Dissolution of the monasteries

• 1. Introduction

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  The dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII swept away a world that an English proverb once teased. If the abbot of Glastonbury married the abbess of Shaftesbury, it went, their heir would hold more land than the king of England.

  Between 1536 and 1541, Henry disbanded every Catholic monastery, priory, convent, and friary in England, Wales, and Ireland. His officials seized the wealth and disposed of the assets. Buildings and relics were destroyed, and libraries were scattered or lost. Someone also had to decide what became of the people and the work these houses had carried out.

  The proverb raises a puzzle about Henry VIII. Why would a king take on institutions that held so much of his own kingdom? Who had been calling for change long before him, and how did he persuade or force thousands of people to give up their homes? Where did the land, the roof lead, and the stone finally end up? The first answers lie in the medieval wealth that made the proverb funny.

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• 2. The Monastic Estate

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  Nearly 900 religious houses stood in England when the dissolution began. Around 260 were for monks and 300 for regular canons. There were 142 nunneries and 183 friaries. Together they held some 12,000 people, made up of about 4,000 monks, 3,000 canons, 3,000 friars, and 2,000 nuns. If England had 500,000 adult men, then one in fifty belonged to a religious order.

  Only a few of the 625 monastic communities that Henry dissolved could trace their origins to Anglo-Saxon or Celtic foundations before 1066. The great majority grew out of a wave of monastic enthusiasm in the 11th and 12th centuries. Founders gave them income from landed estates, along with tithes taken from parish churches under the founder's patronage. The result was enormous. Religious houses controlled appointments to about two-fifths of all parish benefices. They took roughly half of all church income and owned around a quarter of the nation's landed wealth. Few were founded after the end of the 13th century. The youngest was the Bridgettine nunnery of Syon Abbey, founded in 1415.

  By the early 16th century, the money had started to flow elsewhere. Donations and legacies went instead to parish churches, university colleges, grammar schools, and collegiate churches, which suggests where the public's approval lay. Debts at the monasteries were rising and the number of professed religious was falling, though recruits kept arriving to the very end. Most monks and nuns were comfortably fed and housed by the standards of the time, and only a few lived in conspicuous luxury.

  A full round of daily services, called the Divine Office, needed twelve or thirteen professed religious. Only a minority of houses could still supply that many. Even in larger houses, a sub-group known as the Cloister Monks carried the full observance of the Canonical Hours. That left the majority free to conduct business and spend much of their lives in the secular world. Extensive monastic complexes dominated English towns of any size, but most were less than half full.

  The friars were a different case. About 200 more houses of friars in England and Wales came from a second wave of zeal in the 13th century. Most stood in towns. Friars were mendicants, so they lived on donations from the faithful and ideally grew food in large urban kitchen gardens. Almost all monasteries lived off their endowments and, unless they were bad landlords, enjoyed local support. Friars more often met hostility, because their habit of soliciting legacies looked like a drain on family inheritances.

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• 3. Critics and Precedents

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  The scholar Desiderius Erasmus made fun of monasteries as lax, comfortably worldly, wasteful of scarce resources, and superstitious. He wanted monks brought more directly under the authority of bishops. In his view, monks and nuns placed man-made vows above the vows of baptism and man-made rules above the teaching of the Gospels. Many abbeys, he said, were havens for idle drones who did little for ordinary people. He was scandalised that educated monks and nuns joined in what he saw as fraud against gullible believers, through pilgrimages and supposedly miraculous tokens.

  Many bishops across Europe agreed in part. They thought the cost of an unceasing round of services would be better spent on grammar schools and university colleges that trained parish priests. The Catholic historian David Knowles later judged that every country had far too many religious houses, and that monks held more of the wealth than was good for them or for the economy.

