Foundations of the Anglican Church LXIV

The Chapel Royal at Saint James Palace

The dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of their lands, buildings, and treasure was the most successful part of Henry’s raid on Church wealth to increase the wealth of the Crown, but it was not his first nor his only successful scheme to enrich the royal treasury from the Church’s immense wealth. 
To recap the problem: the Church had immense wealth—approximately one third of the land in England belonged to the Church and its revenues (mostly rents from tenants) went to the Church and did so without being taxable by the Crown.  The Crown, on the other hand, was desperately short of funds.  Henry was transforming England from a feudal kingdom to one of the first modern nation states (along with Spain and France, England’s traditional rivals/enemies.)  Henry knew he needed a Navy if he was to expand England’s trade and explore for both new markets and natural resources for manufacturing.  He also needed a Navy if he was to be able to defend England, particularly from Spain whose vast American Empire had required her to develop an unparalleled naval fleet.  Henry was not, for the most part, interested in foreign wars but he also needed a standing army if the Crown were to hold its own against the threats of the feudal nobility that were determined to preserve their traditional prerogatives against the centralized Government Henry was building.  To build that governmental machinery, Henry cultivated a new class of civil servants—drawing not on the old feudal families that had traditionally been ministers of state, but on the rural gentry and urban business classes whose sons had been sent to university to study law.  Henry vastly expanded the Civil Service to make royal government more efficient.  Where was he to get the resources to pay for this new England?  There could be no new taxation without Parliamentary consent.  The nobility in the House of Lords did not support the King because his plans were undermining their power.  The Commons were reluctant to vote new taxes because the burden fell on them and on their home constituency. They wanted the advantages of expanded government—increased commerce, more efficient judicial processes, better national security and defense—but they didn’t want it to come from their pockets. (I know: this does sound like a Democratic President with a Republican Congress and its fears of “big government,” but as Quoheleth said, “there is nothing new under the sun.”)   Henry had to look for existing wealth he could tap and the Church was replete with it. 
Henry began by seizing a number of ecclesiastical properties.  As mentioned in a previous post he took Wolsey’s country palace at Hampton Court, upriver from London, but he also took his London residence, York Place, which he renamed Whitehall and which became Henry’s principal London Residence. The problem in taking York Place, however, was that it wasn’t Wolsey’s personal property but the property of the Archbishopric of York (Wolsey was Archbishop of York) and which by right should have gone to Edward Lee, the next Archbishop of York for his use in London. Henry also seized Durham House, the London residence of the Bishops of Durham, from his submissive bishop of Durham, Cuthbert Tunstall.  This was not a punishment—Tunstall signed the Oath of Supremacy without complaint—and the King promised Tunstall Coldharbour in return, but never delivered on the promise.  Henry also disbanded the Leprosarium of Saint James and built a palace of the same name on the site.  The Palace of Saint James, though not used as the residence of the Sovereign since the accession of Victoria in 1837, remains in use today. Prince Charles long had his London residence there before moving to Clarence House.  The body of Charles’ ex-wife, Diana, lay there before her funeral in 1997. And their grandson, Prince George was baptized there this past October.     
