The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey,dissolved in the Dissolution.
Article from the website of "British Express"
Henry VIII took his most decisive step against the power of the church in 1538, when he began the Dissolution of the Monasteries. He did it piecemeal. First the small, less powerful houses had their property confiscated and their buildings blighted. They were followed the next year by the large houses.
Philosophical concepts of the power of the king over church may have played a part in Henry's decision to suppress the monasteries, but so did greed. The monasteries were rich, and a lot of that wealth found its way directly or indirectly to the royal treasury. Some of the monastery buildings were sold to wealthy gentry for use as country estates. Many others became sources of cheap building materials for local inhabitants. One of the results of the Dissolution of the Monasteries is that those who bought the old monastic lands were inclined to support Henry in his break with Rome, purely from self interest.
Many of the clerics themselves thought that a change was in order. The difference was, they thought the wealth they possessed should go to charity, "religious and educational enterprises." Everyone else had a personal stake in the matter; Henry wanted money, Parliament wanted to raise money without having to impose unpopular taxes, the gentry saw a chance to increase their own estates, and the merchant middle class saw a chance to become landed gentry themselves.
Henry sold the monastic lands for bargain basement prices, such was his need for ready cash. The real beneficiary of the Dissolution was not the king, but the new class of gentry who bought the lands. The suppression of the monasteries and places of pilgrimages was devastating for those pilgrimage centres that had no other economic base. Income for people on the pilgrim routes dropped, with no way to recover it. The other great loser of the Dissolution was culture; many monastic libraries full of priceless illuminated manuscripts were destroyed, with little or no regard for their value.
The monks and nuns were treated quite well as a rule. Only a few who resisted were summarily executed. The others, including 5000 monks, 1600 friars, and 2000 nuns, were given reasonable pensions. Many of the monks and friars went into regular church office, so they could not be said to have suffered. Those who did suffer were the thousands of servants attached to the monasteries. They numbered more than the monks, but there was no pension for them.
The English Reformation was slow to gather steam. Catholics were not mistreated (at least not at first), and in many parts of the country religious life went on unchanged. Catholic rites and symbols remained in use for many years.
(abridged from http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Dissolution_of_the_Monasteries.htm)
Ruins of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire
Article by Chris Trueman
The dissolution of the monasteries was one of the key features of the reign of Henry VIII. The monasteries were seen as being a cornerstone of Papal authority in England and Wales. After various pieces of legislation were introduced into England that ended the Pope’s authority during the early 1530’s, the monasteries became the focal point of the king’s attack as it was assumed that they would remain loyal to the Pope. However, whether the attack on the monasteries – known as the dissolution of the monasteries – was for spiritual or financial reasons is open to debate.
Henry VIII had inherited a considerable amount of money from his father Henry VII. By the mid-1530’s Henry had spent a great deal of this inheritance. However, he would have known that the monasteries were the wealthiest institutions in England and Wales. His advisors, like Thomas Cromwell, had spun the story that a great deal of their annual wealth went to the Vatican. This was an effort to drum up support among the people for the king’s campaign against the Pope. However, it was known by the government that little of the monasteries wealth left England and Wales for the Vatican and that they were, in fact, very wealthy.
When Henry had become king in 1509 there were more than 850 religious houses in England and Wales. While what happened to them is termed the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’, this is, in fact, a misleading term as few of these establishments were known as monasteries. Those larger rural religious houses, such as at Tintern in Gloucester, were referred to as abbeys. Medium sized religious houses were usually called priories (or nunneries) and a friary was usually used to describe the smallest of houses. The most usual division between the two was that some were open while some were closed. Closed religious houses were essentially this – closed to all those outside of those who lived in that religious house. Open houses meant that the occupants worked with the local sick and provided, for example, teachers for boys in the local community. It was common for open religious houses to be poor as what money they raised was spent on the local community. However, closed orders could be (and many were) very wealthy. Though they kept themselves away from the ‘common man’, many of these religious houses relied on the local population to work for them for free. In this way, some religious orders grew spectacularly rich. It was these institutions that are frequently referred to as ‘monasteries’ and they owned, it is thought, about one-third of all the land in England and Wales. The thirty richest monasteries were as rich or richer than the wealthiest nobles in the land. This wealth had been acquired over the centuries – people who hoped to ‘buy’ their way into Heaven had bequeathed much of the land that the monasteries owned to them. For many the work of monks and nuns was an accepted and normal part of life – few knew any different.
The closing down of monasteries was not new. Cardinal Wolsey shut down a number of religious houses years before the attack by Cromwell and Henry. He had done this with the full blessing of the Pope as some of the religious houses in England had ‘decayed’ – the lack of people in them had stopped them being effective. When he closed them, Wolsey used the money raised from them for charitable purposes, including the building of a new grammar school in Ipswich. The man who did the legal work for this was Thomas Cromwell and the records indicate that what was done did not concern anyone of importance at the time.
