For other uses of the term
dissolution see
Dissolution.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries, referred to by Roman Catholic writers
as the Suppression of the Monasteries, was the formal process during the English
Reformation by which Henry VIII confiscated the property of the monastic
institutions in England, Wales and Ireland between 1538 and 1541. He was given the authority to do this by the Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in 1534, which
made him Supreme Head of the Church of England, 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 jurisdiction of the
Roman 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 resulting changes initially changed nothing in England's churches. Protestant innovations seen in the Ten Articles were reversed when Henry VIII expressed the church's continued orthodoxy with the
Six Articles of 1539, which remained in effect until after his death.
Cardinal Wolsey had obtained from the Pope a
Papal Bull authorizing some limited reforms in the English Church as early as 1518.
Under Henry VIII, acts allegedly reforming certain abusive practices in the Church were passed in November 1529. They set caps
on fees for probating wills and mortuary expenses for burial on hallowed ground, tightened regulations covering rights of
sanctuary for felons and murderers, and reduced to four the number of church offices to be
held by one man. These were less forms of "religious reformation" than they were ways of establishing royal jurisdiction over the
Church.
The resulting changes were essentially a form of "State Catholicism". Nevertheless, resistance among the pro-Roman
ecclesiastics was stiff, and was supported by Reginald Pole. Henry VIII originally offered
Pole the position of Archbishop of York or Bishop of Winchester if he would support his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Pole withheld his support and went into self-imposed exile to France and Italy in 1532, where he continued his studies in Padua and Paris.
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 many French abbeys had substantial property and dependent
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 (i.e. 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 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 staunch a 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 College, Oxford; in 1524 he secured a Papal bull to dissolve some 20 other monasteries to provide an endowment for his new college.
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. These views had an immediate 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 and resign. At Luther's home monastery in
Wittenberg all but one man did so at once.
News of these events did not take long to spread among reform-minded - and acquisitive - rulers across Europe, and some,
particularly in Scandinavia, took action. In Sweden in 1527 King Gustavus Vasa secured an edict of the Diet to allow him to confiscate any monastic lands he deemed
necessary to increase the royal revenues, and also to force the return of some properties to the descendents of those who had
originally given them. This plan enriched the king greatly and soon deprived the Swedish religious houses of their means of
economic support, with the result that some collapsed immediately while others lingered for a few decades before fading away by
about 1580. In Denmark, King Frederick I of
Denmark made his move in 1528, confiscating 15 of the houses of the extremely wealthy and unpopular friars. Further laws
under his successor over the course of the 1530s banned the friars and allowed monks and nuns to abandon their houses to the
crown, which was soon gathering in the former abbey lands. Danish monastic life was to gradually vanish in a similar way to that
of Sweden.
In Switzerland, too, monasteries were under threat. In 1523 the government of the
city-state of Zurich allowed nuns to marry if they wished, and followed up the following year by
dissolving all monasteries in its territory and using their revenues to fund education and help the poor. The former inhabitants
were offered help with learning a trade for their new secular lives and 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 ultimately failed and St Gall
survived.
It is unlikely that these moves went un-noticed by the English government and particularly by Thomas Cromwell, shortly to
become Henry VIII's chief minister and to promise to make his sovereign wealthier than any previous English monarch.
Process
Henry had himself declared Supreme Head of the Church of England in February 1531. In April 1533 an Act in Restraint of Appeals eliminated the right of clergy to appeal to "foreign
tribunals" (Rome) over the King's head in any spiritual or financial matter.
In 1534 Henry had Parliament authorize Thomas Cromwell, to "visit" all the monasteries
(which included all abbeys, priories and convents), ostensibly to make sure their members were instructed in the new rules for their supervision by the
King instead of the Pope, but actually to inventory their assets (see Valor Ecclesiasticus). A few months later, in January 1535 when the consternation at having a lay
visitation instead of a bishop's had settled down, Cromwell's visitation authority was delegated to a commission of laymen
including Layton, Pollard and Moyle. This phase is termed the "Visitation of the
Monasteries."
In the summer of that year, the visitors started their work, and "preachers" and "railers" were sent to deliver sermons from
the pulpits of the churches on three themes:
- The monks and nuns in the monasteries were sinful
"hypocrites" and "sorcerers" who were living
lives of luxury and engaging in every kind of sin;
- Those monks and nuns were sponging off the working people and giving nothing back and, thus, were a serious drain on
England's economy;
- If the King received all the property of the monasteries, he would never again need taxes from the people.