  Henry seems to have taken his cue from Erasmus and from Thomas More. Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly in 1511, and More wrote Utopia in 1516. Both men stayed loyal to Rome while ridiculing repetitive formal religion, superstitious pilgrimages, and hoarded monastic wealth. Henry never endowed a religious house, and he made only one pilgrimage, to Walsingham in 1511. More grew steadily more influential from 1518, and his letters condemned idleness and vice in monastic life. Henry also wrote to Erasmus continually, which pushed the scholar to reject Lutheranism more openly. Henry even offered him church preferment if he would return to England.

  By the time Henry acted, kings and bishops had been closing religious houses in England for more than 200 years. His innovation was scale. The first cases involved alien priories. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, some French orders held English property through daughter houses. Lewes Priory, for example, was a daughter of Cluny and answered to the French abbot. Bishops copied the practice as the 15th century drew to a close. In 1496, John Alcock, Bishop of Ely, dissolved St Radegund's Priory in Cambridge to found Jesus College. In 1484, William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, took Selborne Priory in Hampshire for Magdalen College, Oxford. The victims were usually small, poor, indebted communities with few powerful friends, and the great Cistercian abbeys were left alone.

  In 1506, sweating sickness killed every religious at Creake Abbey in Norfolk. Lady Margaret Beaufort then obtained the property to fund her work at Oxford and Cambridge, on the advice of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. In 1522, Fisher himself dissolved the women's monasteries of Bromhall and Higham to help St John's College, Cambridge. That same year, Cardinal Wolsey dissolved St Frideswide's Priory, now Oxford Cathedral, to form the base of Christ Church. In 1524 he secured a papal bull to dissolve 20 other monasteries. When Bayham Abbey fell in 1525, local villagers rioted and restored the canons for a week before they were forcibly removed.

  The law remained shaky. Juries might refuse to hand dissolved property to the Crown. In 1532, the priory of Christchurch Aldgate asked the King for help with its money and legal troubles, and found itself dissolved arbitrarily. The Lord Chancellor, Thomas Audley, would not risk a jury. He recommended that the dissolution be legalised afterward through a special act of Parliament.

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• 4. Examples From Abroad

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  In 1521, Martin Luther published De votis monasticis, or On the monastic vows. He declared that monastic life had no scriptural basis, was pointless, and was actively immoral. Luther was himself a former Augustinian friar, and his words had a dramatic effect. That same year a special meeting of the German province of his order voted that any member could renounce vows, resign office, and marry. At Luther's home monastery in Wittenberg, every friar but one did so.

  Scandinavian rulers moved quickly. At the Riksdag of Västerås in 1527, King Gustav Vasa won an edict letting him confiscate any monastic land he thought necessary to raise royal revenue. Descendants of donors could reclaim the gifts their families had made, which won him loyal nobles. Swedish houses could no longer take novices and could not stop members from leaving, though those who stayed could live on a state allowance for life. Vreta Abbey's last nuns died in 1582. The last nuns left Vadstena Abbey in 1595.

  In Denmark-Norway, King Frederick I confiscated 15 of the wealthiest houses in 1528. Christian III then banned the friars in the 1530s and forced monks and nuns to hand their houses to the Crown. The Crown passed them on to supportive nobles. In 1536, Christian III took over the horse stud at Esrum Abbey and moved its horses to Hillerød, north of Copenhagen. They later became the Frederiksborger breed, and Frederik II founded the Royal Frederiksborg Stud in 1562.

  Switzerland followed a similar path. In 1523 the government of Zürich pressured nuns to leave their monasteries and marry. The next year it dissolved every monastery in its territory, claiming the revenues would fund education and help the poor. Basel followed in 1529 and Geneva in 1530. An attempt in 1530 to dissolve the Abbey of St Gall failed, and it survived until 1798.

  France and Scotland took another route. Under the Concordat of Bologna of 1516, Pope Leo X let Francis I nominate almost all French abbots and priors. Around 80 per cent of French abbacies came to be held in commendam, often by lay courtiers or royal servants. About half the income of French monasteries went to the Crown or its supporters. Scotland followed in 1532, when the young James V got papal approval to name his illegitimate infant sons as commendators. He eventually had nine such sons. More than £40,000 Scots a year flowed from monasteries to the royal coffers. It is hard to imagine these moves escaped Thomas Cromwell, who had worked for Wolsey on his closures and would become Henry's King's Secretary.

