Dissolution of The Monasteries - Process

Process

On failing famously to receive from the Pope an annulment to his marriage, Henry had himself declared Supreme Head of the Church in England in February 1531, and instigated a programme of legislation to establish this Royal Supremacy in law and enforce its acceptance throughout his realm. 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. All ecclesiastical charges and levies that had previously been payable to Rome, would now go to the King. By the Submission of the Clergy, the English clergy and religious orders subscribed to the proposition that the King was, and had always been, the Supreme Head of the Church in England. Consequently, in Henry's view, any act of monastic resistance to royal authority would not only be treasonable, but also a breach of the monastic vow of obedience. Under heavy threats, almost all religious houses joined the rest of the Church in acceding to the Royal Supremacy; and in swearing to uphold the validity of the King's divorce and remarriage. Opposition was concentrated in the houses of Carthusian monks, Observant Franciscan friars and Bridgettine monks and nuns; which were, to the Government's embarrassment, exactly those orders where the monastic life was acknowledged as being fully observed. Great efforts were made to cajole, bribe, trick and threaten these houses into formal compliance; with those religious who continued in their resistance being liable to imprisonment until they submitted; or if they persisted, to execution for treason. All the houses of the Observant Friars were handed over to the mainstream Franciscan order; the friars from the Greenwich house being imprisoned, where many died from ill-treatment. The Carthusians eventually submitted, other than the monks of the London house, which was suppressed; some of the monks being executed for high treason in 1535, and others being starved to death in prison. Also opposing the Supremacy and consequently imprisoned were leading Bridgettine monks from Syon Abbey; although the Syon nuns, being strictly enclosed, escaped sanction at this stage; the personal compliance of the abbess being taken as sufficient for the government's purposes.

In 1534, Cromwell undertook on behalf of the King an inventory of the assets and income of the entire ecclesiastical estate of England and Wales, including the monasteries (see Valor Ecclesiasticus), for the purpose of assessing the Church's taxable value, through local commissioners who reported in May 1535. At the same time, Henry had Parliament authorise Thomas Cromwell to "visit" all the monasteries, including those like the Cistercians previously exempted by Papal dispensation, to purify them in their religious life, and to instruct them in their duty to obey the King and reject Papal authority. Cromwell delegated his visitation authority to hand-picked commissioners; chiefly Richard Layton, Thomas Legh, John ap Rice and John Tregonwell; for the purposes of ascertaining the quality of religious life being maintained in religious houses; of assessing the prevalence of 'superstitious' religious observances such as the veneration of relics; and for inquiring into evidence of moral laxity (especially sexual). The chosen commissioners were mostly secular clergy, and appear to have been Erasmian in their views, and dismissive of the value of monastic life. An objective assessment of the quality of monastic observance in England in the 1530s would almost certainly have been largely negative, but Cromwell did not leave such matters to chance. By comparison with the valuation commissions, the timetable for these monastic visitations was very tight, with some houses missed altogether, and inquiries appear to have concentrated on gross faults and laxity; consequently where the reports of misbehaviour returned by the visitors can be checked against other sources, they commonly appear to have been both rushed and greatly exaggerated, often recalling events and scandals from years before.

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. The commissioners appear consistently to have instructed houses to re-introduce 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 the opportunity at this stage to be released from their monastic vows, so as to make a life elsewhere. The visitors reported the number of professed religious persons in each house. In a few instances, impropriety or irreligion had been so great, or the numbers remaining so few, that the commissioners had felt compelled to suppress a house 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. Accordingly Parliament enacted the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries Act in early 1536, 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; and 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. Accordingly, many monasteries proposed for dissolution put forward a case for continuation, offering to pay substantial fines in recompense; and many of these cases were accepted, so that 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. The £200 benchmark was most likely determined pragmatically; the valuation returns being both more reliable and more complete.

The smaller houses identified for suppression were then visited by a further set of commissioners charged with effecting the arrangements for closure, and empowered to obtain prompt co-operation from monastic superiors by the offer of pensions and cash gratuities. 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. 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 ordinary monks and nuns were given the choice of secularization (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, and, in some areas, the premises of suppressed religious houses were recycled into newly founded houses to accommodate them. 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 monks of Hexham, who made the further mistake of becoming involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace, were executed.

The wording of the First Suppression Act was clear that reform, not outright abolition of monastic life, was being presented to the public as the objective of the legislative policy; and there is a 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, demonstrates that monastic reform was still, at least in the mind of the King, the guiding principle; but that further large-scale action against under-performing 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, 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.

This first round of suppressions contributed to popular discontent in the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536; an event which led to Henry increasingly associating monasticism with betrayal, as most 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. Although Henry continued for a while to maintain that his sole objective was monastic reform, it became increasingly clear that, from around the summer of 1537, official policy now envisaged the total extinction of monasticism in England and Wales; but that this extinction was expected to be achieved through individual applications for voluntary surrender rather than through a systematic centrally imposed suppression. Hugh Latimer, appointed bishop of Worcester in 1535, and a reformer with pronounced Lutheran sympathies, had successfully encouraged the wealthier monasteries in his diocese to provide active support in preaching, prayer and charity to their local communities. Latimer 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", but by then only total surrender was acceptable. Government lawyers 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 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 for the first time the monks were offered life pensions if they co-operated, and were not accorded the option of transfer to another house. This created a "stick and carrot" 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; 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 pensions, 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 in most years to a 10% tax deduction on pensions of £5 year of more).

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; 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 retrospectively legalising acts of voluntary surrender, but by then the vast majority of monasteries in England, 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 last two abbeys to be dissolved were Waltham Abbey and Shap Abbey, both in January 1540.

The local commissioners were instructed to ensure that, where abbey churches were also used by local parishes, this should continue. Accordingly over a hundred former monastic churches continued (and still remain) in use for parochial worship in whole or in part, in addition to the fourteen former monastic churches that continued as cathedrals. 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 a few instances, wealthy urban parishes that were cramped for space purchased a complete former monastic 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 (£63,606,300 as of 2012), per year, although around £50,000 (£21,202,100 as of 2012) of this was committed to fund monastic pensions; 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 (£481 million as of 2012). by 1547. The 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.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries impinged relatively little on English parish church activity. Most parish churches had been endowed with chantries, each maintaining a stipended priest to say mass for the souls of their donors. In addition there remained after the dissolution of the monasteries, over a hundred collegiate churches in England, whose endowments maintained regular choral worship though a corporate 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.