Dissolution of the Monasteries

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The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey,
dissolved in the Dissolution.
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The Dissolution of the Monasteries, sometimes referred to as the Suppression of the Monasteries, was the formal process between 1536 and 1541 by which Henry VIII disbanded monastic communities in England, Wales and Ireland and confiscated their property. 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 in England, and by the First Suppression Act (1536) and the Second Suppression Act (1539).

Contents

Context

The Dissolution of the Monasteries did not take place in political isolation. Other movements against the authority of the Catholic Church had been under way for some time, most of them related to the Protestant Reformation in Continental Europe; however, the religious changes in England under Henry VIII and Edward VI were of a different nature to those taking place in Germany, Bohemia, France and Geneva. On the Continent, while the nobles were acquiring a taste for Church plunder, there was the added element of mass discontent against ecclesiastical power and wealth among common people and the lower levels of clergy and civil society. In England the early Reformation was directed from the highest levels of society, but was met with widespread popular suspicion; spilling over, in particular occasions and localities, into active resistance.

The initial changes resulted in few modifications for England's churches - at least superficially. The Protestant flavour of innovations expressed in the Ten Articles were reversed when Henry VIII expressed his desire for 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 authorising some limited reforms in the English Church as early as 1518, but reformers (both conservative and radical) had become increasingly frustrated at their lack of progress.

Under Henry, parliamentary acts reforming alleged abuses in the English Church were passed in November 1529. They set caps on fees for probating wills and mortuary expenses for burial in hallowed ground, tightened regulations covering rights of sanctuary for criminals, and reduced to two the number of church benefices that could in the future be held by one man. These sought to demonstrate that establishing royal jurisdiction over the Church would ensure progress in "religious reformation" where Papal authority had been insufficient.

English precedents

By the time Henry VIII launched his campaign against the monasteries, royal confiscations of the property of religious houses had a history stretching back 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 agricultural estates with a single foreign monk in residence to supervise things, others were rich foundations in their own right (e.g. Lewes Priory which 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 ('trading with the enemy') whence the French king might get hold of it, and to foreign prelates having jurisdiction over English monasteries. Furthermore, after 1378, French monasteries (and hence alien priories dependent on them) maintained allegiance to the continuing Avignon Papacy, and so their suppression was supported by the rival Popes, conditional on all confiscated monastic property being redirected into other religious uses. The king's officers first sequestrated the assets of the Alien Priories in 1295-1303 under Edward I, and the same thing happened repeatedly for long periods over the course of the Fourteenth Century, most particularly in the reign of Edward III. 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. Some of the Alien Priories were allowed to become naturalised (for instance Castle Acre Priory), on payment of heavy fines and bribes, but for the rest their fates were sealed when Henry V dissolved them by act of Parliament in 1414. The properties went to the Crown; some were kept, some were subsequently given or sold to Henry's supporters, others went to his new monasteries of Syon Abbey and the Carthusians at Sheen Priory; yet others went to educational purposes.

The royal transfer of monastic estates to educational foundations proved an inspiration to the bishops, and as the Fifteenth Century waned such moves became more and more common. The subjects of these dissolutions were usually small and poor Benedictine or Augustinian men's houses or poor nunneries with few powerful friends; the great abbeys and orders exempt from diocesan supervision such as the Cistercians were unaffected. The consequent new foundations were most often Oxford University and Cambridge University colleges, instances of this include John Alcock, Bishop of Ely dissolving the Benedictine nunnery of Saint Radegund to found Jesus College, Cambridge (1496), and William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester acquiring Selborne Priory in 1484 for Magdalen College, Oxford. In the following century Lady Margaret Beaufort obtained the property of Creake Abbey (whose religious had all died of Black Death in 1506) to fund her works at Oxford and Cambridge, an action she took on the advice of such a staunch traditionalist as John Fisher Bishop of Rochester. In 1522 Fisher himself is also found dissolving the nunneries of Bromhall and Higham to aid St John's College, Cambridge. That same year Cardinal Wolsey dissolved St Frideswide's Priory (now Oxford Cathedral) to form the basis of his Christ Church, Oxford; in 1524 he secured a Papal bull to dissolve some 20 other monasteries to provide an endowment for his new college. However, the friars, monks and nuns of these were always absorbed into other houses of their respective orders.