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• 5. Supremacy and Visitors

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  In February 1531, after failing to win a declaration of nullity of his marriage from the Pope, Henry had himself declared Supreme Head of the Church of England. In April 1533, an Act in Restraint of Appeals ended the right of clergy to appeal to Rome. Church charges once paid to Rome now went to the King. The Act of Supremacy followed in 1534. Through the Submission of the Clergy, the English clergy and religious orders accepted that the King was, and always had been, Supreme Head. In Henry's view, a monastic act of resistance was therefore not only treason but also a breach of the vow of obedience.

  Under heavy threats, almost every house accepted the Royal Supremacy and swore to uphold the King's divorce and remarriage. Opposition gathered in the houses of Carthusian monks, Observant Franciscan friars, and Bridgettine monks and nuns. These were the very orders that had earned royal favour over the previous century for their unusual discipline. Great efforts were made to cajole, bribe, trick, and threaten them. Holdouts faced prison until they submitted, or execution for treason if they persisted.

  The Observant houses were handed to the mainstream Franciscans. Friars from the Greenwich house were imprisoned, and many died of ill-treatment. The Carthusians eventually submitted, except for the London house, which was suppressed. Some of its monks were executed for high treason in 1535, and others starved to death in prison. Bridgettine monks from Syon Abbey were imprisoned for opposing the Supremacy. The Syon nuns were strictly enclosed, so the abbess's personal compliance was accepted for them. The 20th-century author G. W. O. Woodward downplayed all this. He wrote: "All but a very few took it without demur. They were, after all, Englishmen, and shared the common prejudice of their contemporaries against the pretensions of foreign Italian prelates."

  In 1534, Cromwell began an inventory of the endowments, liabilities, and income of the whole English and Welsh church. It is known as the Valor Ecclesiasticus, and its purpose was to assess the church's taxable value. Local commissioners reported in May 1535. Parliament also authorised Cromwell to visit every monastery, including the Cistercian houses that papal dispensation had once shielded from bishops. Cromwell passed this task to hand-picked commissioners, chiefly Richard Layton, Thomas Legh, John ap Rice, and John Tregonwell. They were to judge the quality of religious life, the prevalence of superstitious practices such as relic veneration, and evidence of moral laxity, especially sexual. Most were secular clergy who doubted the value of monastic life and dismissed relics.

  Their timetable was tight, and some houses were missed altogether. Where reports can be checked against other sources, they look rushed and greatly exaggerated, and they often recall events from years earlier. The visitors questioned each member of a house, and some servants, and urged them to confess and inform on one another. Letters to Cromwell show that they knew findings of wrongdoing were expected and wanted. They put the worst construction on what they heard, but they do not seem to have invented charges outright. Where no faults appeared, none were reported.

  In autumn 1535, reports reached Cromwell with bundles of purported miraculous wimples, girdles, and mantles. Monks and nuns had been lending them for cash to the sick and to mothers in labour. In seven houses, the wrongdoing was so great, or the numbers so small, that the commissioners shut them down on the spot. Yet the power to dissolve a house had once rested with the Pope, and the King now needed a statute to claim it.

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• 6. Lesser Houses and Rebellion

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  The first Suppression Act of 1535 let the King compel the closure of houses that failed to maintain a religious life. It set a line at an annual income of less than £200 as declared in the Valor Ecclesiasticus. Potentially 419 houses fell below it, and the King could exempt any of them at his pleasure. All property of a dissolved house reverted to the Crown. The £200 figure was odd, since the preamble spoke of numbers rather than income. The Valor figures were probably simply more reliable and complete than the visitors' reports.