In addition to seizing London properties belonging to bishops and abbots—most of which he turned to his private use—Henry forced cash settlements from the hierarchy.  In 1530 Convocation, the assembly of bishops and abbots, were charged with violations of the Statutes of Praemunire.  In the 14^th century Parliament passed a number of laws limiting papal power in England.  The Statute of Provisors (1306) forbad the sending out of England of revenue for any sort of tax, tribute, or fee imposed by a religious authority.  This would mean that such fees as Peter’s Pence, annates, or any fees paid to the Holy See were illegal.  (Annates were the monies paid to the Holy See when a cleric was appointed to his office—usually the first year’s salary.  In other words, a Bishop, a Cathedral Dean, an Abbot or another Churchman whose appointment required a papal confirmation was required by the Holy See to send to Rome the equivalent of his salary for his first year in office.  These amounts could be quite considerable.  The Statute of Provisors forbad this as well as other fees being sent abroad.)   
The 1353 Statute of Praemunire forbad filing an appeal to any Court outside England, including the Papal Court.  Thus it was forbidden to send any matter—such as a petition for annulment—to Rome for settlement.  In addition to annulments (which were rare) there were many cases where bishops or lower clergy appealed to Rome to settle matters of jurisdictional dispute or other questions that could not be handled by English courts—civil or ecclesiastical.  A further statute passed in 1393 forbad appealing to Rome or paying the Holy See for papal bulls, excommunications, or the translation of a prelate from one benefice to another.  These laws, along with several others that had been designed to limit the growth of Papal power in England but which had never been seriously enforced, compromised the entire hierarchy.  Every single Bishop and Abbot, as well as most Cathedral deans, had sent the required monies to Rome to obtain the bulls authorizing their consecration or abbatial blessing.  Every one of them had paid their annates.  Many of them had paid the fees that allowed them to transfer from one deanery to a better paying one, or one diocese to a wealthier one. Many clergy—not only bishops, abbots, and deans—had filed suits in a Roman Court.  The entire hierarchy stood guilty of a breach of law and the punishment declared them outlaws and the properties escheat to the Crown.  Moreover, not only were they to be punished, but their notaries and advisors were guilty and subject to punishment as well.  As I said, these laws had never been enforced but now Henry turned to Parliament—whose laws these were—and Parliament graciously decreed that should the clergy pay a fine of £118,000, punishment would be waived. 
Using the pension of £5 per annum paid to monks of suppressed abbeys in the 1537-41 dissolution of the monasteries as a guide, £118,000 would be worth approximately 475 million dollars in today’s cost of living.  (It is very difficult to give an accurate translation of cost from 1530 Tudor England to 2014 United States.  The actual value of the pound sterling, based on its silver content, would not be so high as to equal 475,000.000 USD 2014—perhaps the value would be about £27,500,000 in today’s British currency, or about 44,000.000 USD.   But you need to remember that a respectable 1540 salary for an English worker with which to support his family might be £8 a year.  Taking that as a base to translate the Pound Sterling for cost of living impact, you would come up with £295,000.000 or 475,000,000 USD.) 
This payment of £118,000 was only the beginning of Henry’s looting the Church coffers. A 1532 Act of Parliament reduced the amount of money sent to Rome for Annates and other fees to 5%.  1534 was a banner year for the Royal Coffers.  In the winter of that year, Parliament decreed that all monies formerly sent to Rome were now to go to the royal coffers.  In March that same year Parliament decreed that the Peter’s pence was no longer to be sent to Rome.  Later in the spring, Parliament then passed An Act Concerning the Archbishop of Canterbury, declaring that the power of dispensation formerly belonging to the Pope was now derived from the King’s authority and was to be exercised by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It further decreed that the King was to be given 2/3 of any revenue from dispensations. That same spring it then taxed the clergy ten percent of their income to the Crown.  The Act of Supremacy passed in November 1534 and generally considered the definitive break with Rome granted the Crown all monies formerly sent to Rome.  By this point, Henry had squeezed the Dioceses and secular clergy dry and so he then turned to the religious with the suppression of the monasteries. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXII

Ruins of Glastonbury Abbey 

One of the saddest stories in the dissolution of the monasteries is that of Glastonbury abbey and its Abbot, Richard Whiting.  Glastonbury was an ancient foundation in the west of England—almost in Wales—and dated back to the seventh century and Anglo-Saxon times.  Its legendary stories were even more dramatic with some accounts identifying it with the Avalon of King Arthur (whose tomb it supposedly held) and other stories claiming a church had been built there by Joseph of Arimathea who had come there after the Resurrection of Jesus.  The earlier abbey was rebuilt on a much grander scale in the twelfth century after a fire had destroyed the earlier abbey and monastic buildings.  It was a large community of over a hundred monks—all drawn from the finest families in England.  The monks ran a school of the sons of the aristocracy to prepare them for Oxford and Cambridge.  At the Reformation it was the wealthiest monastery in England—even wealthier than the Royal Abbey at Westminster—and its Abbot was among those with the right to sit in the House of Lords.  The Abbey’s “treasure”—plate, gold, silver, jewels and ornaments was worth well over £83,000 at 1540 value, or £6,250,000 in today’s currency, (but about $61,000,000 in actual purchasing power today).  This does not include the value of the Abbey lands and rents. 

It was one of the last abbeys to be suppressed and it’s Abbot Richard Whiting—who had supported Henry’s claim to be Head of the Church of England—finally drew the line and refused to surrender his house to the royal commissioners. 

Whiting had become a monk at Glastonbury somewhat later in life and was forty years old when he was ordained priest.  He was almost sixty-five when in 1525 he was appointed Abbot by Papal Legate Cardinal Wolsey to whom the monks had surrendered the right of election.  He registered no complaint when required to take the oath of supremacy renouncing papal authority and recognizing Henry as head of the Church, but five years later stood his ground and refused to surrender the monastery to Royal Commissioners Richard Layton, Richard Pollard and Thomas Moyle who arrived in September 1539 to appropriate the abbey and its assets to the Crown.  Whiting—now in his late seventies, was arrested along with several of his monks and sent to the Tower of London. 

The affair of Glastonbury and its Abbot was not overseen by Henry himself but by his “Vicar General” for matters ecclesiastical, Thomas Cromwell.  After interrogating Whiting, Cromwell determined that the Abbot had to be tried, convicted, and executed to make the message clear to others who resisted the royal authority in this matter of the dissolution of the monasteries.  Whiting was a member of the House of Lords and as such had a right to be tried by his peers: a jury of the Lord Spiritual.  This was overlooked as it most likely would not have produced the vicious results Cromwell desired.  Instead the Abbot was sent to Wells, the episcopal city nearest his abbey where a trial was held and mandated verdict delivered.  Whiting was then taken to Glastonbury where he and two monks—John Thorne and Roger James—were fastened to hurdles and dragged by horses to the top of Glastonbury Tor (a large hill that overlooks Glastonbury) where they were hung, cut down while still alive, disemboweled, and then beheaded before their arms and legs were severed from their corpse and sent to various places to be exhibited as the remains of traitors.  This process of being “hanged, drawn, and quartered” was standard for treason. 

Whiting was not the only Abbot to receive this punishment.  Hugh Faringdon, the Abbot of Reading, was also hanged, drawn, and quartered along with one of his monks, John Rugge, and the parish priest of Reading, John Enyon.  Faringdon too had signed the Oath of Royal Supremacy, and even seems to have surrendered his Abbey without complaint, but was caught up in a protest against the policy of closing the monasteries by a group of northern rebels. 

John Beche (aka Thomas Marshall) had been named Abbot of Colcheseter just months before the Act of Supremacy, which he and his monks signed.  The martyrdom of Thomas More, John Fisher, and Prior Houghton and his fellow Carthusians seems to have give Beche some backbone however.  He spoke openly of his admiration for the martyrs and when Henry began closing the monasteries claimed that God would take vengeance on the King for “putting down these houses of religion.”  He was executed for treason on Cromwell’s orders, being hanged, drawn, and quartered in front of his abbey church at Colchester on December 1, 1539.

It is difficult to know what was in the minds and hearts of these three men.  All three willingly acceded to Henry’s demand to be recognized as the head of the Church.  Beche alone, though he never formally recanted, seems to have reconsidered this position and made his objections to the royal policy known.  Whiting seems to have died defending his Abbey—or perhaps its wealth, but not papal authority.  Faringdon seems only to have supported a protest against the closing of the monasteries.  All three of these men were beatified by Leo XIII in 1895. 

