Dissolution of the Monasteries

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The Dissolution of the Monasteries, referred to by Roman Catholic writers as the Suppression of the Monasteries, was the formal process during the English Reformation by which King Henry VIII confiscated the property of the monastic institutions in England, Wales and Ireland between 1538 and 1541. He was given the authority to do this by the Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in 1534, which made him Supreme Head of the Church of England.

Contents 1 Context 2 Process 3 Consequences 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Context

The Dissolution of the Monasteries did not take place in an isolated political context. Other movements against the jurisdiction of the Holy See had been underway for some time–most of them related to the Protestant Reformation in Continental Europe–but the religious changes in England were of a different nature than those being seen in places like Germany. Henry VIII's dispute with the Holy See was political, not theological.

The resulting changes initially retained many Catholic traditions in England's churches. Protestant innovations seen in the Ten Articles were largely reversed when Henry VIII expressed the church's continued orthodoxy with the Six Articles of 1539, which remained in effect until after his death. Cardinal Wolsey had obtained from the Pope a Papal Bull authorizing some limited reforms in the English Church as early as 1518.

Henry VIII's Church of England retained strong Catholic influences until the reign of his son and heir Edward VI. Protestant worship introduced during that time was largely influenced by two men during the reigns of both kings: Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, who served as Lord Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King's Person in the regency organization for Edward VI. Cranmer secretly married the niece of a Lutheran theologian of Nuremberg.

Under Henry VIII, acts allegedly reforming certain abusive practices in the Church were passed in November of 1529. They set caps on fees for probating wills and mortuary expenses for burial on hallowed ground, tightened regulations covering rights of sanctuary for felons and murderers, and reduced to four the number of church offices to be held by one man. These were less forms of "religious reformation" than they were ways of establishing royal jurisdiction.

Nevertheless, resistance among the pro-Roman ecclesiastics was stiff, and was supported by Reginald Pole. Henry VIII originally offered Pole the position of Archbishop of York or Bishop of Winchester if he would support his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Pole withheld his support and went into self-imposed exile to France and Italy in 1532, where he continued his studies in Padua and Paris.

[edit] Process

Henry had himself declared Supreme Head of the Church of England in February 1531. In April 1533 an Act in Restraint of Appeals eliminated the right of clergy to appeal to "foreign tribunals" (Rome) over the King's head in any spiritual or financial matter.

In 1534 Henry had Parliament authorize Thomas Cromwell, to "visit" all the monasteries (which included all abbeys, priories and convents), ostensibly to make sure their members were instructed in the new rules for their supervision by the King instead of the Pope, but actually to inventory their assets (see Valor Ecclesiasticus). A few months later, in January 1535 when the consternation at having a lay visitation instead of a bishop's had settled down, Cromwell's visitation authority was delegated to a commission of laymen. This phase is termed the "Visitation of the Monasteries."

In the summer of that year, the visitors started their work, and "preachers" and "railers" were sent to deliver sermons from the pulpits of the churches on three themes:

• The monks and nuns in the monasteries were sinful "hypocrites" and "sorcerers" who were living lives of luxury and engaging in every kind of sin;
• Those monks and nuns were sponging off the working people and giving nothing back and, thus, were a serious drain on England's economy;
• If the King received all the property of the monasteries, he would never again need taxes from the people.

Meanwhile, during the fall of 1535, the visiting commissioners were sending back to Cromwell written reports of all the scandalous doings they said they were discovering, sexual as well as financial. A law that Parliament enacted in early 1536, relying in large part on the reports of impropriety Cromwell had received, provided for the King to take all the monasteries with annual incomes of less than £200, and that was done: the smaller, less influential houses were emptied, their few inhabitants pensioned and their property confiscated. Monastic life had already been in decline. By 1536, the thirteen Cistercian houses in Wales had only 85 monks among them. Their reputation for misbehaviour was likely overstated, however.

These moves did not raise as much capital as had been expected, even after the king re-chartered some of the confiscated monasteries and confiscated them again. In April 1539 a new Parliament passed a law giving the King the rest of the monasteries in England. Some of the abbots resisted, and that autumn the abbots of Colchester, Glastonbury, and Reading were executed for treason. (The Carthusian priors of Beauvale, London, and Axholme, had been executed in 1535 for refusal to recognize Henry's Act of Supremacy.) St. Benet's Abbey in Norfolk was the only abbey in England which escaped dissolution.