Continental precedents

While these transactions were going on in England, elsewhere in Europe events were taking place which presaged a storm. In 1521, Martin Luther had published 'De votis monasticis' (Latin: 'On the monastic vows'), a treatise which declared that the monastic life had no scriptural basis, was pointless and also actively immoral in that it was not compatible with the true spirit of Christianity. Luther also declared that monastic vows were meaningless and that no one should feel bound by them. Luther, a one-time monk, found some comfort when these views had a dramatic effect: a special meeting of German members of the Augustinian Friars, (of which Luther was part) held the same year accepted them and voted that henceforth every member of the regular clergy should be free to renounce their vows, resign their offices and to get married. At Luther's home monastery in Wittenberg all the monks save one did so.

News of these events did not take long to spread among Protestant-minded (and acquisitive) rulers across Europe, and some, particularly in Scandinavia, moved very quickly. In Sweden in 1527 King Gustavus Vasa secured an edict of the Diet allowing him to confiscate any monastic lands he deemed necessary to increase royal revenues; and to force the return of donated properties to the descendants of those who had donated them. In one fell swoop, Gustav gained large estates and a company of diehard supporters. The Swedish monasteries and convents were simultaneously deprived of their livelihoods, with the result that some collapsed immediately, while others lingered on for a few decades before persecution and further confiscations finally caused them all to disappear by 1580. In Denmark, King Frederick I of Denmark made his grab 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 parsed them out to supportive nobles, who were soon found enjoying the fruits of former monastic lands. Danish monastic life was to vanish in a way identical to that of Sweden.

In Switzerland, too, monasteries came under threat. In 1523 the government of the city-state of Zurich pressured nuns to leave their convents and marry, and followed up the next year by dissolving all monasteries in its territory, under the pretext of using their revenues to fund education and help the poor. The former religious who cooperated with the scheme were offered help with learning a trade for their new secular lives, and in some cases were granted pensions. The city of Basel followed suit in 1529 and Geneva adopted the same policy in 1530. An attempt was also made in 1530 to dissolve the famous Abbey of St. Gall, which was a state of the Holy Roman Empire in its own right, but this failed, and St. Gall has survived.

It is inconceivable that these moves went unnoticed by the English government and particularly by Thomas Cromwell, shortly to become Henry VIII's chief minister, who promised to make his king wealthier than any previous English monarch.

Process

Visitation of a monastery

On failing famously to receive his desired annulment from the Pope, Henry had himself declared Supreme Head of the Church in 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. Those who refused to assent to the Royal Supremacy were liable to execution for treason - a fate which befell the London Carthusians and Observant Franciscans in 1535, with the consequent confiscation of their religious houses.

In 1534 Henry had Parliament authorise 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 in reality 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 including Layton, Pollard and Moyle, for the purpose of ascertaining what wealth the monasteries held and to find pretexts for their confiscation.

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 out to deliver sermons from the pulpits of the churches on three themes:

Meanwhile, during the autumn of 1535, the visiting commissioners were sending back to Cromwell written reports of all the lurid doings they claimed to be discovering, sexual as well as financial. A horrified Parliament enacted laws in early 1536, relying in large part on the reports of "impropriety" Cromwell had received, providing for the King to forcibly dissolve monasteries with annual incomes of less than £200, amounting to around 304 houses. Monasteries proposed for dissolution could, however, put a case for continuation; and around 70 successfully did so, paying substantial fines in recompense. 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; while the monks and nuns were given the option of secularization or transfer to a continuing larger house of the same order. The majority chose to remain in the religious life, and, in some areas, new religious houses were founded by Henry VIII to provide for them. Monastic life, numerically speaking and to some extent in the rigour of their lifestyle, had been in decline for some time. By 1536, the thirteen Cistercian houses in Wales held only 85 monks amongst them. However, the claims of misbehaviour were greatly exaggerated, often recalling events and scandals from years before.