The pontificate of Leo XIII was an important one for defining the boundaries between the Church of England and the Catholic Church.  There were strong currencies in the Anglophone world favoring some sort of movement towards corporate reunion of the Anglican and Catholic Churches.  These fantasies were enkindled by the naiveté of Victorian Romanticism and the glib reconstructionism of the Oxford Movement that tried to erase the Protestant centuries of Anglican history, but as we will see in time the fancies of Cowley and All Saints Margaret Street mask a deep and rich Anglican theological heritage quite different from Catholicism.  Despite friendships like that of Cardinal Newman with Dean Church, it would have been a long and complex process in that pre-Vatican II era to come to that level of theological consensus which we have reached these past fifty years, much less to achieve full communion, and it is hard to imagine how these dreams could have borne the desired fruit.  Nevertheless, with men like Lord Acton on the Catholic side and Lord Halifax on the Anglican flank, serious—if unofficial (very unofficial) dialogue was beginning.  This proto-ecumenism had its foes however. The ultramontane party in England led by Cardinal Manning and later by Cardinal Gasquet feared that talk of corporate reunion would dry up the steady stream of converts that the Catholic Church was gaining from the Church of England.  Potential Catholics might think: Would it not be better to wait for corporate reunion than to “swim the Tiber” alone?  Moreover, the enthusiasm of the proponents of corporate reunion led them to be somewhat quick and easy on the issue of the “legitimacy” of the Church of England as a “branch” of the Church of Christ and correspondingly defensive of the validity of Anglican Orders, putting Anglicanism in a position analogous to the Orthodox Churches.  And again, why then should one “convert” when the real issue was healing the “schism.”  Manning and those Catholics who were intent on raiding the Anglican nest for easy-pickings pushed Leo XIII to make it very clear that there was an irreparable gulf between the Catholic Church and the “Church” of England.  It would culminate in the 1896 denunciation of Anglican Orders in the Papal Bull Apostolicae Curae, but it led to the 1886 beatification of 55 English men and women martyred by Henry, Edward VI, or Elizabeth.  In 1895, Leo beatified 10 more.  I am not saying that these were not worthy candidates for veneration, but like the motives for their executions, the motives for their beatification were at least as much political as they were inspirational. 

To be fair to the Ultramontane party, the Anglican Church had its opponents to the early ecumenical dialogue as well.  The restoration of the English hierarchy in 1851 had never sat well in England and the arrogant presumptions of Cardinal Wiseman, the first Archbishop of Westminster, had built up a wall of cold hostility on the part of the Protestant Ascendancy towards the Catholic Church.  The Bench of Bishops in the Church of England was still pretty much drawn from the Evangelical wing, or at least from the more Protestant and low-Church constituency.  Queen Victoria herself was a committed Protestant.  Archbishop Temple of Canterbury was fairly low-Church and both he and Archbishop Maclagan of York were deeply angered by Apostolicae Curae and its dismissal of Anglican Orders.  There was a sense of the Church of England losing ground to Catholicism as many prominent Anglicans became Catholics.   It would be some decades before the atmosphere thawed enough for dialogue to resume.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXI

Peterborough Abbey Church,

raised by Henry VIII to Cathedral

status for a new diocese the King

established. 

