Much haggling and bargaining took place with the monks themselves. The abbot of Athelney was offered 100 marks, and another ecclesiastical post. He threw up his hands and declared that ‘I will fast three days on bread and water than take so little’. One monk tried to sell his cell door for two shillings, and said that it had cost more than five shillings. So within three years the life of ten centuries was utterly destroyed.
It was perhaps a saving grace that eight cathedral churches, once staffed by monks and nuns, were now turned into secular cathedrals; the most important cathedrals in England became Canterbury, Rochester, Winchester, Ely, Norwich, Worcester, Durham and Carlisle. Only the monastic cathedral of Coventry was torn down. The others remained as centres of music and sung liturgy in a reformed world that became increasingly wary of their power.
It is difficult to calculate the effect of the dissolution on the educational life of the country. Some effort was made to replace religious with secular training. There had been a rise in the number of educational foundations in the decades around 1500, but the appetite for formal education was by no means diverted or diminished. Henry and his ministers, for example, endowed twelve permanent grammar schools in the cathedral cities, and it can be said with some certainty that the sixteenth century remained the age of the grammar school. The richer tradesmen endowed schools in their own towns, and borough institutions took the place of monastic institutions. Christ’s Hospital was established, for example, within the former Greyfriars Convent in London.
The leading reformer, Hugh Latimer, urged upon the clergy of Winchester their duty to educate children in the learning of English, while Cranmer proposed a collegiate foundation at Canterbury to take the place of the monastic cathedral school. At a later date, the archbishop of York declared the foundation of schools to be ‘so good and godly a purpose’. Yet the old faith could still prove usefuclass="underline" some monks began life again as schoolmasters in village or town; chapels became schoolrooms.
Some of the last monasteries to be dissolved were those of Colchester, Glastonbury and Reading, where the abbots were denounced as seditious. The abbot of Glastonbury was accused of concealing or taking away the treasures of his house and is reported to have said that ‘the king shall never have my house but against my will and against my heart’. More seriously, perhaps, he is reported to have previously expressed support for the northern rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace. He declared them to be ‘good men’ and ‘great crackers’. It was also discovered that he, together with the abbot of Reading, had supplied the pilgrims with money. When the abbey itself was searched, gold and silver, vessels and ornaments, were found in walls, vaults and other ‘secret places’. The commissioners searched the abbot’s rooms and found there such suspicious items as papal bulls and arguments against the king’s divorce. He was questioned and his answers were deemed to be ‘cankered and traitorous’.
The abbot was charged and sentenced; he was dragged through the streets of Glastonbury before being taken to the conical hill known as Glastonbury Tor where he was hanged. His head was then placed on the abbey gate, and his quarters distributed through Somerset. So was dissolved one of the greatest of English shrines, supposedly the home of the Holy Grail and the last resting place of King Arthur. The abbots of Reading and Colchester suffered the same fate in their own towns.
The convents and friaries were the next to fall. Some 140 nunneries had been established in England, with perhaps 1,600 women, the majority of them belonging to the Benedictine order. It was much harder for a nun than a monk to make her way in the secular world; she could earn no obvious living, and as an unmarried woman would endure many more hardships in a society that considered marriage to be the only proper fate of the female. Nuns and monks were in any case still bound to their vows of chastity.
The nuns of Langley were according to the commissioners ‘all desirous to continue in religion’. The prioress ‘is of great age and impotent’ while ‘one other is in regard a fool’. Yet they were not spared. The nunneries were genuinely missed in their immediate neighbourhoods. They had become guest houses for the more important gentry. At the nunnery in Langley, for example, Lady Audeley used to attend church accompanied by twelve dogs. The convents had also offered a simple education for the daughters of the gentry, where they learned surgery, needlework, confectionery, writing and drawing. The great ages of female spirituality, evinced by such women as Dame Julian of Norwich, now also came to an end.
In the autumn of 1538 the friaries were destroyed. They were all situated within or close to towns, the friars themselves devoted to an active ministry of preaching in the world; 200 of them were in existence, and the number of friars can be estimated at 1,800. They had very little wealth or treasure, but it was considered fitting that they should also submit to the king’s authority. In many cases their surrender took the form of a confession to unnamed ‘crimes and vices’. Particular charges were sometimes raised against them. They were accused of dabbling in necromancy. The community of Austin Friars in London was compared to a herd of wild beasts in Sherwood Forest, and it was reported that they sat in the beer-house from six in the morning until ten at night ‘like drunken Flemings’. But in truth the principal offence of the friars was their resistance to reform. The Observant friars, in particular, had been vociferous in the cause of Katherine of Aragon. Some of the friars changed their clothes and became secular priests, while others went back into the world. Thomas Cromwell came across one friar, however, who was still wearing his old habit. ‘If I hear by one o’clock that this apparel be not changed,’ he warned him, ‘you will be hanged immediately for example to all others.’
While the monasteries were suppressed, their shrines and relics were destroyed. The ‘rood of grace’ at Boxley Abbey, in Kent, was one such holy image, which was also known, to the men of the new faith, as the Dagon of Ashdod or the Babylonish Bel. It was a wooden crucifix upon which the eyes and the head of Jesus sometimes moved; on some occasions the whole body on the cross trembled to express the reception of prayers. Many offerings were of course made to such a miraculous figure. A man named Partridge suspected a fraud and, laying hands on the rood, exposed a number of springs that had made the motions. It was brought to London, and pieces of it were tossed to the crowd outside St Paul’s Cathedral.
In the summer of 1537 the cult statue of Our Lady of Worcester was stripped of its clothes and jewels, to reveal that it was a doll-like effigy of an early medieval bishop. The images of the Virgin were taken down from shrines in Ipswich, Walsingham and Caversham; they were carried in carts to Smithfield and burned. The blood of Hailes, popularly believed to be the blood of Christ, was revealed to be a mixture of honey and saffron. The bishop of Salisbury, Nicholas Shaxton, urged the destruction of all ‘stinking boots, mucky combs, ragged rochets [vestments], rotten girdles, pyld [threadbare] purses, great bullocks’ horns, locks of hair, and filthy rags, gobbets of wood under the name of parcels of the holy cross …’ It was soon decreed that there must be no more ‘kissing or licking’ of supposed holy images.
These were only preliminaries to the greatest act of destruction, or desecration, in English history. The shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury was probably the richest in the world. The least costly of its materials was pure gold, and Erasmus once described how ‘every part glistened, shone and sparkled with rare and very large jewels, some of them exceeding the size of a goose’s egg’. It was a treasure house of devotion, a bright worker of wonders and miracles. This was now dismantled, with the jewels and gold packed into wooden chests before being transported to London in twenty-six ox-wagons. One great ruby donated to the saint by a king of France, Louis VII, was fashioned into a ring that Henry wore on his thumb.