Dissolution of the Monasteries 1535-40: Consequences
Political

Don’t forget to argue that the pilgrimage of Grace was partly a political
response to the dissolution of the smaller monasteries. Analyse the demands
of the rebels relating to the monasteries.

You could legitimately include the improved financial position of the Crown
under the heading of political consequences. Make sure that you have some
supporting figures!

The dissolution strengthened lay influence in the House of Lords. Prior to
the dissolution, 29 abbots had sat in the Lords.

Sales of monastic lands gave the Crown huge powers of patronage. The
purchase of land bound the Crown and the landowning classes more tightly
together and gave both a vested interest in at least this part of the Henrician
religious settlement. Restitution of monastic estates would have been costly
both for Crown and gentry. Significantly the restoration of Catholicism
under Mary did not see the return of monasticism. The dissolution, for
political and legal reasons (title to newly acquired property, for example) was
virtually irreversible.

If it was not a motive for the dissolution, Henry was aware that the greater
interdependence of Crown and landed classes was a useful consequence. In
setting out a blueprint on dissolution for the benefit of James V, King of
Scotland, Henry advised his fellow sovereign to consult ‘with the chief of the
noble men’ and to share the land of the abbeys with them to ‘their great profit
and honour.’
Financial

The monasteries represented a huge asset: they owned about two million
acres of land, over 16%of the total in England.

Key Data
1. 1536-47 Crown earned over £1 million in rental income and sales. (Some
of the land was gifted to courtiers and clients but very little after 1540.)
2. The first surge in sales occurred in 1542-44, years which coincided with
wars against France and Scotland.
3. By 1547 half of the land had been sold, garnering £800,000. This was a
substantial windfall, especially given the relative (i.e. in comparison with its
European counterparts) poverty of the English crown.

The squander thesis does not really hold water.
1. Henry and Cromwell never intended to create an additional complex of Crown
lands that would free the monarch from dependence on Parliament for taxation.
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Dissolution of the Monasteries 1535-40: Consequences
2. Henry never intended to keep all the land. Instead the plan was to gradually
liquidate the newly acquired assets. Although sales peaked in 1542-44, there was no
fire sale of monastic lands.
3. It was not so much that the land was wasted but that the revenue from sales was
spent so badly. Much of it was wasted on wars which brought very limited gains (see
notes on Henry’s foreign policy in the 1540s), though one could argue that some of
the money was well spent, for example the shoring up of England’s coastal defences.
4. Even the money spent on wars against France and Scotland served its purpose in
that it allowed Henry to do what great renaissance monarchs did, which was to
wage war. Moreover, those wars were not entirely fruitless.
5. Nevertheless, Henry VIII did not save the money and leave his son a solvent
Crown, which had been his legacy in 1509. Instead he bequeathed to Edward a
Crown in debt.
Social

Do not underestimate the role of the monasteries in the spiritual life of
England. Thomas Audley wrote to Cromwell that while ordinary people
were resentful of the wealth of the monasteries and abuses by their
inhabitants, ‘they think there is great loss of their prayers.’

The dissolution yielded an educational dividend:
1. Henry VIII founded or re-founded six grammar schools (Bristol,
Canterbury, Carlisle, Chester, Ely) with the money from the dissolution of t
he monasteries.
2. Wolsey’s foundation Cardinal College, Oxford was re-endowed as Christ
Church.
3. Trinity College, Cambridge was also founded
4. Five Regius (appointment was in the gift of the crown) Professorships
were inaugurated at Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Apart from the spiritual services they provided, religious houses were an
important part of the kingdom’s social fabric. They were providers of basic
schooling and of alms and poor relief. David Knowles has estimated that
monastic charity may have amounted to as much as £7,000 to £10,000 a
year. The growing numbers of vagrants and poor may have been a direct
effect of the closure of the monasteries.

Thomas Starkey and the Commonwealth group were hopeful of a broader
programme of social reform. Income from the dissolution would pay for new
schools and more poor relief. Starkey and his supporters embraced humanism
as a movement of social and educational reform. Their hopes, however, were
not fulfilled. Thirteen new bishoprics had been projected but only six were
created under the Bishoprics Act (May 1539) and one of those,
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Dissolution of the Monasteries 1535-40: Consequences
Westminster, did not survive beyond 1550. Instead the money was spent on
reinforcing coastal defences 1538-39 and on wars against France and
Scotland 1542-46.

It had been hoped that some of the larger houses would be converted into
secular colleges where resident priests would educate the laity but such a
programme was never implemented. Talk of reform helped Henry in that it
served as a smokescreen for his basic motives for shutting down the
monasteries, which were financial and political. The Bishoprics Act was a
diversionary tactic, deliberately introduced at the same time a the bill for the
dissolution of the larger houses in order to buy support and generate
goodwill and suggest that dissolution was part of a broader policy of
educational reform.

Who bought the land?
1. Members of the nobility, merchant and lawyers (these new entrants to the
landowning class are sometimes unhelpfully called ‘new men’).
2. The nobility, however, were not the main buyers. Hence Norfolk’s
observation in September 1536 that ‘the time of sowing is at hand and every
other nobleman has already his portion’ is misleading.
3. Nor should the gains made by new men be overstated. Lawyers did buy
land but they were often the sons of landed families.
4. The majority of buyers were existing members of the gentry (the landed
classes one level below the landowning nobility in the social hierarchy).
Often they were younger sons of the landowning classes, excluded from land
ownwership under inheritance laws. Sometimes they had been stewards
(estate managers) of the suppressed monasteries in their native counties and
were well placed as buyers.
5. The net effect. therefore, of the land sales was to bolster the position of the
higher echelons of the landed classes or gentry at the expense of the Crown
and the Church.
Elton: ‘the largest share went to the established landed gentry.’
Elton: ‘the main result of the redistribution was to increase the size and number of
middling estates.’