These moves did not raise as much capital as Henry had hoped; and also contributed to popular discontent in the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536; an event which led to Henry increasingly associating monasticism with treason, as members of several religious houses (more or less willingly) sided with the rebels. Government lawyers then scripted a legal pretext, in that the superior of a religious house (abbot, abbess, prior or prioress) was the "owner" of the monastic property of the house; and hence, if the superior were to be convicted of treason, all the property of the abbey would legally revert to the Crown. One major Abbey whose monks had been closely implicated in the rebellion was that of Furness in Lancashire; and 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 for the first time the monks were offered life pensions if they co-operated. This created a "stick and carrot" in favour of further dissolution. Abbots and priors came under pressure from their communities to offer voluntary surrender, if they could obtain on favourable terms for pensions; while also knowing that if they refused to surrender, they might suffer the penalty for treason; and their religious house would be dissolved anyway. In 1538 applications for surrender became a flood, and Cromwell appointed local commissioners to encourage rapid compliance with the King's wishes, to supervise the orderly sale of monastic goods and buildings, and to ensure that the former monks and nuns were provided with cash gratuities and clothing. Monks or nuns who were handicapped or infirm were marked out for more generous treatment, 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). The endowments of the monasteries, landed property and appropriated parish tithes and glebe, were transferred to the Court of Augmentations, who would thereon pay out life pensions at the agreed rate (subject to a 10% tax deduction).

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. But by the 16th century their income from donations had collapsed, their numbers had shrunk to under 1,000 and their buildings were often ruinous, or leased out commercially. Consequently, almost all friars were now living outside their friaries; and many, in contravention of their formal rules, supported themselves through paid employment and some held personal property. In 1538 Cromwell deputed Richard Ingworth, Bishop of Dover and former Provincial of the Dominicans, to obtain the friars' surrender; which he did by drafting new injunctions that strictly enforced each order's rule, facing the friars with the choice of compliance with the king's wishes, or starvation. On surrender, the friars received a gratuity of 40 shillings each, but were not offered pensions.

In April 1539 Parliament passed a new law legalising acts of voluntary surrender, but by then the vast majority of monasteries in England, Ireland and Wales had already been dissolved. Some resisted, and that autumn the abbots of Colchester, Glastonbury, and Reading were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason. St. Benet's Abbey in Norfolk was the only abbey in England which escaped formal dissolution, its estates being transferred directly to the bishops of Norwich.

The local commissioners were instructed to ensure that, where abbey churches were also used for parish worship, this should continue. Accordingly over a hundred monastic churches survive in whole or in part. Otherwise the most marketable fabric in monastic buildings was likely to be the lead on roofs, gutters and plumbing, and buildings were burned down as the easiest way to extract this. Building stone and slate roofs were sold off to the highest bidder. Many monastic outbuildings were turned into granaries, barns and stables. In some instances, wealthy parishes purchased a church for their own purpose, and many others bought choir stalls and stained glass windows. Cromwell had already instigated a campaign against "superstitions": pilgrimages and veneration of saints, in the course of which, ancient and precious valuables were grabbed and melted down; the tombs of saints and kings ransacked for whatever profit could be got from them, and their relics destroyed or dispersed. Even the crypt of King Alfred the Great was not spared the looting frenzy. Great abbeys and priories like Glastonbury, Walsingham, Bury St. Edmunds, and Shaftesbury which had flourished as pilgrimage sites for many centuries, were soon reduced to ruins. However, the tradition that there was widespread mob action resulting in destruction and iconoclasm, that altars and windows were smashed, partly confuses the looting spree of the 1530s with the vandalism wrought by the Puritans in the next century against the Anglican privileges.

The Crown became richer to the extent of around £150,000 per year, and 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, usually at the market rate of twenty years' income; raising over £1,400,000 by 1547. The purchasers were predominantly leading nobles, local magnates and gentry, with no particular opinion in terms of Catholic or Protestant religion other than utility. 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.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries impinged relatively little on English parish church activity. Most parish churches were endowed with chantries, maintaining a stipended priest to say mass for the souls of their donors. In addition there remained over a hundred collegiate churches in England, whose endowments supported a collegiate body of canons, prebends or priests. All these survived the reign of Henry VIII largely intact, only to be dissolved under the Chantries Act of 1547, by Henry's son Edward VI, their property being absorbed into the Court of Augmentations, and their members being added to the pensions list. Since many former monks had found employment as chantry priests, the consequence for these clerics was a double experience of dissolution, perhaps mitigated by being in receipt thereafter of a double pension.

Consequences

Ruins of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire

The abbeys of England, Wales and Ireland had been among the greatest landowners and the largest institutions in the kingdom; 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, virtually overnight, rent great gaps in the social fabric.