Meanwhile, during the autumn of 1535, the visiting commissioners were sending back to Cromwell written reports of all the
scandalous doings they said they were discovering, sexual as well as financial. A law that Parliament enacted in early 1536,
relying in large part on the reports of impropriety Cromwell had received, provided for the King to take all the monasteries with
annual incomes of less than £200, and that was done: the smaller, less influential houses were emptied, their few inhabitants
pensioned and their property confiscated. Monastic life had already been in decline. By 1536, the thirteen Cistercian houses in Wales had only 85 monks among them. Their reputation for misbehaviour was likely
overstated, however.
These moves did not raise as much capital as had been expected, even after the king re-chartered some of the confiscated
monasteries and confiscated them again. In April 1539 a new Parliament passed a law giving the King the rest of the monasteries
in England. Some of the abbots resisted, and that autumn the abbots of Colchester, Glastonbury, and Reading were executed for treason. (The Carthusian priors of Beauvale,
London, and Axholme, had been executed in 1535 for refusal to recognize Henry's Act of Supremacy.) St. Benet's Abbey in Norfolk was the only abbey in England which
escaped dissolution.
The other abbots signed their abbeys over to the King. Some of the confiscated church buildings were destroyed by having the
valuable lead removed from roofs and stone reused for secular buildings. Some of the smaller Benedictine houses were taken over as parish churches, and were even bought for the purpose by wealthy
parishes. The tradition that there was widespread destruction and iconoclasm, that
altars and windows were smashed, partly confuses the damage done
in the 1530s with the greater damage wreaked by the Puritans in the next century.
Relics were discarded and pilgrimages discouraged, however.
Places like Glastonbury, Walsingham, Bury St Edmunds, Shaftesbury and Canterbury, which had thrived on the pilgrim trade, suffered setbacks.
Henry needed more money; so many of the abbeys now in his possession were resold to the new Tudor gentry, aligning them as a class more firmly to the new Protestant settlement.
Consequences
The abbeys of England, Wales and Ireland had been among the greatest landowners and the largest institutions in the kingdom.
Particularly in areas far from London, the abbeys were among the principal centres of hospitality, learning, patronage of
craftspeople and sources of charity and medical care. The removal of over eight hundred such institutions virtually overnight
left many gaps.
It is unlikely that the monastic system could have been broken simply by royal action, if there had not been a strong feeling
of resentment against the church amongst the gentry and the mercantile population.
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]
The related destruction of the monastic libraries was one of the greatest cultural
losses caused by the English Reformation. Worcester Priory (now Worcester Cathedral)
had 600 books at the time of the dissolution. Only six of them have survived intact to the present day. At the abbey of the
Augustinian Friars at York, a library of 646 volumes was destroyed, leaving only three surviving books. Some books were destroyed
for their precious bindings, others were sold off by the cartload, including irreplaceable early English works. It is believed
that many of the earliest Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were lost at this time.
| “ |
A great nombre of them whych purchased those supertycyous mansyons, resrved of those
lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes, some to scoure candelstyckes, and some to rubbe
their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and soapsellers. |
” |
|
—John Bale, 1549
|
Monastic hospitals were also lost, with serious consequences locally. Monasteries had also supplied charitable food and alms
for the poor and destitute in hard times. The removal of this resource was one of the factors in the creation of the army of
"sturdy beggars" that plagued late Tudor England, causing the social instability that led to the Edwardian and Elizabethan
Poor Laws. In addition, monastic landlords were generally considered to be more lax and
easy-going than the new aristocrats who replaced them, demanding higher rents and greater productivity from their tenants.
More generally, the suppression of the English monasteries and nunneries contributed as well to the overall decline in
attention to contemplative spiritual practices in Protestant Europe in subsequent centuries, with the relatively rare exceptions
of groups like the Society of Friends ("Quakers").
The destruction of the monastic institutions was unpopular in some areas. In the north of England, centering on
Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, the suppression of the
monasteries led to a popular rising, the Pilgrimage of Grace, that threatened the
crown for some weeks. The demand for the restoration of some monasteries resurfaced later, in the West Country Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549.
Many of the dismantled monasteries and friaries were sold for nominal amounts (often to the local aristocrats and merchants),
and some of the lands the King gave to his supporters; there were also pensions to be paid to some of the dispossessed clerics.
Many others continued to serve the parishes. Although the total value of the confiscated property has been calculated to have
been £200,000 at the time, the actual amount of income King Henry received from it from 1536 through 1547 averaged only £37,000
per year, about one fifth of what the monks had derived from it.
In 1536 there were major popular risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and, a further rising in Norfolk the following year. Rumours were
spread that the King was going to strip the parish churches too, and even tax cattle and sheep. The rebels called for an end to
the dissolution of the monasteries, for the removal of Cromwell, and
for Henry's daughter, and eldest child, the Catholic Mary to be named as successor in place of his younger son Edward. Henry defused the movement with promises, and then summarily executed some of the
leaders.
See also
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
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