Dissolution of the Monasteries - Essay Example

Dissolution of the Monasteries, plunder and suppression of monasteries, nunneries, abbeys, friaries, and other s of monasticism in England, carried out on the orders of Henry VIII between 1536 and 1540 caused one of the greatest: economic, social-religious changes in English history. Centuries of religious life and service to local communities came to an end as buildings were left to fall into disrepair, and thousands of monks, nuns, and friars could no longer worship at their old houses. The Dissolution had a great effect on society, and substantial numbers of people in the north and east of England protested against it in the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536. Henry, working through his chief minister Thomas Cromwell, decided to cut England's ties with the papacy in Rome and introduce the Reformation into the kingdom. Historians have argued that the dissolution of England's monasteries was a social and economic revolution. Economic Consequences: - It was the biggest change in the ownership of land in the kingdom since the Norman Conquest. In the 16th century, England needed more land because of a rise in the kingdom's population and improvements in agriculture, allowing previously uncultivated lands to be opened up. The Dissolution also allowed people outside the Church to take advantage of the monasteries' property, and nobles and the gentry bought much of it. A large part of England's wealth was thus taken out of the hands of the Church; this allowed the gentry to take a more important part in the kingdom's affairs because they could afford to attend university and sit as Members of Parliament. 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 be 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. Money from the monasteries helped to ensure that Henry would have no difficulty financing the Crown. Consequences of the Act for the Suppression of the Lesser Monasteries: Prior to 1536, Henry had ordered that Thomas Cromwell, his Vicar-General, carry out an audit of the monasteries, which he did with four men in just six months, resulting in some wrong decisions. Cromwell reported 'Manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed amongst the little and small abbeys'. The reports of Cromwell often differed with the reports of the relevant Bishops and he tended to brand all houses as corrupt. It was in this spirit of reform that the Act for the Suppression of the Lesser Monasteries, 1536 was passed. The Act clearly pointed out the worthiness of 'great and honorable monasteries right well kept', contrasting these with the smaller houses that were 'sunk irredeemably in iniquity' and had 'resisted all attempts at reform for 200 years or more', and it was these that should be closed down. The Act also stated that 'The idle and dissolute monks and nuns who live in these little dens of vice should be dispersed amongst the greater abbeys where they will, by discipline and example, be brought to mend their ways. The properties and endowments thus vacated can then be transferred to the King, to put to such better uses as he may think fit'. Henry used the money to finance the building of forts around the English coast, hardly a better use. According to the Act, all the land and property of a religious house that had an income of less than 200 a year was transferred to the Crown. The Act allowed for the abbots, priors, abbesses and prioresses to be compensated with generous pensions and other monks and nuns could be transferred to another house or return to the secular way of life. The new owners of the lands were encouraged to retain the servants and farmhands. Neither did Dissolution come about because of Henry's break with the Church of Rome, as most of the clerics had sworn allegiance to the King after the Act of Supremacy. The few that refused to swear allegiance to the King and not the Pope included Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, both of whom were executed on grounds of treason. Therefore the main driving force behind Dissolution was raising money for Henry to spend. The Act of Suppression passed through the House of Commons and the House of Lords without any problems and it only applied to three out of every ten houses. The Act met fierce opposition in the north of England, leading to a rebellion in October 1536 known as the 'Pilgrimage of Grace', with the rebels demanding the restoration of the dissolved houses. They were not successful because of internal squabbling, at which point Henry mercilessly crushed them and the big religious houses that had supported them, including the execution of abbots. The Cistercian abbey of Furness in Cumbria had been sympathetic to the rebel's cause, but Cromwell could find nothing with which to indict the Abbot. The Abbot voluntarily transferred the abbey and lands to the Crown, the first of many monastic surrenders. Dissolution gained momentum in the latter stages of 1537 and nearly 20 houses a month were disappearing and Henry and his government now wished to get rid of all the religious houses, with the religious themselves having to declare that their monastic way of life had been a 'vain and superstitious round of dumb ceremonies' that they were willing to abandon so that they could live 'as true Christian men' outside the monasteries. No longer was Dissolution a reform. The last Dissolution was that of Waltham Abbey. The altar plates, goblets and vestments became part of Henry's jewel house, the bells became canons and the lead roofing was used for shot. The lead was often melted in furnaces built on site and fired with the roof timbers of the monasteries. In Lincolnshire the monasteries were systematically razed to the ground, others were left to a more gentle ruin, with the stones being used for other buildings in the local area. Some such as Lacock and Beaulieu became homes, others such as Tewkesbury were bought by local townspeople and some survived to become Cathedrals such as Durham. The immediate effect of the Dissolution was to transfer vast tracts of land to the Crown. Monastic land was worth at least three times as much as existing royal landholdings. Henry also acquired vast amounts of gold and silver plate, worth as much as one million pounds. Not only the Crown gained by the Dissolution - many royal administrators and clients lined their pockets with monastic money. The seizure of monastic land gave the Crown the possibility of complete financial independence. Had Henry VIII exploited it prudently, he and his successors might never have needed to call Parliament again. But from the very beginning, and particularly between 1543 and 1547, Henry sold most of the land to pay for extravagant wars with France and Scotland. The land was bought by merchants, by yeomen syndicates, by noblemen, and - overwhelmingly - by neighboring gentry families. Social 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 centers 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. The related destruction of the monastic libraries was one of the greatest cultural losses caused by the English Reformation. Worcester Priory 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. 