Well, let’s leave Pope Francis and his critics for awhile and travel back to Merry Old England and the adventures of Good King Hal.  Or maybe not such a good fellow.  Where we left off the saga was in the middle of the closing of the monasteries. Just to recap:  If you remember, in the 1520’s, before Henry’s break with Rome, Cardinal Wolsey had closed down a number of smaller religious religious houses, transferred their members to more successful communities, and appropriated the endowments and lands of those closed houses to establish Cardinal College (now Corpus Christi College) at Oxford and a grammar school in his native Ipswich.  This was not a new tactic—the Crown had, with permission of the Holy See, suppressed a number of failing monasteries in the 14^th and 15^th centuries and diverted their revenues to other projects.  Wolsey’s right-hand man and leading disciple, Thomas Cromwell, had noticed the profits of this strategy of the Cardinal and after Wolsey’s fall had suggested this strategy to his new master, Henry VIII, in order to replenish the royal funds.   Henry was a spend-aholic. He was taking England from a back-water feudal monarchy into one of the leading Nation States of Europe, competing with both the Empire and France.  Henry was building up the Royal Navy—a task which centuries later would pay off in spades.  He used funds copiously as bribes and rewards to expand his influence on the continent.  He was pushing England into international trade and exploration for new markets and new sources of raw materials.  He also was relying more and more on the gentry and the mercantile classes for civil service and had to find funds with which to pay them or lands which to ennoble them.  Henry was very much the one who laid the foundation for the great Empire England was to become in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  And it cost money.  At the same time he was spending lavishly on himself and his succession of queens.  Henry was into building palaces.  Some he would seize (York Place which became Whitehall, and Wolsey’s Hampton Court along with the Hospital of Saint James which still retains its name today as St. James Palace.  In fact, the Royal entourage is still called “The Court of Saint James.”)  Others he bought and refurbished such as Beaulieu and Oatlands Place.  Some were existing royal residences he rebuilt, remodeled, or refurbished  such as Eltham Palace, Hatfield House, and Greenwich,   Still others he built from scratch such as Bridewell, Chelsea Manor, and Nonsuch Palace.  Henry was also given to magnificent spectacles such as his meeting with Francis I of France in 1520, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold because of the extravagance of the two monarchs trying to outdo each other in display of wealth.  Henry regularly traveled in great state—often by a flotilla of royal barges on the Thames.  He loved clothes and armor and tournaments.  In fact, there was probably no European monarch so spendthrift until in the following century Louis XIV, the Sun King, ascended the throne of France.  All this extravagance, whether personal or political, had to be paid for and the English Crown was particularly poor.  The sentiment in England was that “The King should live off his own”—which meant that the King should use the revenues from his own lands to pay not only for his private expenses but even for the Army, the Navy, and other government projects.  The Crown could not impose new taxes without the consent of the House of Commons and the Commons believed, as I wrote, that the Crown should live off its own.  So where was Henry to get money?  The Church had money—more money than the Crown, much more money.  How was the Crown to get that money?   Cromwell remembered the trick of suppressing monasteries.  In 1536 he went after the small monasteries—some of which were quite wealthy in land and revenues, despite their small numbers.  Monks and nuns were given the choice of secularizing with a small cash settlement or of transferring to larger monasteries.  The following year Cromwell went after some of the larger monasteries and gave handsome settlements to those who voluntarily surrendered their property.  This time monks and nuns were not given the option of transferring to other monasteries (Cromwell had determined to pick the monastery tree fruitless) but were given the settlement of an annual pension, sufficient for the monks to live comfortably.  Abbots and priors were given pensions far more generous than that granted to ordinary monks, pensions that enabled them to live as gentlemen of means, and this assured their cooperation in closing down their houses.   (The nuns had a smaller pension that was not quite enough for them to do the same, though it was presumed they would return to their families where the allowance would be sufficient for their maintenance.)  Neither monks nor nuns were released from their vows and thus were not free to marry (though some, especially among the nuns, did).  They also were expected to retain their religious garb (though few did).  Monasteries that did not voluntarily surrender were visited by royal commissioners and shut down.  By 1539 there were still a considerable number of monasteries operating, but these were either in more remote corners of the kingdom or they were some of the great monastic houses with ties to the Crown.  But even these were to fall.    Before we get to that, however, we need to look at a particular type of monastery and how Henry dealt with them and these are the Cathedral priories.