  Many houses below the line argued for survival and offered substantial fines. Many of those cases succeeded. Only around 330 were sent to suppression commissions, and only 243 houses were actually dissolved at this stage. During 1536, a county commission visited the smaller houses to list their assets and valuables. It could win cooperation from superiors with pensions or bribes. Few houses surrendered at once. The commissioners reported to Cromwell, who decided whether to proceed, and around 80 houses were exempted. These commissioners found fewer faults than the earlier visitors had. They may have known that monks and nuns with bad reputations would be hard to place elsewhere.

  The 1536 Act settled that the property of dissolved smaller houses went to the Crown, whatever founders or patrons claimed. Cromwell created a new agency, the Court of Augmentations, to manage it. Lay holders of monastic offices, pensions, and annuities kept their incomes, and tenants kept their rights. Ordinary monks and nuns could choose secularisation, with a cash gratuity but no pension, or transfer to a larger house of the same order. They were still forbidden to marry, so life outside was precarious. Most chose to stay in religious life. Finding them places proved much slower and harder than expected.

  Two houses tried to resist the commissioners by force. They were Norton Priory in Cheshire and Hexham Abbey in Northumberland. Henry saw treason and demanded brutal punishment in a personal letter. The prior and canons of Norton were imprisoned for several months and were lucky to survive. The canons of Hexham had become involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and they were executed.

  That rising of 1536 drew much of its discontent from Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Some spared houses in northern England sided with the rebels, and former monks resumed religious life in several suppressed houses. Henry came to link monasticism with betrayal. Clauses in the Treasons Act of 1534, which Cromwell had drafted with dissolution in mind, made a convicted traitor's property revert to the Crown. His argument was that the head of a house legally owned all its property.

  Scholars still debate whether a universal dissolution was secretly planned from the start. The dominant view is that the great care taken to transfer monks and nuns shows that reform was still the guiding idea, at least in the King's mind. Nothing was dissolved during 1537, perhaps from fear of reigniting revolt. Visitations by bishops resumed, and many houses finally made overdue repairs. Meanwhile, in 1537 and 1538, monasteries leased out land and sold fee-paying offices and annuities for ready cash. This reduced the eventual return to the Crown, but no one discouraged it, and Cromwell collected many such fees himself.

  In 1537 it became clear that the true policy was to end monasticism in England and Wales. The method would be voluntary surrender rather than statute. The abbot of Furness Abbey in Lancashire, whose monks had been tied up in the Pilgrimage of Grace, feared a treason charge and offered to surrender. Cromwell gladly agreed. When Lewes Priory surrendered in November 1537, its monks were not offered transfer to another house. They were offered life pensions, and from then on every dissolution not caused by a treason conviction was legally voluntary.

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• 7. Surrender and Pensions

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  From the start of 1538, Cromwell went after the houses he knew were wavering and pressed their superiors to apply for surrender. In March 1538 he sent a circular condemning false rumours of a general dissolution. The same letter warned superiors that stripping assets or hiding valuables could count as treason. Applications flooded in as the year went on. In each case Cromwell named a local commissioner to speed things along, oversee the sale of goods and buildings, and make sure the monks and nuns received pensions, gratuities, and clothing.

  Tenants kept their tenancies, and lay office holders kept their fees, even with no duties left. The aged, handicapped, and infirm received more generous pensions. In a few cases even monastic servants were given a year's wages. Monks received pensions averaging around £5 a year, and heads of houses typically got 10 per cent of the house's net annual income. In 1538, £5 matched a skilled worker's yearly wages. At least twenty monks and canons were made bishops within a decade, which saved money on pensions. Nuns fared worse, averaging £3 a year, and they could not marry. Well-born nuns often returned to their families, and others shared households. No friars were pensioned.

  The future of ten monastic cathedrals was uncertain. Bath and Coventry each had a second secular cathedral in the diocese, and both surrendered in 1539. The other eight had to continue in some form. A model came from Stoke-by-Clare in Suffolk, where Dean Matthew Parker had recast the college statutes in 1535 around preaching and children's education. In May 1538, the monastic cathedral community at Norwich surrendered and became a college of secular priests. It had a dean, five prebendaries, and sixteen minor canons, about half the number of its former monks.

