R E L I G I O N & R E L I G I O U S C H A N G E I N E N G L A N D , C . 1 4 7 0 -1 5 5 8

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES

THE DISSOLUTION & THE ‘HENRY’ MYTH:

THE PROBLEM:• The most significant change any monarch had ever imposed on England:• Process by which every abbey/convent/priory closed and lands taken into the king’s

possession (or sold).• Youings: a ‘revolution in land ownership, second only to that which followed the

Northern Conquest’.• 1/5 of all land• £200,000 per annum (more than King’s lands)

• Made the Reformation visible• 1500: two types of clergy – 1) Secular; 2) Religious• By 1540 – the Religious rapid decline.

• Huge windfall of cash for the crown:• Largest in English history• Promised to spend it on charitable purposes• Actually spent it on war with France (1544-46)• 1546 – bankrupt again.

HISTORIOGRAPHY:

• Distasteful:• Hoskins (1976): pure exploitation• ‘Stalin of Tudor England’, ‘loathsome character’ who ‘exhausted the

vocabulary of vituperation’.• Haigh: avarice cloaked in the language of spiritual reform.• Henry not help his own image:• ‘the enterprise…..requireth politic handling…commissioners must have secret

commission…[to]get knowledge of all their [the monks] abominations…he [the ruler] agreeing with them [the nobility] for the distribution of the lands of the abbeys…’

(To the Scottish regent, the Earl of Arran, 1543)

• More recent views stress religious fervour/ conviction alongside opportunism.

MONASTERIES & LATE-MEDIEVAL CATHOLICISM:

• What did monasteries do?• Powerhouses of prayers for the dead (but, chantries/ parishes encroach?)• Prestigious & independent (more Abbots in HofL than Bishops)• Social & economic roles (involved in lay life)

• Vibrant/healthy c.1500?• Under-examined in revisionist historiography.• Irrelevant/stagnant?• Knowles: idea of ‘immoral’ a myth; but zeal not the norm, either (therefore

no longer indispensable).• Hoyle: removed from the populace’s concerns• Duffy/Bossy – LMC = communal parish religion• People detached from monasteries: Hoyle, could remove them without damaging

purgatory• Recent work: intellectual life thriving/ more involved in everyday piety than

thought/ pilgrimages crucial

THE DISSOLUTION: PROCESS

• Not pre-meditated – ‘on the run’ Reformation• Two stages:• 1536-38 – Reform (smaller houses)• 1538-40 – Dissolve (all houses)

• Not necessarily ‘Protestant’, or unprecedented:• 1525-6 – Wolsey dissolved monasteries to finance

Oxbridge Colleges.• 1529 – Papal permission to unite houses with

fewer than 12 members.

THE DISSOLUTION: PROCESS

• ‘Reformation Parliament’:• Expected that Church revenues would be vulnerable to

attack.• Older ‘anti-clerical’ views revived.• 1529 – clergy to return to true purity (handing property to

the Crown achieve this):• Money employed to fight ‘the Turk’.• A move by Norfolk/Suffolk to destroy Wolsey?

• 1530 – Dissolution proposed in Ireland• Finance younger English lords & colonisation

THE DISSOLUTION: PROCESS

• 1535-6: Cromwell ordered survey of Church wealth:• Valor Ecclesiasticus• Visitors assessed morality/wealth/discipline• Sincere desire to impose order/reform?

• No clear method of dissolution:• Problem = founders’ rights• Pursued a process of voluntary surrenders• If HVIII opted to pursue founders’ rights, could weaken his hold on the

Church by allowing the nobles control• Cromwell favoured statue• KEY: CONSIDERABLE DEBATE ABOUT THE BEST MEANS OF PROCEEDING

TRIGGERED BY LEGAL ISSUES

THE SMALL HOUSES:

• 1536 – visitors reports justified seizure of religious houses with a value of under £200:• Extracts from Valor Ecclesiasticus helped the Bill pass in

Parliament.• Cromwell – concerned for reform?• Hesitant and unsure how quickly he could proceed.