The other abbots signed their abbeys over to the King. Some of the confiscated church buildings were destroyed by having the valuable lead removed from roofs and stone reused for secular buildings. Some of the smaller Benedictine houses were taken over as parish churches, and were even bought for the purpose by wealthy parishes. The tradition that there was widespread destruction and iconoclasm, that altars and windows were smashed, partly confuses the damage done in the 1530s with the greater damage wreaked by the Puritans in the next century. Relics were discarded and pilgrimages discouraged, however. Places like Glastonbury, Walsingham, Bury St Edmunds, Shaftesbury and Canterbury, which had thrived on the pilgrim trade, suffered setbacks.

Henry needed more money; so many of the abbeys now in his possession were resold to the new Tudor gentry, aligning them as a class more firmly to the new Protestant settlement.

[edit] Consequences

The abbeys of England, Wales and Ireland had been among the greatest landowners and the largest institutions in the kingdom. Particularly in areas far from London, the abbeys were among the principal centres of hospitality, learning, patronage of craftspeople and sources of charity and medical care. The removal of over eight hundred such institutions virtually overnight left many gaps.

It is unlikely that the monastic system could have been broken if there had not been a strong feeling of resentment against the church amongst at least part of the general population.

The related destruction of the monastic libraries was one of the greatest cultural losses caused by the English Reformation. Worcester Priory (now Worcester Cathedral) had 600 books at the time of the dissolution. Only six of them have survived intact to the present day. At the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York, a library of 646 volumes was destroyed, leaving only three surviving books. Some books were destroyed for their precious bindings, others were sold off by the cartload, including irreplaceable early English works. It is believed that many of the earliest Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were lost at this time.

“	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

Monastic hospitals were also lost, with serious consequences locally. Monasteries had also supplied charitable food and alms for the poor and destitute in hard times. The removal of this resource 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. In addition, monastic landlords were generally considered to be more lax and easy-going than the new aristocrats who replaced them, demanding higher rents and greater productivity from their tenants.

More generally, the suppression of the English monasteries and nunneries contributed as well to the overall decline in attention to contemplative spiritual practices in Protestant Europe in subsequent centuries, with the relatively rare exceptions of groups like the Society of Friends ("Quakers").

The destruction of the monastic institutions was unpopular in some 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. The demand for the restoration of some monasteries resurfaced later, in the West Country Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549.

Many of the dismantled monasteries and friaries were sold for nominal amounts (often to the local townspeople), and some of the lands the King gave to his supporters; there were also pensions to be paid to some of the dispossessed clerics. Many others continued to serve the parishes. Although the total value of the confiscated property has been calculated to have been £200,000 at the time, the actual amount of income King Henry received from it from 1536 through 1547 averaged only £37,000 per year, about one fifth of what the monks had derived from it.

In 1536 there were major popular risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and, a further rising in Norfolk the following year. Rumours were spread that the King was going to strip the parish churches too, and even tax cattle and sheep. The rebels called for an end to the dissolution of the monasteries, for the removal of Cromwell, and for Henry's daughter, and eldest child, the Catholic Mary to be named as successor in place of his younger son Edward. Henry defused the movement with promises, and then summarily executed some of the leaders.

[edit] See also

• The earlier dissolution of the Knights Templar
• List of monasteries dissolved by Henry VIII of England
• Little Jack Horner, a children's rhyme allegedly based on the incident.
• Religion in the United Kingdom

[edit] References

• G. Baskerville, English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries (1937)
• Brendan Bradshaw, The Dissolution of the Religious Orders in Ireland under Henry VIII (1974)
• Howard Colvin, The History of the King's Works
• J.C.K. Cornwall, Wealth and Society in Early Sixteenth-Century England (Cambridge 1988)
• A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation ((2nd ed. London 1989)
• Eamon Duffy (1992). The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580. Yale University Press ISBN 0-300-06076-9. An interpretation radically different from that contained in this article. Duffy maintains that Henry VIII's reformation was in many ways a radical Protestant reformation, that Mary I's attempt to restore Catholicism was a Counter-Reformation effort and that her form of Catholicism was considerably different from that which Henry VIII had swept away.
• F. A. Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (8th ed. London 1925)
• C Haigh, The Last Days of the Lancashire Monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace (1969)
• ——, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge 1975)
• David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, vol III (1959)
• H. F. M. Prescott (1952). The Man on a Donkey. A finely researched novel, set in the form of a chronicle, of Henry VIII's dissolution of monasteries and the answering rebellion in the North, the Pilgrimage of Grace
• A. Savine, English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolution (Oxford 1909)
• J. Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1971)

[edit] External links

• Dissolution of the Monasteries
• BBC Timeline: Tudors
• BBC History: English Reformation
• Catholic Encyclopedia: Suppression of English Monasteries