The whole approach to religious houses changed in 1535. Cromwell, now Henry’s vicegerent responsible for the day-to-day running of the Church, ordered that all religious houses should be visited by one of his representatives. Traditionally either a local bishop or a senior member of the order concerned had done these visits. Their task was to check on standards etc. Now Cromwell ordered that his men should do them.
In the same year, the ‘Valor Ecclesiasticus’ was introduced. This was a full-scale undertaking to examine just how much property was owned by the Church in England and Wales. The findings proved to be of great importance to Cromwell even though questions have to be asked as to the accuracy of the reports that were fed back to Cromwell. Those who did the investigating were unpaid local gentry who would have been in a prime position to make out of any attack on religious houses in their locality.
The ‘Valor Ecclesiasticus’ combined with the visits ordered by Cromwell proved to be a difficult problem for the religious houses. The visits were orchestrated mainly carried out by Thomas Legh and Richard Layton – both trusted employees of Cromwell. Both men were ambitious and would have known about the final outcome desired by Cromwell. It is assumed that they suitably adjusted their reports to fit in with Cromwell’s game plan. Though the lack of evidence means that it cannot be proved, it is generally thought that both provided Cromwell with a list of each house’s shortcomings as opposed to any strong points that a house might have had. Their list of ‘comperta’ was certainly much greater than any positives each house had. Many houses complained about the bullying tactics of Legh and Layton but it seems that Cromwell ignored these complaints. Such was their reputation that the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 specifically called on the “evil councillors” to receive “special punishment”.
In March 1536 Parliament passed an act that many in the monasteries had feared. The act stated that any monastery with an income of less than £200 a year (as assessed by the Valor Ecclesiasticus) was to be dissolved and their property passed to the Crown. The heads of the houses were to be offered a pension while those who lived in each religious house were given the choice of transferring to a larger one or going to live in society free of any vows of poverty and obedience but still having to respect their vow of chastity. Three hundred religious houses fell within this category of having an income of less than £200 a year. The majority were closed down but at least 67 were given royal permission to remain open as the act gave Henry the right to do this. However, those religious houses that were ‘saved’ had to pay for their survival. This was usually a year’s income. So this would have earned the king about £13,500 – though it is thought that another 10 religious houses fell into this category but their records have been lost. If this is so, the 77 houses involved would have meant that Henry received about £15,500 from them.
Once the act was passed, government commissioners moved with speed to shut down the religious houses. They feared that any delay in their actions would allow the moveable treasure and wealth of these houses to ‘disappear’. These small monasteries were easy targets and could do little against the government. Their valuable metal – gold, silver, bronze and lead – was taken by the government to be melted down. The land was swiftly rented out while all other items not required by the government were auctioned off locally. What the government did not require was taken by the local population. Well-cut bricks, fences etc were all well received by the locals. Hence why so many monasteries became classic ruins very quickly – they were all but dismantled by either the government or by the locals (with the government’s support). The one area where this did not happen speedily was in the North, where the local population did not support what was going on. The attempted actions of the commissioners in the North were one of the causes of the Pilgrimage of Grace (October 1536).
Some religious houses were charged with helping the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Once order was restored, Henry showed no mercy. The head of each religious house thought to be involved was declared a traitor in an act of attainder and executed. In an act of dubious legality, it was declared that the houses of the executed religious leaders were their property. Therefore, after their execution all this ‘private’ property transferred to the Crown – as was required by an act of attainder. Any monks left from these houses were forced out.
However, even after the Pilgrimage of Grace had ended, many powerful and rich monasteries remained – those that had an income of more than £200 and therefore did not come under the 1536 Act and were south of the area affected by the Pilgrimage of Grace.
Action against these houses was piecemeal as no equivalent of the 1536 act was passed. Cromwell sent out commissioners to each of the houses. Those that seemed prepared to fight were noted but Cromwell had told the commissioners to leave these houses once they had spread some degree of fear in them. The method used by the commissioners to persuade each head of a religious house was to make a threat couched in ‘if you love the king’. With the example of what had happened to abbots in the north for their ‘disloyal’ behaviour to the king during the Pilgrimage, many abbots succumbed to royal pressure. In 1539 an act was passed in Parliament that stated that any religious house that had surrendered its property voluntarily to the Crown was part of a legal act – as would be any future surrender of property. The act also included a rider that there could be no challenges to the validity of the king’s title of ownership once a monastery had voluntarily dissolved. If the king then transferred ownership of titles, these too could not be contested in a court.
The government’s commissioners went about their task with great energy. There is little doubt that the threat posed by the government led to many heads of religious houses handing over their land and wealth – just as Henry and Cromwell would have wished. However, there were some abbots and religious house leaders who would not be bullied. They had to face the full force of the law, as it was perceived then. The Abbot of Glastonbury led what was a very wealthy monastery, one of the wealthiest in England. He was executed and the buildings in the monastery were all but destroyed. The land passed to the king. The abbot himself was charged with secretly hoarding gold and “other parcels of plate, which the abbot had hid secretly from all such commissioners”.
By 1540, over 800 monasteries had been dissolved. The process had taken just about four years.
(abridged from http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/dissolution_monasteries.htm)
The suppression of English Monasteries