  The idea found sponsors. Thomas Audley suggested Colchester and St Osyth's Priory. The Duke of Norfolk backed Thetford Priory and moved shrines, relics, and fittings there from the dissolved Castle Acre Priory. Cromwell proposed Little Walsingham without its superstitious shrine. Bishop Hugh Latimer begged for Great Malvern Priory and for two or three such houses in every shire. In May 1539, the Second Suppression Act went to Parliament alongside an Act allowing new bishoprics and collegiate cathedrals. Then an apparent alliance of France and the Holy Roman Empire, agreed at Toledo in January 1539, set off an invasion scare. Henry demanded unprecedented sums for coastal defences from St Michael's Mount to Lowestoft. Only six abbeys became cathedrals of new dioceses, and only Burton-on-Trent and Thornton were re-founded as colleges. Thetford was dissolved on the 16th of February 1540, while the Duke was away on an embassy to France.

  Cromwell hoped even in late 1538 to save a few nunneries of high quality. One was Godstow Abbey near Oxford, whose abbess, Lady Katherine Bulkeley, he had promoted. In October 1538, his commissioner Dr John London demanded its surrender. After a direct appeal, the house was told it could continue. Lady Katherine assured Cromwell that "there is neither pope nor purgatory, image nor pilgrimage nor praying to dead saints used or regarded amongst us". Godstow offered boarding and schooling for girls of notable families, as did several other nunneries. The historian Diarmaid MacCulloch adds a blunt suggestion, that "customary male cowardice" also made the government wary of confronting female superiors. The reprieve lasted just over a year. Godstow was suppressed in November 1539 with the other surviving nunneries.

  The friars had been left outside the earlier laws and visitations. At the start of the 14th century England had around 5,000 friars. There were still around 200 friaries at the dissolution, but their numbers had shrunk to fewer than 1,000. Most lived in rented lodgings outside their friaries, and the buildings were often ruinous or leased out. Cromwell sent Richard Yngworth, suffragan Bishop of Dover and a former Provincial of the Dominicans. Yngworth drafted injunctions requiring strict life behind the walls, and refusal meant homelessness and starvation, so the friars surrendered quickly. Each received a gratuity of around 40 shillings. The Court of Augmentations disposed of their churches fast. Only St Andrew's Hall in Norwich, Atherstone Priory in Warwickshire, the Chichester Guildhall, and Greyfriars Church in Reading remain standing. The London church of the Austin Friars served the Dutch Church until the Blitz destroyed it.

  In April 1539, a new law retrospectively legalised voluntary surrenders and assured tenants of their rights. Some houses still resisted. In autumn 1539, the abbots of Colchester, Glastonbury, and Reading were hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason, and their monks received a pension of £4 a year. St Benet's Abbey in Norfolk escaped formal dissolution altogether, because its last abbot became Bishop of Norwich and the abbey's endowments passed to the bishops with him. Shap Abbey fell in January 1540, and Bolton Priory in Yorkshire on the 29th of January 1540. Waltham Abbey was the last, on the 23rd of March 1540. In April 1540, the cathedral priories of Canterbury and Rochester became secular cathedral chapters.

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• 8. What Was Left Behind

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  Parts of 117 former monasteries, out of over 800, survived and mostly still serve for parish worship. Another fourteen monastic churches survived whole as cathedrals. Around a dozen wealthy benefactors bought a complete church from the commissioners and gave it to their community. Many parishes bought monastic woodwork, choir stalls, and stained-glass windows. The abbot's lodging was often large, and lay purchasers converted these into country houses. At Lacock Abbey and Forde Abbey the monastic buildings themselves became the core of a Tudor mansion.

