ENGLISH MONKS and the SUPPRESSION OF THE MONASTERIES ENGLISH MONKS and the SUPPRESSION OF THE MONASTERIES by GEOFFREY BAS KER VILLE M.A. (I) JONA THAN CAPE THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE LONDON FIRST PUBLISHED I937 JONATHAN CAPE LTD. JO BEDFORD SQUARE, LONDON AND 91 WELLINGTON STREET WEST, TORONTO PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN THE CITY OF OXFORD AT THE ALDEN PRESS PAPER MADE BY JOHN DICKINSON & CO. LTD. BOUND BY A. W. BAIN & CO. LTD. CONTENTS PREFACE 7 INTRODUCTION 9 I MONASTIC DUTIES AND ACTIVITIES I 9 II LAY INTERFERENCE IN MONASTIC AFFAIRS 45 III ECCLESIASTICAL INTERFERENCE IN MONASTIC AFFAIRS 72 IV PRECEDENTS FOR SUPPRESSION I 308- I 534 96 V THE ROYAL VISITATION OF THE MONASTERIES 1535 120 VI SUPPRESSION OF THE SMALLER MONASTERIES AND THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE 1536-1537 144 VII FROM THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE TO THE FINAL SUPPRESSION 153 7- I 540 169 VIII NUNS 205 IX THE FRIARS 2 2 7 X THE FATE OF THE DISPOSSESSED RELIGIOUS 246 EPILOGUE 273 APPENDIX 293 INDEX 301 5 PREFACE THE four hundredth anniversary of the suppression of the English monasteries would seem a fit occasion on which to attempt a summary of the latest views on a thorny subject. This book cannot be expected to please everybody, and it makes no attempt to conciliate those who prefer sentiment to truth, or who allow their reading of historical events to be distorted by present-day controversies, whether ecclesiastical or political. In that respect it tries to live up to the dictum of Samuel Butler that 'he excels most who hits the golden mean most exactly in the middle'. It is based throughout on the contemporary documents which are described in the introduction or in the footnotes. My obligations to many writers are recorded in these. I should wish further to proffer my warmest thanks to the Reverend Doctor Salter for his kindness in reading the manuscript of the book and for much helpful advice and criticism, and to Professor Hamilton Thompson for his courtesy in lending me his transcript of those visitations of the diocese of Lincoln which are so far unprinted. G. BASKERVILLE Crowsley Park Henley-on-Thames July 1936 7 INTRODUCTION Nihil bene quod non jucunde THE period which beheld the disappearance of the religious houses in England can be described in many ways and from many points of view. It can be represented as an age of martyrs: of martyrs incinerated by conservatives in a panic, or of martyrs disembowelled by radicals in a hurry. We could stand in the market place at Carmarthen and look at an aged Augustinian prior consuming slowly away in the midst of flames 'holding up his poor stumps till a merciful bystander with a staff dashed him on the head and struck him down'. We could go to Newgate prison to see a learned Cistercian monk being degraded from his orders, follow him to Gloucester and, after watch­ ing him burning in the morning, sit down to a ~umptuous lunch with the high sheriff and all the 'county people'. Or we could go to Smithfield to see one friar after another put to a like death. But the story of the sufferings of Doctor Ferrar, Doctor Hooper, Doctor Cardmaker, and other· former religious of their way of thinking is best read in that old and tried book, Foxe' s Book of Martyrs. Again, we might accompany the Duke of Norfolk and all that counted for most in London society to Tyburn, there to see conservative martyrs hanged, cut down alive, and disembowelled. But the history of the Carthusian victims of state policy is best studied in Maurice Chauncy's Historia Aliquot Nostri Saeculi Martyrum, or in one or other of the numerous modern works which have been inspired by it. In days when there were no gangster films to cater for the taste of the public, burnings and disembowellings must 9 INTRODUCTION certainly have been welcome to persons who craved for excitement. Doubtless the pillory, with its constant succession of tradesmen who had overcharged, or given short weight, palled after a time, and one would tire of seeing the light ladies being dipped in the Thames. It might have been exciting to go to Paul's Cross in Queen Mary's time, along with the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs, to gaze at former monks with sheets about them, and tapers in their hands, doing penance for the crime of committing matrimony; or to see a clergyman's wife go through the city in a cart and to hurl at her decayed vegetables and rotten eggs, or even household utensils of a formidable and 'un­ seemly kind. Even to see a general servant boiled alive for poisoning her mistress would not be so exciting as the doings at the stake or the scaffold. And always after 'commotion times' one could go to London Bridge to see the heads and quarters set up and guess the names