One by-product of the dissolution was to extend lay control over the church.
Many monasteries had bee rectors to a parish. They received a tithe (literally
a tenth, a tax paid in cash or kind) from that parish and appointed a priest to
a salaried post in the parish. In addition the priest was given a house. The
priest enjoyed a living or benefice. After dissolution, the right of appointment
(and the right to collect the tithe) passed to lay landowners, affording them
patronage and the opportunity for reform-minded gentry to appoint priests
of a similar outlook.
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Dissolution of the Monasteries 1535-40: Consequences
Church

The church lost power and influence. The transfer of nearly two million
acres of land to the crown stripped the church of significant wealth.
Smith: ‘the loss of all its regular clergy and almost half of its wealth over a period of
four years meant that the new national Church of England was a much less
impressive material edifice than its medieval predecessor.’
Elton: ‘the great loser was the Church which ceased to be the largest landowner in
England.’

What happened to the buildings? Some were converted into manor houses
for the laity; the abbey at Malmesbury was converted into a clothing factory
by William Stumpe; others fell into disrepair and ruin once they had been
stripped of valuable raw materials such as the lead on their roofs. Think of
Rievaulx Abbey in north Yorkshire, one of the glories of medieval English
church architecture. It became a majestic ruin.

The wealth of the monasteries was plundered. Older history books refer to
this process as the spoliation. The larger monasteries in particular were
treasure-houses of books and valuable objects. Chalices and crosses were sold
or melted down. Royal commissioners often sold off furnishings and
moveable goods on site. Treasures were transferred to the Court of
Augmentations and sold off or given away.
1. The five great abbeys of Bury St. Edmunds, Ely, Ramsey, Peterborough
and Crowland alone produced two-thirds of a ton of silver.
2. The library of Worcester Priory was ransacked. Six hundred books were
lost.
3. At the Augustinian friary in York 646 volumes were destroyed.

The impact on learning was appreciated at the time. With the moral support
of Henry VIII, an antiquary, John Leland, attempted to save ancient
manuscripts but with only limited success. Much of the literary heritage of
Anglo-Saxon England was lost in the throes of dissolution.

At one level the closure of the monasteries was an attack on the doctrine of
works-based salvation, i.e. the idea that entry to heaven had to be earned by
good works such as pilgrimages. Some houses were the centres of saint cults.
The shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham was attached to a monastery, while
the Benedictine Priory at Durham housed the remains of St. Cuthbert, the
most visited shrine in the north of England.

The safety net offered by pensions was patchy. Ordinary monks had to be
satisfied with less than £10 p.a. Nuns received less, friars nothing at all.
Pensions were calculated according to the wealth of the house to which the
monks had belonged and paid by the Court of Augmentations, even when
title to property had passed from the Crown to a private owner. Thus, when
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Dissolution of the Monasteries 1535-40: Consequences
crown finances collapsed in the reign of Edward VI, many pensions were
unpaid. The average was probably around £5 per year. The minimum
needed for subsistence.

About 1800 members of the regular clergy did not receive a pension. Spare a
thought for nuns released from their vows. Their pension was inadequate.
They did not have the option of becoming parish priests. The life of a single
woman no linger protected by the seclusion of the cloister was an
uncomfortable one in Henrician England.

Quite a few monks became chapel or chantry priests and the dissolution of
the chantries in 1547 at the outset of Edward’s reign was a severe blow to
them.
N.B. Remember that not all the effects of the dissolution were adverse.

About 9,000 monks and nuns were at large after the dissolution. Many were
issued with ‘capacities’, i.e. licences to practise as parish clergy. Many were
well qualified and raised the standard of the secular clergy. Under-educated
priests were a historic weakness of the English church. Indeed the influx of
regular clergy into the ranks of the priesthood forestalled a manpower crisis
in the English church. In the uncertain climate of the 1530s and 1540s there
had been a shortage of ordinands.

Many of the dispossessed monks fared reasonably well.
1. Take, for example, Kirkstall Abbey near Leeds after dissolution. Its head,
Abbot John, lived in the gatehouse of the abbey. Two former monks served
as vicars living in vicarages that had belonged to the abbey. Another exmonk, Thomas Pepper, was appointed rector of Adel.
2. The prior of Montacute in Somerset retired on a pension of £100 p.a., the
income of a middling gentleman.

There was also a reform dividend: six new bishoprics (Bristol, Chester,
Gloucester, Oxford, Peterborough and Westminster) were created out of
abbeys on those sites.
Historiography
Those who see the dissolution as both an act of cultural vandalism and a blow to the
spiritual life of the people include Jack Scarisbrick. In Henry VIII (1968) he referred
to ‘ a frenzy of getting, grabbing, buying and begging without equal in English experience.’
Scarisbrick: ‘one can still maintain that there was little disenchantment or active hostility
towards … these institutions up to the moment when they were despoiled.’
Elton’s unsentimental view is a little different. The monasteries were ripe for reform
and unlamented: ‘the nation’s reaction makes it plain that the monastic ideal and practice
had ceased to have any hold on people’s minds and hearts spiritually the English orders had
long been of little worth.’
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