The medieval Church of England had a particularly unique tradition in which several cathedrals did not have the usual dean and chapter of canons but a monastic community that followed the Rule of Saint Benedict and was governed by the Prior (the Abbot being, in theory, the Bishop.)  Canterbury, Winchester, Ely, Carlisle, Durham, Rochester, Norwich, and Worcester were all such arrangements.  (Carlisle was not a Benedictine foundation, but one of the Arrouaisian Canons who followed the Rule of Saint Augustine.)    Typically in such situations, the Prior was named as dean of the newly constituted chapter of secular canons that replaced the monks.     Thomas Goldwell was prior of the Benedictine monks at Canterbury—a large house of 69 monks.  He signed the assent to the royal supremacy in 1534 which acknowledged Henry as head of the Church.  Monastic life continued as normal until 1539 when the monastery was suppressed.   Goldwell was given an annual pension of £ 80 and named a prebendary (canon) of the Cathedral.  (1539 £ 80 equals about $60,000 in modern currency, but approximately five times that in actual buying power.)  Winchester Priory had 45 monks and the last prior, William Kingsmill, was appointed dean of the Cathedral.  Robert Steward had been prior of Ely since 1522.  Although he had supported the validity of the Royal Marriage to Katherine of Aragon, he soon switched sides to Henry and supported the Royal Supremacy as well as playing an active role in convincing monasteries to surrender to the King.  When his own monastery was suppressed in November 1539 he was given a handsome pension.  Two years later he was appointed first dean of the new Cathedral.  Hugh Whitehead was Prior of the monks at Durham from 1519.  Like the others, he acceded to Henry’s supremacy.  The monastic community was dissolved in 1540 and he was pensioned but then appointed first dean of the new secular chapter.   Under Edward VI he was imprisoned in the Tower of London along with his bishop, Cuthbert Tunstall, for refusing to go along with the Protestantization of the Church of England by Archbishop Cranmer.     
Henry was not only into dismantling the monasteries—he was also into building up the Church.  While his primary goal in suppressing the monasteries was to enrich the royal coffers, he not only provided for the monks and nuns out of the revenues of the suppressed houses, he also used the monastic endowments to establish a number of new dioceses to provide good pastoral oversight for the Church.  Most of these dioceses were founded on, and from the revenues of, suppressed monasteries.  Dioceses were founded at Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford, Peterborough and Westminster.   Henry also moved the See of Coventry to Lichfield.    Other than Lichfield, the new sees were all established in former Benedictine abbeys, except for Oxford which was originally established in the former Augustinian Osney Abbey and later (1545) transferred to Saint Frideswide’s Priory (Augustinian) which had been suppressed and then incorporated into Wolsey’s Cardinal College in 1525.  Peterborough Abbey was the site of the grave of Katherine of Aragon who had been buried there only five years before and so was saved from being destroyed or deconsecrated.  Henry was faced with an even greater conundrum in what to do with Westminster Abbey which had been the site of English coronations for almost five centuries.  Henry may have been willing to break continuity with the papacy, but not when it came to his Crown and its traditions.  He had a superstitious urgency to preserve any and all symbols of Royal legitimacy and Westminster Abbey was central to this.  Westminster Abbey was also the second wealthiest religious house in England.  The monastic community was suppressed in 1539 and in 1540 Henry took the city of Westminster and the county of Middlesex from the Diocese of London to create the Diocese of Westminster.  Thomas Thirlby, a churchman loyal to Henry was named bishop and William Benson (sometimes Boston), the former monastic prior, was named Dean of a chapter of 12 canons drawn mostly from the monks.  The idea of a Diocese of Westminster was only to preserve a reason for the Abbey Church to be preserved and was neither pastorally useful nor economically feasible.  The Diocese was suppressed in the reign of King Edward VI.  The Abbey was left impoverished of its revenues and almost destroyed by the greed of the Duke of Somerset, the uncle of King Edward VI and “Lord Protector of England” in the King’s minority.  The Church was restored to abbatial status during the reign of Mary and then under Elizabeth became a “royal peculiar”—directly under the Crown who appoints the dean and canons.  It remains that way today as a Collegiate Church (a church with a college of canons led by the dean) under the Crown.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church LX