  The most valuable fabric was the lead on roofs, gutters, and plumbing, and buildings were burned to get it out. Stone and slate went to the highest bidder, and outbuildings became granaries, barns, and stables. Cromwell's earlier campaign against superstition had already melted down precious valuables and ransacked the tombs of saints and kings. Even the crypt of King Alfred the Great was not spared. Glastonbury, Walsingham, Bury St Edmunds, and Shaftesbury, pilgrimage sites for centuries, were soon ruins. Tales of mob destruction partly confuse the 1530s with the vandalism of the Puritans in the next century. Woodward argued there was no general policy of destruction, apart from Lincolnshire, where one government agent razed as many houses as he could. Far more often the buildings suffered from unroofing, neglect, or quarrying.

  Once the new cathedrals and colleges were funded, the Crown grew richer by around £150,000 a year, though about £50,000 went at first to pensions. Cromwell wanted the bulk to serve as regular income. After his fall in 1540, Henry needed money quickly for his military ambitions in France and Scotland. By 1547, the monastic property that had been sold represented an annual value of £90,000. Land was not auctioned. The government answered a flood of applications, and former founders and patrons could expect success. Buyers were mostly leading nobles, local magnates, and gentry. They wanted the manorial estates, which carried the right to hold a court for tenants, a mark of standing that families had rarely been able to buy. Nothing would later persuade them to give these up.

  The Court of Augmentations kept enough income to pay annual pensions. As pensioners died, or lost their pensions by accepting a better royal post, surplus property was released each year. The last surviving monks drew their pensions into the reign of James I, more than 60 years after the dissolution. Parish life changed little. Tithes once paid to a monastery went to a lay impropriator, while rectors and vicars stayed in place. Chantries, each paying a priest to say Mass, were untouched at first. The Chantries Act of 1547 under Edward VI dissolved them, along with the over a hundred collegiate churches. Many former monks had become chantry priests, so they were dissolved twice, perhaps cushioned by a double pension.

  Ireland followed a different course. Around 400 religious houses stood there in 1530, many more than England and Wales had for the size of its population. Friaries made up about half. They had flourished in the 15th century with popular support and ambitious building. Irish monasteries had declined sharply, few having more than six monks. Henry's direct authority reached only the Pale around Dublin, even after he became King of Ireland in 1541. In 1537 he introduced legislation to legalise closures, and only sixteen houses were suppressed. In 1539, his bill to close nine named monasteries was the only royal bill that year that failed to pass. From 1541, he mostly made deals with local lords, granting monastic property in return for allegiance. Henry gained little if any of the wealth. Some dissolved communities hid in the countryside and mountains, and some reappeared under Mary I.

  By Henry's death in 1547, around half the Irish houses had been suppressed. Many resisted until Elizabeth I, whose reign brought re-confiscations and closures in the Gaelic parts of Ireland. Some houses in the West of Ireland remained active until the early 17th century. In 1649, Oliver Cromwell led a Parliamentary army into Ireland and systematically destroyed former monastic houses. Sympathetic landowners later housed monks and friars near several ruins, allowing a covert existence through the 17th and 18th centuries.

  In England, the gap left for the poor remains disputed. Political historian Gregory Slysz holds that the dissolution brought social catastrophe for the next 50 or so years, as almshouses and hospitals closed amid inflation and a doubling of population. He cites Westminster Abbey. Its monks had fallen from 50 to 25 by the dissolution. Eighteen got new positions and seven were pensioned. The hundred or so servants got nothing. The abbey's 1540 almsgiving of £400 was replaced by a £100 annual grant, and its almshouse fell as low as £34. Slysz links the failure to replace this system to the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 and the rise of workhouses.

  Revisionist scholars disagree. In 1974, Woodward wrote that no great host of beggars was suddenly thrown on the roads, because monastic charity had only marginal significance. Historian Linda Colley described a "vast superstructure of prejudice" built over the older view of monasticism. The numbers from Westminster are now read by both sides, and each reads them differently.

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