounds, therefore, out of the four hundred of income, covered ali the

PER. MON.

pensions except the prior's and sub-prior's. The property belonging to the abbeys was carefully looked into and made to produce its proper rent. At this same abbey of Northampton there was an instance of the absurd way in which it had been before managed. Their income had shrunk considerably, but not in this prior's time: "But surely his predecessors pleasured much in odoriferous savours, as it should seem by their converting the rents of their monastery, that were wont to be paid in corn and grain, into gilly-flowers and roses." All the wealth of the property, relics, jewels, etc., were carefully inventoried, and in large part sold, and the houses themselves stripped of their lead and bells and glass, and the very materials sold to the neighbouring gentry, the churches sometimes, but not often, being spared.1 In 1539 an Act was passed, not for dissolving monasteries-that had been done already—but for vesting their property in the King. The work was then virtually finished, and the Parliament, which had counted in its first session, beginning in April 1539, twenty abbots among its members, began its second session in April 1540 with none. Two or three abbots who remained obstinate, such as Beche of St. John's, Colchester, Coke of Reading, and Whiting of Glastonbury, were entangled in charges of treason and beheaded. While the Revolution was thus proceeding in all directions, and in all classes of society, the outward appearance of England appearance of did not change much. Visitors, both in Henry VII.'s reign and in Elizabeth's, mention the abundance of pasturage, the comparative paucity of agriculture, and the great quantity of open country stocked with game. "Agriculture is not practised in this island beyond what is required for the consumption of the people. . . . This negligence is, however, atoned for by an immense profusion of every comestible animal, such as stags, goats, fallowdeer, hares, rabbits, pigs, and an infinity of oxen, which have much larger horns than ours, which proves the mildness of the climate, as horns cannot bear excessive cold. Common fowls, pea-fowls, partridges, pheasants, and other small birds, abound here above measure. The roads were set deep between hedges, and Perlin tells us how there were steps up from the deep roads to the fields above through the hedges. The houses of the common people were mostly mud hovels, but we are told in Elizabeth's reign the people in them fared like kings. The thinness of the population was remarkable. The wars at home and abroad of the last century had made 1 See Scudamore's accounts in the Suppression of Monasteries. 2 Italian Relation.

Outward

England.

"2

...

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APPEARANCE OF ENGLAND

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great havoc among the people; disastrous sweeping diseases, bred probably in part by uncleanness, had still further thinned them. Such as there were dwelt in very scattered hamlets, one of the changes of the period being the rise of large villages and small towns. The decay of towns is one of the most frequent complaints met with in the Statute-Book; though this was partly caused, perhaps, by the general smallness of the population, and by unskilful legislation with regard to trade, it depended more upon the fact that the mercantile proprietors began to attract labourers around their own dwellings. The rules of the guilds and corporations were very oppressive, and workmen sought refuge from them in the villages. There is a striking Act in the twenty-fifth year of Henry VIII., which interdicts under penalties manufacture in hamlets and villages, "because persons inhabiting them both farmed lands and occupied the mysteries of cloth-making, weaving," etc. The efforts of the great towns to retain their monopolies were vigorous. There are many statutes restricting places where certain trades may be carried on. The whole system of trade was indeed one of restriction. Again and again were prices fixed; rules were made insisting upon the authorized examination and marking of goods to secure their purity. The number of apprentices was limited. The jealousy of foreigners was so great that in some of the national branches of trade no foreign apprentices were admitted.1 The frequent repetition of such statutes marks their futility; in fact here, too, change from the medieval to the modern state was being effected, and the primary laws of competition and of supply and demand were forcing themselves into notice.

But if other large cities decayed, London continually grew. Its wealth and splendour are admitted on all hands. "In one single street, named the Strand, leading to St. Paul's, there are fifty-two goldsmiths' shops, so rich and full of silver vessels, great and small, that in all the shops in Milan, Rome, Venice and Florence put together, I do not think there are to be found so many or of the magnificence to be seen in London." The streets were, it is true, built chiefly of timber, or at best of brick, and the paving was intrusted to the individual care of each householder; but the City abounded with every article of luxury as well as with the necessaries of life, while through it ran the clear, beautiful Thames, "in which it was truly a beautiful thing to behold one or two thousand tame swans

1 The pewterers, for instance.

2 Italian Relation.

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