Selby Abbey in Yorkshire: when

the Benedictine Community was

suppressed, the Abbey Church

became the parish church

As mentioned in the previous posting, Henry did not find much opposition to his break with papal authority from the religious orders, save for the Carthusian monks and the Observant Franciscan Friars.  The Observants are the group known today as the OFM’s or “Brown Franciscans.”  These were the two strictest religious communities in England at the time, but even among these the majority of monks/friars seem to have gone along with the king in the matter of the supremacy.  All in all eighteen Carthusian monks and lay brothers were martyred, all for denying the Royal Supremacy.  I can’t come up with a reliable number of Observant Franciscans but it was less than that, perhaps a half dozen who stood firm after imprisonment and other scare tactics. 

Although most of the 15,000 religious in England went along with the royal supremacy and took the required oath that they recognized Henry as head of the Church, the King determined to suppress religious life in his realm.  It seems above all to have been a matter of finance rather than theology or even politics—the king saw the religious houses as a new source of revenue to expand his royal programmes without having to request the Commons for new taxes.  He had learned from Wolsey’s suppressions that there were vast amounts of wealth—primarily in land—to be gained by closing down the monasteries.  Henry’s agent in the work was Thomas Cromwell.  You might want to look at the posting for October 14^th to learn more about Cromwell, but Cromwell was in the employ of Cardinal Wolsey and learned well from Wolsey on how to please the King at any cost and without conscience.  When Wolsey fell, Cromwell rose to power.   It was Cromwell who designed most of the legislation by which Henry separated the English Church from the Roman Communion.  And it was Cromwell who moved to suppress the monasteries.

With the first suppressions in 1536 it appeared that this was simply the sort of reorganization that Wolsey had employed and for which even good Catholics had been calling in order to reform the Church.  Small houses with little income and few members were first to be targeted.  Monks and nuns were transferred to larger houses that could support them.  Royal Commissioners would visit the house, interview the community, inventory the assets and make a report back to Cromwell.  Not all houses were immediately suppressed—some were allowed for the time being to continue.  Those marked for suppression were visited a second time where the visitators would actually close down the house, transfer the religious, and dispose of the property.  In the disposal of the properties—the seizure of the assets in the King’s name or their distribution to the King’s friends—the commissioners were very careful to make sure all debts were first settled, those owned a pension given their rights, and matters settled amiably with tenants.  Properties were not just seize outright for the King.  Those religious—a minority—who wanted to secularize rather than transfer to a new foundation—were also given a cash settlement from the monastery assets.  As fair as the royal commissioners were, the canons of the two houses that resisted their suppression—were treated quite brutally, some with imprisonment and others with death. All of these foundations closed in the first wave of suppressions were either monks (Benedictine, Cistercian, or Carthusian), nuns of the same orders, or Canons Regular.  About eighty houses were suppressed in this first wave—most having less than a half dozen religious.  The Carthusian houses were larger communities but due to the resistance their now martyred colleagues had shown to the royal supremacy, came into particular focus for suppression. 

The second phase—in 1537—was accomplished by encouraging larger communities to voluntarily surrender their property and assets to the crown.  The Cistercians at Furness Abbey voluntarily surrendered their monastery because Henry was about to move against them for their involvement in the Pilgrimage of Grace—a popular uprising against Henry’s break with Rome.  Jervaulx, also Cistercian, surrendered for similar reason.  Lewes Priory (Benedictine), Titchfield Abbey (Premonstratensian) Bardsey Abbey (Augustinian), Eye Priory and Easby Abbey all voluntarily surrendered.  A new policy was put into practice with the religious not being allowed to transfer to other houses, but being given a modest pension on which to live on their own.  Monastic pensions averaged around £5 a year—at that time the income of a modest gentleman.  Nuns were less fortunate as their monasteries were usually less well endowed than those of the monks or canons and received about £3 per annum.  Henry required that monks and nuns, though no longer living in their cloisters, maintain religious garb and he forbad them a release from celibacy which prevented their marriage.  For nuns this mean they usually had to return to their families, but the pension due them provided them with the ability to contribute to the family income.  Abbots and priors usually received more handsome—and often more handsome by far—pensions.  They also were more likely to be offered Cathedral deaneries or even bishoprics, in which case their new position paid them a salary in lieu of any pension. 

