Yet Henry still feared popular discontent. He described his method to the rulers of Scotland as they began their own policy of dissolution. He advised them to keep their intentions ‘very close and secret’ in order to thwart any delays from the clergy. He then suggested that commissioners be dispatched ‘as it were to put good order in the same’ but really ‘to get knowledge of all their abominations’. The Scottish leaders should consult among themselves on the distribution of the monastic lands ‘to their great profit and honour’. The monks and abbots should then be offered some financial settlement. This was indeed the policy he followed.
Some of the great abbots were first obliged to surrender their houses, signing a declaration that ‘they did profoundly consider that the manner and trade of living, which they and others of their pretended religion, had for a long time followed, consisted in some dumb ceremonies … by which they were blindly led, having no true knowledge of God’s laws’. This might charitably be called a voluntary surrender, although the threat of death or imprisonment lay behind it. These submissions were then followed by induced surrenders as one by one the greater monasteries fell. In the first eight months of 1538, for example, thirty-eight of them were appropriated by the Crown.
Cromwell’s agent at the priory of Lewes described ‘how we had to pull the whole down to the ground’. The vault on the right side of the high altar was the first to be destroyed, followed by the groined roof, walls and pillars of the church. ‘We brought from London,’ he wrote, ‘seventeen persons, three carpenters, two smiths, two plumbers, and one that keepeth the furnace.’ The furnace was used to melt down the lead stripped from the roof. Nothing went to waste. The pages of the books from the monastic libraries, once one of the glories of England, were employed to scour candlesticks or clean shoes; they also had another use since the pages could become ‘a common servant to every man, fast nailed up upon posts in all common houses of easement’. A house of easement was a latrine.
A young man who lived in the neighbourhood of Roche Abbey, in south Yorkshire, spoke to one of the workmen who were destroying the abbey church.
‘Did you,’ he asked, ‘think well of the religious persons and of the religion then used?’
‘Yes,’ the man replied, ‘for I saw no cause to the contrary.’
‘Well, then how comes it to pass that you are so ready to destroy and spoil what you thought so well of?’
‘Might I not as well as others have some profit from the spoil of the abbey? For I saw all would away, and therefore I did as others did.’
There speaks the representative voice of the Englishman at a time of reformation.
The Carthusians were the most roughly handled, and in the summer of 1537 a list was drawn up detailing their fates under the headings of ‘there are departed’, ‘there are even at the point of death’ and ‘there are sick’. The Charterhouse at Smithfield was turned into a venue for wrestling matches, and the church became a warehouse for the king’s tents; the altars were turned into gaming tables.
As the certainty of suppression became more evident, the monasteries were eager to sell or to lease whatever property they possessed. At Bisham the monks sold their vestments in the chapter house while at a market set up in the cloister they brought their own cowls to sell.
Yet some provision was made for the lives of the monks themselves. At the priory of Castle Acre, for example, the religious were given a payment of £2 together with a small quarterly pension; this became general practice. As a result some monks were willing and even eager to go. ‘Thank God,’ said the former abbot of Beaulieu, ‘I am rid of my lewd monks.’ The former abbot of Sawtry revealed that ‘I was never out of debt when I was abbot’. Certain abbots became diocesan bishops and were more prosperous than ever; the prior of Sempringham became bishop of Lincoln, for example, and the abbot of Peterborough became the see’s bishop. The monks themselves often became the canons or prebendaries of the cathedrals.
Resistance was maintained by the brave or the foolish. When one monk at the Carthusian house of Hinton denied the royal supremacy, the others explained that he was a lunatic. The royal commissioners sometimes moved on from recalcitrant houses, leaving them isolated and unprotected until the commissioners returned on a future occasion. Yet sometimes the seizures were sudden and immediate. The monks at Evesham were at evensong in the choir when they were told to ‘make an end’.
Where did the spoils go? It had previously been proposed that the dissolution of the monasteries was for the higher good of the nation. The incomes of the various priories would be spent on colleges and hospitals and schools ‘whereby God’s work might the better be set forth, children brought up in learning, clerks nourished in the universities, old servants decayed to have livings, almshouses for poor folk to be sustained in, readers of Greek, Hebrew and Latin to have good stipends, daily alms to be ministered, mending of highways …’ It never happened. The only deity worshipped was that of Mammon.
It is difficult to estimate the size of monastic occupation. At the time it was believed that the clergy owned one third of the land, but it may be safe to presume that the monks controlled one sixth of English territory. This was of immense benefit to the Crown, and represents the largest transfer of land ownership since the time of the Norman conquest.
The greater parts of the monastic lands were sold to the highest bidder or the highest briber; many went to the local gentry or to newly rich merchants who were eager to secure their status in a society based solidly on land ownership. It was a way of binding the rising families both to the cause of the reformation and to the Tudor dynasty. City corporations sometimes made purchases, as did syndicates of investors that included doctors and lawyers. The parlours of successful men were hung with altar-cloths, their tables and beds covered with copes instead of carpets. The once sacred chalices and patens were now in secular use. It is reported that, in Berwick, a baptismal font was used as a basin ‘in which they did steep their beef and salt fish’.
Many of the monasteries and priories fell into the pockets of the courtiers. Cromwell and the duke of Norfolk, for example, shared between them the lands and revenues of the wealthy Cluniac priories at Lewes in Sussex and at Castle Acre in Norfolk. Cromwell eventually appropriated the land and revenue of six religious houses, and was widely reputed to be (after the king) the richest man in England. The duke of Northumberland secured eighteen monastic properties, while the duke of Suffolk became master of thirty foundations. Cartloads of plate and jewels were taken to the royal treasury.
From the ruins of the plundered monasteries and abbeys arose new buildings. Sir William Paulet purchased Netley Abbey and built a fine residence from the remains of the church and cloisters; Sir Thomas Wriothesley fashioned a gatehouse in the nave of Titchfield Abbey, and Sir Edward Sharington turned a nunnery into a family house. It was reported at the time that a Lancashire gentleman, having purchased an abbey, ‘made a parlour of the chancel, a hall of the church and a kitchen of the steeple’. The steeple of Austin Friars, in London, was used to store coal. The Minories, an abbey of nuns of the order of St Clare, was turned into an armoury and St Mary Graces became a naval depot where great ovens were introduced for baking bread. The house of the Crutched Friars, in the street near Tower Hill which still bears the name, was changed into a glass manufactory. Other churches were converted into stables, cookhouses and taverns. The abbeys of Malmesbury and Osney became clothing factories.
Some of the great men of the realm openly asked for the spoils. Sir Richard Grenville, the marshal of Calais, wrote to Cromwell that ‘if I have not some piece of this suppressed land by purchase or gift of the king’s majesty I should stand out of the case of few men of worship of this realm’. He was, in other words, following the example of everyone else.