• No sense that this would lead to the closure of ALL houses:• Monks from smaller houses permitted to enter larger ones.• 1536-7 – Henry founded two new houses.

THE ‘BIG’ HOUSES:

• Pilgrimage of Grace:• Moved from reform to dissolution 1538-40

• Lancashire – Abbot of Furness charged with supporting rebels:• Forfeit the monastery.• Not his property = legally dubious.

• 1538 – began to fall into Royal hands:• Cromwell – vice-regency over the houses:• Local pressure; 1538 visitations; policy of surrender (therefore dissolve without

Parliamentary approval).

• Voluntary surrenders; HVIII appoint Abbots he knew would comply• Pliant pensioned off; recalcitrant left penniless.

• 1539 – Parliament bill (after the fact):• Critics pleaded with HVIII to use wealth to charitable ends.

RESISTANCE – WHY SO QUIET?

• 1) Because irrelevant/ out of touch?

• 2) Cromwell adopted measures to limit discontent:• Safeguarded interests of tenants as far as possible:• Favour local landlords• Freeze rents

• Ensure that the elites had a vested interest in dissolution:• Royal gains matched by the ‘better sort’.

• Treat the religious decently (pensions) as long as complied.

RESISTANCE:

• Where resistance did occur is revealing:• Lancashire (Haigh)• Abolition of smaller houses (1536) led to involvement in

the Pilgrimage of Grace• More religious motivations than the social tumults of the

previous years• BUT – those who took over land Catholic (not evangelical)

& became staunch recusants under Elizabeth.

GREED?• Timing is significant:• Treaty of Nice (France/ Habsburgs) 1538• Kildare Revolt (Ireland) 1534

• But is it enough?• Not loot beyond the monasteries – why not Cathedrals? Chantries?• Significant political costs:• Thetford Priory, Norfolk – Duke of Norfolk’s ancestors buried there.

• 9 of the dissolved houses became Cathedrals (no gain)• 1546 – founded Oxbridge colleges despite Crown’s poverty.

• Note: not all houses particularly wealthy:• So why seize them all?

• Two other factors key:• 1) Security/Obedience• 2) Concern for Reform – Erasmian/evangelical tendencies

OBEDIENCE:

• Orders: an international presence:• Potential contradiction re: Royal Supremacy:• ‘Foreign’ power who looked to continental superiors• Vehement resistance to Supremacy (18 Carthusians/ 31 Observants

executed 1538-40)• Also ardent supporters of C of A and Elizabeth Barton• Suspicion of ‘popery’: conspire against King/Church

• HVIII showed reservations about monasteries during divorce proceedings:• March 1533 – intended to unite Church and Crown goods• Parliament of 1534 & need to raise an army because of the Irish

situation (proposal for dissolution)• I.E – was this about more than rank opportunism?

• Propaganda logic:

Henry was not stealing from the Church or aggrandizing royal wealth – but Reforming the Church according to the Truth, and for the laity’s benefit.

An expression of his duties as Supreme Head (like Old Testament monarchs).

Broken down into two categories:

1) Idolatry

2) The Commonwealth – withdrew resources to the few which could have been better used to help all

IDOLATRY & SUPERSTITION:

THE COMMONWEALTH:

• Not easy to justify wealth in a period of exceptional economic hardship

• Why economic hardship?• Population pressure• Agricultural production

could not keep pace (therefore rising prices)

• Inheritance practices = increased division of rich/poor.

• BUT, views of monastic wealth inconsistent.• Use of wealth to reform the

Church was acceptable – but their total loss not:• Thomas Starkey, Dialogue of

Pole & Lupset• Latimer (re: Benedictine House

of Great Malvern) – should be preserved: ‘not in monkery….but to maintain teaching, preaching, study with praying and…good housekeeping’.

