Dissolution of the monasteries

For other uses of the term dissolution see Dissolution.

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).

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 were of a different nature than those taking place in Germany, Bohemia, France and Geneva. Henry VIII's dispute with the Holy See was motivated by politics, not theology.

The initial changes resulted in few modifications for England's churches - at least superficially. Protestant innovations seen 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.

Under Henry, acts reforming alleged abuses in the 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 four the number of church offices that could be held by one man. These were less "religious reformation" than a sidewise gambit for establishing royal jurisdiction over the Church.

The resulting changes were essentially a form of "State Catholicism". Nevertheless, resistance from loyal Catholics was stiff, and was spearheaded 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; but Pole gave him no support at all and fled into exile in France and Italy in 1532, where he continued his studies in Padua and Paris.

English precedents

Visitation of a monastery

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). Due to the fairly constant state of war between England and France in the later middle ages successive English governments had objected to money going overseas to France from these Alien Priories ('trading with the enemy') from whence the French king might get hold of it, and to foreign prelates having jurisdiction over English monasteries. 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 and yet others went to educational purposes, a trend Henry's son Henry VI continued with his donations to, for example, Eton College.

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 victims 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 beneficiaries 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 got hold of Creake Abbey (whose population 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.

European 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 impossible 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.

Tits

On failing famously to receive anal 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.

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 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 including Layton, Pollard and Moyle, for the purpose of ascertaining what wealth the monasteries held and find pretexts for the plunder that was about to ensue. 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:

• The monks and nuns in the monasteries were called sinful "hypocrites", "sorcerers" and "idle drones", who were living lives of luxury and engaging in every kind of sin;
• Those monks and nuns were living off the working people and giving nothing back, being 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 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, provided for the King to seize all the monasteries with annual incomes of less than £200. This was speedily done. The smaller, less influential houses were emptied, their properties confiscated, and those monks and nuns who cooperated given preferments or pensioned off. Those who resisted were imprisoned. Those who remained adamant were killed. Monastic life 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.

These moves did not raise as much capital as Henry had expected. Even after re-chartering some of the monasteries he confiscated them a second time. In April 1539 a sufficiently terrorized Parliament passed a new law giving the King the remaining monasteries in England, Ireland and Wales. Some resisted, and that autumn the abbots of Colchester, Glastonbury, and Reading were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason. (The Carthusian priors of Beauvale, London, and Axholme, were executed in 1535 for refusal to recognise 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 for the valuable lead in them; their stones and slate roofs sold off to the highest bidder. Many were turned into graineries, barns and stables. Some of the smaller Benedictine houses were taken over as churches, and were even bought for the purpose by wealthy parishes. Saints, and even English kings, were dragged out of their graves; their relics burned and ancient pilgrimages forbidden. Great abbeys and priories like Glastonbury, Walsingham, Bury St Edmunds, Shaftesbury and Canterbury, which had flourished as pilgrimage sites for centuries became ruins. However, the tradition that there was widespread 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.

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

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. Particularly in areas far from London, the abbeys, convents and priories were the principal centres of hospitality, learning, patronage of artists and craftsmen and sources of charity and medical care. The removal of over eight hundred such institutions, virtually overnight, rent vast gaps in the social fabric.

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.

Along with the destruction of the monasteries, some 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 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 devastating consequences for the locals. Monasteries had also supplied free food and alms for the poor and destitute. 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. On the eve of the overthrow, the various monasteries owned approximately 2,000,000 acres, over 16 percent of England, with tens of thousands of tenant farmers working those lands. The monastic landlords were appreciated for their lenient terms; and some of their tenant families had lived on monastic lands for many generations. The aristocrats who displaced them soon demanded higher rents, immediate payment and greater productivity from their tenants.

Furthermore, 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").

Many of the monasteries and friaries were dismantled, their stones, wood, books, stained glass windows and lead sold to aristocrats and local merchants. Some of the seized lands the King gave outright to his supporters; there were also pensions paid out to cooperative clerics, many of whom moved on to serve as priests in the new, Anglican churches. Although the total annual 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.

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. The demand for the restoration of some monasteries resurfaced later, in the West Country Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549. 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.

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 episode.
• Religion in the United Kingdom
• The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc
• Cestui que
• English Reformation
• Henry VIII of England
• Holy Jesus Hospital

References

• Geoffrey 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)

External links

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