In addition, about a quarter of net monastic wealth on average consisted of "spiritual" income arising from the appropriation of parish tithes where the religious house held the advowson of a benefice with the legal obligation to maintain the cure of souls in the parish, either by endowing a vicar or by appointing a stipendiary priest. 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 income from tithes and glebe lands, albeit that they also as lay rectors became liable to maintain the fabric of the parish chancel. Where the monastery had not endowed a vicar, the lay rector was additionally obliged to establish a stipend for a perpetual curate.

It is unlikely that the monastic system could have been broken simply by royal action had there not been the overwhelming bait of personal enrichment 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.[1]

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. 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), 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.

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

Most monastic hospitals were also closed, their residents being discharged with small pensions. 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% 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. Monastic grammar schools and university colleges, by contrast, were commonly refounded with enhanced endowments, especially in connection to the newly re-established cathedral churches. 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. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that only in 1580 did overall levels of charitable giving in England returned to those before the dissolution. On the eve of the overthrow, the various monasteries owned approximately 2,000,000 acres (just under 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.

It has been argued that the suppression of the English monasteries and nunneries contributed as well to the spreading decline of that contemplative spirituality which once thrived in Europe, with the occasional exception found only in groups such as the Society of Friends ("Quakers"). This may be set against the continuation in the retained and newly established cathedrals of the daily singing of the Divine Office by choristers and vicars choral, now undertaken as public worship, which had not been the case before the dissolution. The deans and prebends of the six new cathedrals were overwhelmingly former heads of religious houses. The secularised former monks and friars commonly looked for re-employment as parish clergy; and consequently numbers of new ordinations dropped drastically in the ten years after the dissolution, and ceased almost entirely in the reign of Edward VI. It was only in 1549, after Edward came to the throne, that former monks and nuns were permitted to marry; but within a year of the permission being granted around a quarter had done so, only to find themselves forcibly separated (and denied their pensions) in the reign of Mary. On the succession of Elizabeth, these former monks (happily reunited with both their wives and their pensions) formed the backbone of the new Anglican church, and may properly claim much credit for maintaining the religious life of the country until a new generation of ordinands became available in the 1560s and 1570s.

Although it had been promised that King's enhanced wealth would enable the founding or enhanced endowment of religious, charitable and educational institutions, in practice only about 15% of the total monastic wealth was reused for these purposes. This comprised: the refoundation of eight out of nine former monastic cathedrals (Coventry being the exception), together with six wholly new bishoprics (Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford, Peterborough, Westminster) with their associated cathedrals, chapters, choirs and grammar schools; the refoundation as secular colleges of monastic houses in Brecon, Thornton and Burton on Trent, the endowment of the Regius Professorships in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the endowment of the colleges of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Christ Church, Oxford and the maritime charity of Trinity House. About a third of total monastic income was required to maintain pension payments to former monks and nuns, and hence remained with the Court of Augmentations. This left just over half to be available to be sold at market rates (very little property was given away by Henry to favoured servants, and any that was tended to revert to the Crown once their recipients fell out of favour, and were indicted for treason). By comparison with the forcible closure of monasteries elsewhere in Protestant Europe, the English and Welsh dissolutions resulted in a relatively modest volume of new religious endowments; but the treatment of former monks and nuns was more generous, and there was no counterpart elsewhere to the efficient mechanisms established in England to maintain pension payments over successive decades.

The dissolution and destruction of the monasteries and shrines was very unpopular in many areas. In the north of England, centring 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. 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 solemn promises, all of which went unkept, and then summarily executed the leaders.

However, when Mary succeeded to the throne in 1553, her hopes for a revival of English religious life proved a failure. Westminster Abbey, which had been retained as a cathedral, briefly reverted to being a monastery, but Mary found it very difficult to persuade former monks and nuns to enter her proposed revived foundations, and was compelled to import professed religious from Spain. In spite of much prompting, none of Mary's lay supporters would co-operate in returning their holdings of monastic lands to religious use; while the lay lords in Parliament proved unremittingly hostile, as a revival of the "mitred" abbeys would have returned the House of Lords to having an ecclesiastical majority. In less than 20 years, the monastic impulse had effectively been extinguished in England; and was only revived, even amongst Catholics, in the very different form of the new and reformed Counter-reformation orders, such as the Jesuits.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Chaucer's Pardoner and other Chaucerian anticlerical satire are too familiar to need instancing; the general background is in John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature. (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1956.

External links