Of all the changes associated with the English Reformation, probably none affected the nation’s landscape and built environment more profoundly than the dissolution of the monasteries. In just four years, from 1536 to 1540, the monastic houses which had grown up across England during the previous nine centuries were systematically destroyed. In all, roughly 900 religious foundations in England, housing a total of 4000 monks, 3000 canons, 3000 friars, and 2000 nuns, were closed down and either demolished or left to decay.
The dissolution offers a good illustration of how incremental policies can ultimately have devastating consequences. In early sixteenth-century England, there were some who regarded monasticism with growing scepticism and even disapproval, but this would probably not have generated enough hostility to cause the dissolution had it not been for the growth of Protestant ideas from the 1520s onwards and then Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1533-4. Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, stood in the vanguard of both these developments.
As Supreme Head of the Church in England, Henry appointed Cromwell as his vicegerent in spirituals to assert royal authority over the monasteries. In 1535, Cromwell ordered a visitation that compiled a survey of monastic wealth known as the Valor Ecclesiasticus. This provided the rationale for an act of Parliament in 1536 that ordered the suppression of all monastic houses with an income of less than £200 a year. The act justified this step on the grounds that “manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed among the little and small abbeys, priories and other religious houses…where the congregation of such religious persons is under the number of twelve persons.”
It is possible that this was initially intended as a ‘reformation’ and ‘restructuring’ of the monastic orders, and there may not have been a plan at this stage to destroy the monasteries in their entirety. Certainly all those in the suppressed houses were offered a transfer to “great and honourable monasteries of religion,” those “great solemn monasteries of religion of this realm” where “religion is right well-kept and observed.” Furthermore, only 243 of the 419 houses worth less than £200 a year were actually dissolved in 1536 – places like Michelham Priory in East Sussex, which by this time had just eight canons and an annual income of £160.
Soon, however, the move towards full-scale dissolution began to gather momentum. Some of the orders, especially the Carthusians and the Observant Franciscans, had expressed reservations about the royal supremacy and shown a lingering attachment to the Pope. Henry wished to see such opposition stamped out, and Thomas Cromwell encouraged this on religious grounds as well. Cromwell sympathised with Protestant ideas; he opposed masses for the dead and pilgrimage sites on principle and he saw monasteries as centres of superstition as well as political opposition. These considerations may well have been more important in explaining the dissolution than a desire to boost royal income.
The money that came into the Crown’s newly established Court of Augmentations was no doubt useful. The revenues of religious houses amounted to about £130,000 a year, which was probably twice what the Crown received from its own estates. However, it seems unlikely that a wish to make the Crown wealthier was the primary motive for the dissolution; after all, royal grants of former monastic land had gifted away nearly two thirds of it by the time of Henry VIII’s death in 1547.
Probably more important in driving the dissolution forwards was a desire to crush opposition and to assert royal authority. In the autumn of 1536, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire saw the outbreak of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a rebellion whose key aim was to prevent further dissolutions and to reverse those that had already taken place. Its leader, Robert Aske, insisted that “the suppression of abbeys was the greatest cause of the said insurrection.” This seems to have hardened Henry and Cromwell into adopting a more aggressive approach towards the remaining monasteries from 1537 onwards. During 1538, 1539 and early 1540, royal commissioners were sent round all the remaining houses to obtain – probably under varying degrees of persuasion and pressure – their ‘voluntary’ surrender to the Crown. In 1539 Parliament passed an act legalising these surrenders; this second act did not itself dissolve any houses, it merely ratified what had already been done.
The potential for future opposition was rapidly diminished by grants of monastic property to members of the nobility and gentry, thus creating a vested interest in the dissolution which helped to ensure its permanence. Many members of the social elite – and not only those of Protestant sympathies – were willing to take over former monastic properties, hence the large number of English country houses that retain the name “abbey” – for example, Woburn Abbey and Forde Abbey.
By the time the last monastery, Waltham Abbey, surrendered in March 1540, England had witnessed the destruction within just four years of institutions that have existed for centuries. England’s landscape was fundamentally changed. One only has to visit a Roman Catholic country anywhere in the world to be struck by the physical and cultural presence of monastic foundations. The removal of the monasteries profoundly altered the nature of England’s religious life as well as its provision of education and charitable relief.
The dissolution has remained permanently. When the Catholic Mary I succeeded to the throne in 1553, she permitted those who owned former monastic lands and property to keep them. By the 1590s, Shakespeare could write movingly in Sonnet 73 of “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” It is worth visiting some of the great monastic ruins up and down England to get some sense of the scale of the destruction; places like Fountains Abbey or Glastonbury Abbey give a vivid impression of what England lost at the dissolution. Whether we regard these events as good or bad – and culturally at least it is difficult to see them as other than a tragedy – they certainly constituted a decisive step that has, with the exception of a few later foundations and re-foundations, never been reversed.