of their former owners. But we must leave the accounts of these proceedings to the city annalists, to Wriothesley, to Machyn, and to Stow. The period might be described from the point of view of the exiles. We could follow the former religious who had imbibed new ideas to Germany or to Switzerland and listen to 'the poor sheep of Christ dispersed abroad' quarrelling about rites and ceremonies. We could hear a Carmelite1 bawling in Frankfort that the latest book of Common Prayer was but the leavings of popish dregs, devised, in John Knox's plain words, for upholding of massing priests and all the trash of the pope's sinful service: or a Fran- - ciscan I objecting from Strasbourg that 'the goodly order set forth and received in England stood with God's word'. The details of these dreary controversies may be found by 1 John Bale. 8 Guy Eton. IO INTRODUCTION those who are interested in them, in William Whitting­ ham's Brief Discourse of the Troubles at Frankfort. Or again we could follow conservative exiles to Flanders or Spain or Italy, watch the Carthusians reconstitute their order, or study the quarrels between the pro-English and pro­ Spanish factions, bitter as those which were to be waged between the Jesuits and the secular clergy at the time of the 'Wisbech Stirs'. The careers of these martyrs and exiles have filled too many pages, not only of the works of professional martyr­ ologists, but of those of sober historians. Since, however, the whole number of martyrs and exiles, conservatives and radicals, which the monasteries provided scarcely amounted to one per cent of the former religious, it is surely time that some notice was taken of the fate of the ninety-nine per cent - the exact proportion of just persons to lost sheep - who were neither martyrs nor exiles. This book, then, is to be the story of those of the former · monks who were not willing to sacrifice their heads or their bowels, or to risk the loss of their property, for the sake of 'keeping of opinion'. The history of the suppression in England has often been treated as if it could be explained wholly from without the religious houses themselves. Instead of giving us a picture of the internal condition of the monasteries, many contro­ versialists lash themselves to fury over defects of character in Henry VIII and his officials, just as others explain the continental reformation as if its only importance con­ sisted in the bad language which was habitually used by Martin Luther. The faults of the King are plain enough. All his con­ temporaries and in particular the foreign ambassadors at II INTRODUCTION his court (of whom he had generally got the best) agree that he was covetous, mean, fickle, suspicious, and, above all, ungrateful. Sir Walter Raleigh, in his History of the World, has well summed up the last trait of Henry's character: 'To how many gave he abundant flowers from whence to gather honey and in the end of harvest burnt them in the hive.' Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York and Cardinal; Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex; Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk- had ever a king three such faithful servants? Yet one perished on the scaffold, and of the other two, one was, perhaps, only saved from a like fate by his own death and the other by that of the King. But was he really the 'tiger and ramping lion raging and roaring after blood' that Archdeacon Harpsfield pictured him? or even the 'picture and pattern of a merciless prince' that Raleigh described? Contrast these outbursts with what contemporary conservatives said of him. Sir Thomas Wriothesley may have had his tongue in his cheek when he told the Duchess of Milan that his King is 'a most gentle gentleman, his nature so benign and pleasant that I think till this day no man heard many angry words from his mouth'. But Bishop Gardiner was almost as fervent in admiration, as his letters written just after Henry's death show. The owners of the gift of bonhomie can do a great deal that those who do not possess that dangerous quality cannot, and if Henry was faux bonhomme, so much the worse for those who served him. But it is sad that this great King should be judged solely by his matrimonial misfortunes and on this account to be made a figure of fun for the benefit of film fans. Did he not, as he said himself, have a set of ill-conditioned wives? If Anne Boleyn would carry on with an organist and Katharine Howard with a piano­ tuner (for so I suppose the player on the virginals was), 12 INTRODUCTION and if Anne of Cleves was repulsively ugly and Katharine of Aragon battered and dingy, was that Henry's fault? And was he not more respectable with his consecutive plurality of wives than King Francis with his concurrent plurality of mistresses? And who followed more obediently St.