Dissolution of the monasteries

A leading figure here is the scholar and theologian Desiderius Erasmus who satirized monasteries as lax, as comfortably worldly, as wasteful of scarce resources, and as superstitious; he also thought it would be better if monks were brought more directly under the authority of bishops.

They set a cap on fees, both for the probate of 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.

J. J. Scarisbrick remarked in his biography of Henry VIII: Suffice it to say that English monasticism was a huge and urgent problem; that radical action, though of precisely what kind was another matter, was both necessary and inevitable, and that a purge of the religious orders was probably regarded as the most obvious task of the new regime—as the first function of a Supreme Head empowered by statute "to visit, extirp and redress".

[12] The exceptional spiritual discipline of the Carthusian, Observant Franciscan and Bridgettine orders had, over the previous century, resulted in their being singled out for royal favour, in particular with houses benefitting from endowments confiscated by the Crown from the suppressed alien priories.

[citation needed] By the time Henry VIII turned to monastery reform, royal action to suppress religious houses had a history of more than 200 years; his innovation was in scale The first case was that of the so-called 'alien priories'.

Some of these were granges, agricultural estates with a single foreign monk in residence to supervise; others were rich foundations in their own right (e.g., Lewes Priory was a daughter of Cluny and answered to the abbot of the French house).

The subjects of these dissolutions were usually small, poor, and indebted Benedictine or Augustinian communities (especially those of women) with few powerful friends; the great abbeys and orders exempt from diocesan supervision such as the Cistercians were unaffected.

[citation needed] The conventional wisdom of the time was that the proper daily observance of the Divine Office of prayer required a minimum of twelve professed religious, but by the 1530s, few communities in England could provide this.

Most observers were in agreement that a systematic reform of the English church must involve the drastic concentration of monks and nuns into fewer, larger houses, potentially making monastic income available for more productive religious, educational and social purposes.

Religious superiors met their bishops' pressure with the response that the cloistered ideal was only acceptable to a tiny minority of regular clergy, and that any attempt to enforce their order's stricter rules could be overturned in counter-actions in the secular courts, if aggrieved monks and nuns obtained a writ of praemunire.

[citation needed] The King actively supported Wolsey, Fisher and Richard Foxe in their programmes of monastic reform; but even so, progress was painfully slow, especially where religious orders had been exempted from episcopal oversight by papal authority.

Luther, a one-time Augustinian friar, found some comfort when these views had a dramatic effect: a special meeting of the German province of his order held the same year voted that henceforth every member of the regular clergy should be free to renounce their vows, resign their offices, and marry.

From 1518, Thomas More was increasingly influential as a royal servant and counsellor, in the course of which his correspondence included strong condemnations of the idleness and vice in monastic life, alongside his equally vituperative attacks on Luther.

[18]In 1534, Cromwell undertook, on behalf of the King, an inventory of the endowments, liabilities 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.

[citation needed] In the autumn of 1535, the visiting commissioners were sending back to Cromwell their written reports, enclosing with them bundles of purported miraculous wimples, girdles and mantles that monks and nuns had been lending out for cash to the sick, or to mothers in labour.

[citation needed] The smaller houses identified for suppression were visited during 1536 by more local commissions, one for each county, charged with creating an inventory of assets and valuables, and empowered to obtain co-operation from monastic superiors by granting pensions or bribes.

Nevertheless, the public stance of the government was that the better-run houses could still expect to survive, and Cromwell dispatched a circular in March 1538 condemning false rumours of a general policy of dissolution while also warning superiors against asset-stripping or concealment of valuables, which could be construed as treasonable action.

A possible model was presented by the collegiate church of Stoke-by-Clare, Suffolk, where, in 1535 the evangelically minded Dean, Matthew Parker, had recast the college statutes away from the saying of chantry masses and towards preaching, observance of the office, and children's education.

This change corresponded with ideas of a reformed future for monastic communities that had been a subject of debate and speculation amongst leading Benedictine abbots for decades, and sympathetic voices were being heard from a number of quarters in the late summer of 1538.

[25] In April 1539, Parliament passed a new law retrospectively legalising acts of voluntary surrender and assuring tenants of their continued rights, but by then the vast majority of monasteries in England and Wales had already been dissolved or marked out for a future as a collegiate foundation.

[citation needed] About a quarter of net monastic wealth consisted of "spiritual" income arising where the religious house held the advowson (right to appoint) a benefice with the legal obligation to maintain the cure of souls in the parish, originally by nominating the rector and taking an annual rental payment.

From the mid-fourteenth century onwards, the canons had been able to exploit their hybrid status to justify petitions for papal privileges of appropriation, allowing them to fill vicarages in their possession either from among their own number, or from secular priests removable at will.

[citation needed] It is unlikely that the monastic system could have been broken simply by royal action, had there not been the overwhelming bait of enhanced status for gentry, and the convictions of the small but determined Protestant faction.

The antiquarian John Leland was commissioned by the King to rescue items of particular interest (especially manuscript sources of Old English history),[33] and other collections were made by private individuals, notably Matthew Parker.

This argument has been disputed, for example, by G. W. O. Woodward, who summarises: No great host of beggars was suddenly thrown on the roads for monastic charity had had only marginal significance and, even had the abbeys been allowed to remain, could scarcely have coped with the problems of unemployment and poverty created by the population and inflationary pressures of the middle and latter parts of the sixteenth century.

Where monasteries had provided grammar schools for older scholars, these were commonly refounded with enhanced endowments; some by royal command in connection with the newly re-established cathedral churches, others by private initiative.

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.

On the succession of Elizabeth, these former monks and friars (reunited both with their wives and their pensions) formed a major part of the new Anglican church and may properly claim credit for maintaining the religious life of the country until a new generation of ordinands became available in the 1560s and 1570s.

One unintended long-term consequence of the dissolution was the transformation of the parish clergy in England and Wales into an educated professional class of secure, beneficed incumbents of distinctly higher social standing.

Westminster Abbey, which had been retained as a cathedral, reverted to being a monastery; while the communities of the Bridgettine nuns and of the Observant Franciscans, which had gone into exile in the reign of Henry VIII, returned to their former houses at Syon and Greenwich respectively.