‘EVANGELICAL’ VS ‘CONSERVATIVE’?:

• An emotive issue – both Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour hostile to the Dissolution:• Passion Sunday 1536, Boleyn’s almoner John Skip preached against lay

greed (series of allusions to Cromwell)• Seymour pleaded with the King for the restoration of the lesser houses

after the Pilgrimage of Grace.• Other courtiers defend individual houses, not the institution

of monasteries:• Lord Chancellor Audley (St Osyth’s & St John’s, Colchester)• Notion that the court ‘anti-clerical’ in need of revision

• Bishops not particularly effective defenders

IDOLATRY? OR CATHOLIC ICONOCLASM?• Monks = peddlers of sin/irreligion,

deluding the laity into idolatry• Evangelicals saw dissolution as a

doctrinal move against Purgatory (which it was not)• Sense of ambivalence• Felt that HVIII not push his ideas to their logical

conclusion

• Latimer – ‘the founding of monasteries argued purgatory to be, so the putting them down argueth them not to be’• Henry demolished Latimer’s scriptural arguments• Never entirely abandoned prayers for the dead

• Other evangelicals – particularly the Boleyn circle: • Hoped that the wealth would be used to

support preaching and education.• When it was clear that this would not

happen (c.1540), evangelicals increasingly isolated from the regime.

• Erasmian?• Material vs Spiritual approach to

Christianity• A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake (1526),

criticised shrines at Walsingham & Canterbury Cathedral.

• ‘who show uncertain relics for certain ones, and attribute more to them than ought to be, and basely makes a gain of them’.

• Henry to Duke of Norfolk (1537) – monasteries train people in superstition/deception:• Approves of the Duke’s blackening the

monks’ names ‘that the ignoraunt people may perceive, howe they have been absued in them, and the rather leave the supersticions, in to the whiche they [the religious] have, of long tyme, trayned them’.

EFFECTS – RELIGION:• Monasteries – meeting point

of sacred/profane• Encapsulated in pilgrimages.• Blossoming at the

Reformation:• Evidence: household

accounts/wills/pilgrims badges• C14th onwards, monasteries

increasingly skilled at fostering cults around saints’ relics.

KEY – MONASTERIES A MORE IMPORTANT PART IN PIETY THAN PREVIOUS GENERATION OF SCHOLARSHIP ALLOWED

• Removal of monasteries significant impact on piety

• Regime targeted the most famous relics in very public displays of ‘fraud’:• The Rood of Boxley• The Blood of Hailes• ‘Set pieces’ to demonstrated

‘monkish’ villainy (and, therefore, Henrician verity)

Concern with ‘superstition’ persistent KEY: EVANLEGICAL WRITING, BUT NECESSARILY EVANGELICAL IDEAS (ERASMIAN?)

EFFECTS – RELIGION:

• Decline of purgatorial practices/ intercession through prayer?• Robert Aske: ‘a greate nombre of messes unsaid’• Fewer chantry priests• Not end intercessory Masses (but raised the question of their future).

• Longer term – memory: • A physical space to remember the dead gone• Bodies of the deceased disintered (often led to charges of treason for

those families who resisted).• Margaret, Countess of Salisbury (1538)• Aske hated to see ‘tombs of honourable and noble men pulled don and sold’.

• Had been an aspect of social/political capital to be buried in a monastery (avenue no longer open).

TWO THINKING-POINTS:

• 1) Was witnessing this destruction to participate in it?• How could something ‘sacred’ be dissolved?

• 2) No way back to late-medieval Catholicism:• Mary I discover that monasteries were very hard to

re-found.

EFFECTS – SOCIAL & ECONOMIC:

• Unavoidably significant:• Huge landholders• Social roles alongside religious

• Debate re: impact on:• Value of land• Growing distinctions between rich & poor• The economy of cities (decline of pilgrimage/ arts)• The provision of charity

WHAT’S IN A MEMORY?

WHAT’S IN A MEMORY?