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 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. At the same time, the Dissolution caused distress to men and women for whom religious houses had played an important part in their lives. Even some loyal Roman Catholic noblemen and gentlemen disapproved of Henry's actions, and they challenged the King in the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. Although the King's laws did not prevent monks and nuns gathering together for prayer and worship, they forced them out of the buildings where they had worshipped for generations. Some of Henry's critics claimed that the Dissolution had increased poverty and vagrancy, adding monks and nuns to the ranks of beggars. Indeed, beggars and vagrants, some of whom may well have been former members of the religious orders, were an alarming social problem for the subjects of Henry VIII's daughter Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabethan England. Luckier former monks found positions in Henry's new Church of England. 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. 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. An Act of Parliament made Henry Supreme Head of the Church in 1534. The country was still Catholic but the pope's power had been ended. When Henry became king in 1509, the church in England was as follows: Head of the Church: the pope based in Rome Church services: all were held in Latin Prayers: all said in Latin Bible: written in Latin Priests: not allowed to marry. By the death of Henry in 1547, the church in England was as follows: Head of the Church: the king Church services: held in Latin Prayers: most said in Latin. The "Lord's Prayer" was said in English Bible: written in English Priests: not allowed to marry. The Dissolution of the Monasteries in England and Wales had a considerable, and in many ways unexpected, effect on the course of English history. There was little popular pressure for an end to monasticism in the 1530s. Henry VIII was not opposed to the traditional worship of the Roman Catholic Church; he merely did not wish to perpetuate the authority of the papacy in England. William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, was a boy when the monasteries were dissolved, but he later referred to Henry VIII's policies as the "first reformation" in England. The Dissolution was, however, supported by Protestants because they opposed the Roman Catholic Church, and the Protestant Elizabeth I used the laws her father had passed to turn the Church of England into a true Protestant Chuch. The end of the monasteries was a display of Henry's power and his claim of absolute supremacy, but it was also a sign that the religious life of England was changing under the pressure of the Reformation. The Crown also acquired the monasteries' right to collect tithes (support from the parish to its priest), which had been taken over by the monasteries in exchange for them paying the priest a wage instead. Nobles and gentlemen also bought the impropriated tithes strengthened their hand in parish affairs. The enrichment of the gentry increased their power and independence relative to both Church and Crown. It also created a powerful pressure group with a vested interest in ensuring that the old Roman Catholic Church was never fully restored. Many monasteries had also held the right to choose which person should become priest of a parish. This right of presenting to a church living was known as an advowson, and monasteries controlled about two in five English advowsons. All these fell to the Crown making it an overwhelmingly powerful patron. Before the Reformation, 25 abbots had sat in the House of Lords: all of them lost their places leaving the secular lords in a majority over the Bishops (who continued to sit). The Dissolution of the monasteries involved a certain amount of physical destruction: buildings decayed because the lead was seized from the roofs; libraries were broken up and sold off. Moreover, traditional charitable functions of feeding and housing travelers ceased. Henry VIII promised to found thirteen new bishoprics on the proceeds from the dissolution, but only nine (Peterborough, Gloucester, Chester, Oxford, Bristol and Westminster; the last of these was suppressed by Edward VI in 1550) were actually created. Henry VIII did found a number of schools and Trinity College, Cambridge, but on balance charity and education suffered. In Henry's campaign to secure a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which led him to break with Rome, his strategy, as Bernard shows, was more consistent and more radical than historians have allowed. Henry refused to introduce Lutheranism, but rather harnessed the rhetoric of the continental reformation in support of his royal supremacy. Convinced that the church needed urgent reform, in particular the purging of superstition and idolatry, Henry's dissolution of the monasteries and the dismantling of the shrines were much more than a venal attempt to raise money. The king sought a middle way between Rome and Zurich, between Catholicism and its associated superstitions on one hand and the subversive radicalism of the reformers on the other. With a ruthlessness that verged on tyranny, Henry VIII determined the pace of change in twenty years fundamental to England's religious development. The creation of the "English Bible": William Tyndale's 1525 Bible was published in Cologne and initially banned in England as heretical. But Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer did persuade Henry VIII to allow the publication in England of a vernacular Bible. This project came to fruition in Matthew's Bible of 1537 (a hybrid version partly taken from Tyndale's translation and partly translated by John Rogers (who worked under the assumed name of Thomas Matthew). In 1539, it was revised and reissued as the Great Bible, In May 1541, a Royal Proclamation ordered every parish to comply Cromwell's instructions and have a copy for public use before Ash Wednesday, 1541. Reference List: 1. Land and Politics in England of Henry 8, by R.B. Smith, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1970 2. Remy Lafort and John Cardinal Farley, Volume VII. Published 1910. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Nihil Obstat, June 1, 1910. 3. Remy Lafort and John Cardinal Farley, Volume X. Published 1911. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Nihil Obstat, October 1, 1911. 4. J.C.K. Cornwall, Wealth and Society in Early Sixteenth-Century England (Cambridge 1988) 5. The King's Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (Yale University Press, 2005) 6. RB Ekelund Jr, RF Hebert, RD Tollison - Journal of Political Economy, 2002 7. F. A. Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (8th ed. London 1925) 8. C. Haigh, The Last Days of the Lancashire Monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace (1969) 9. G. Baskerville, English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries (1937) 10. Brendan Bradshaw, The Dissolution of the Religious Orders in Ireland under Henry VIII (1974) Read More