Dissolution of the Monasteries

I

Introduction

Dissolution of the Monasteries, plunder and suppression of monasteries, nunneries, abbeys, friaries, and other institutions of monasticism in England, carried out on the orders of Henry VIII between 1536 and 1540, one of the greatest social and 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. To understand the Dissolution, and the concerns of men and women who were opposed to it, it is necessary to consider why 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.

II

Henry VIII and the English Reformation

Before the 1530s, the Church in England, as part of the Roman Catholic Church of Europe, was subordinate to the pope. Henry decided to divorce his first wife Catherine of Aragón, who had failed to give him a male heir, but the reigning pope, Clement VII, refused to annul the marriage. This forced Henry to consider his position very carefully: in 1533 he separated England from the Roman Catholic Church. Since Catherine did not want to divorce, she appealed to Clement VII for a decision. Henry ordered his officials to find ancient precedent for disobedience to the pope. In the end, the position taken was that the king was an “emperor”. This did not mean that he claimed to control an empire of territories or lands, but that the pope had no right to make decisions applying to England. The King declared himself supreme head of the Church of England, and denied the right of any other foreign countries or monarchs to interfere in the affairs of his Church. This presented a problem for many of England's monasteries, which were mostly branch houses of monastic orders spanning Europe.

III

The Monasteries of England

Monasteries had been part of the religious life of the kingdom for many years. Their economic importance, through their large estates, was matched by their religious and cultural significance, not least in their large libraries. Monks also had wider social duties that gave them important positions in their local communities: they cared for the sick, provided for the poor, and furnished food and shelter for travellers.

This was the ideal, but some in the 16th century were beginning to criticize the monks' way of life. Before the dissolution, Thomas Wolsey, Henry's chief minister before Cromwell and a Roman Catholic cardinal, made a survey of how monks lived. The results showed that men who were supposed to be leading simple religious lives were eating and drinking well, playing games, and sometimes even keeping wives and mistresses. This was nothing new: monks had had disreputable reputations for many years. Even Geoffrey Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, described a monk who enjoyed the pleasures of life. However, it angered the new reformers inspired by Protestantism, who thought that it reflected a real failure of the Church to provide for the spiritual needs of the country. The English Protestant Simon Fish wrote A Supplication for the Beggars in 1529, in which he called all Roman Catholic Churchmen (including monks and friars) “ravenous wolves”, accusing them of excessive wealth, greed, and idleness. The considerable landed wealth of the monastic houses, though hardly new, also made a tempting target both for accusations of worldliness and appropriation by secular powers. Wolsey himself had dissolved some houses in 1529, partly to acquire their wealth.

IV

Thomas Cromwell and the End of the Monasteries

Thomas Cromwell, Henry's chief minister, organized the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Cromwell may well have been a covert Protestant, but Henry was not; although the King wanted to rid England of the power of the pope, he was still religiously very conservative and traditional, and persecuted the radical Protestants. Henry wanted money and power, and this is exactly what the demise of the monasteries could give him. In 1535, Cromwell ordered some of his officers to tour the monasteries of England and Wales. They collected the names of the monks, and listed the value and property of their monasteries. The result of this survey was called the Valor Ecclesiasticus, and it showed how much money the Crown could make from taxing the monasteries or dissolving them.

The end of the monasteries in England and Wales began with an act of Parliament in 1536, which ordered the dissolution of all religious houses worth less than £200: there were nearly 400 of them across the kingdom. Two years later, Parliament ordered the closure of the rest of the monasteries. By 1540, there were no functioning monasteries left: the buildings were left to decay, their metalwork and jewellery was melted down, and their libraries were dispersed. Although some fine specimens of medieval monastic architecture remain—Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire or Much Wenlock Priory in Shropshire, for example—the extent of the destruction is shown by the fact that all that is left of most monasteries is stone walls, arches, and windows.

Parliament gave Henry the right to dispose of the monastic lands as he wished, and between 1536 and 1547 he received over £1 million from the Dissolution. The money was channelled into the Court of Augmentations of the King's Revenue, a new state department created by Cromwell for the purpose. Some of this money was used to create new religious dioceses to be presided over by the Church of England's bishops, to help the churches at some of England's cathedrals, and to fund new professorships at the University of Cambridge. It also allowed Henry to build fortresses and coastal defences against the French. However, Henry's heavy expenditure, especially on campaigns against Scotland and France in the 1540s, meant that the Crown derived little lasting benefit from the transfer of resources.