Cromwell set up the Court of Augmentations to make sure that the disposal of monastic property was done in such a way as not to leave debtors, tenants, or the religious themselves in undue distress.  This was a very wise policy as the sudden collapse of these houses without providing for the religious or their employees or their creditors would have done serious economic damage that would have made the King and his policies very unpopular. As it was, with people able to get their hands on monastic wealth through royal grant or purchase, the dissolution was well received in most circles.  Indeed, when Mary came to the throne and investigated the possibility that such properties would be returned to the re-founded monasteries there was great alarm.

By 1538 many of the larger monasteries, seeing where the wind was blowing, were applying for permission to hand over their properties to the Crown in return for pensions.   Also by 1538 Cromwell had gotten the dissolution process down to a science and was closing down religious foundations quite quickly and with his usual efficiency.

To this point we have spoken of the monks and canons—both of whom had massive endowments.  The mendicant orders—the Augustinian Hermits, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Carmelites—did not have extensive endowments but lived from their work and from alms.  Their convents were also closed down but the religious—not having the assets from which to provide pensions—were not pensioned off.  Their buildings were sold or given to clients of the King in return for services done the Crown.  This created some hardship for the friars.  The priests could seek work as secular clergy—and many having degrees in theology were often rewarded with decent posts—but the lay brothers had no choice but to enter the workforce as common laborers.  Like the monks and nuns, the friars—clergy and lay—were not release from the obligations of celibacy. 

Thus by 1539 most—but not all—of the religious foundations of England and Wales had been suppressed.  Only a few great abbeys remained. Vast amounts of land were in new hands and huge amounts of wealth were in the royal treasury.  At the same time, Henry was not releasing the religious from their vows and especially from celibacy.  England was in many ways still very Catholic but the elimination of the religious removed one very important bulwark of religious orthodoxy and in time that would tell.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church LVIX

Carthusian Saint John Houghton

In the last posting we looked at the early phase of the dissolution of the Religious Houses in England during the reign of Henry VIII.  Just to recap in the broadest of all possible views, the Church held immense wealth—more than the Crown—and owned approximately a third of the land in England.  About half of this land was owned by the great Benedictine, Cistercian, Augustinian, and Bridgettine Abbeys and monasteries.  (Augustinians here refers to the canons and canonesses, not to the friars or nuns affiliated to the friars.  Also the Bridgettines had only one major house in England—Syon Abbey in Middlesex—but it was an extremely wealthy foundation, one of the richest in England.) 
In the fifteenth centuries a number of defunct religious houses were closed and their properties devoted to other charities—hospitals and schools primarily---and Cardinal Wolsey got the idea during his administration to shutter a number of smaller religious houses and transfer their members to more stable abbeys while using their endowments for two educational foundations he was making—a grammar school in his native Ipswich and a new College, Cardinal College, at Oxford.  Cardinal College later was renamed Christchurch and today is perhaps the icon-college of Oxford even as Kings is of Cambridge. 
With Wolsey’s fall, Henry was not quick to close down other monasteries but he did note how the monastic wealth could be diverted to other causes.  He filed that piece of information away in his mind for later use. 
The Religious of England—monks, nuns, canons, friars—almost universally acceded to the royal supremacy.  A notable exception was John Houghton, prior of the Carthusians in London.  Prior Houghton was persuaded to swear to the 1533 Act of Succession which named Henry Head of the Church “so far as the Law of Christ Allows.”  However, the following year the Act of Supremacy declared Henry to be “the only Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England” and Prior Houghton and two other Carthusian priors—Robert Lawrence of Beauvale and Augustine Webster of Axeholm—along with Richard Reynolds (a Bridgettine of Syon Abbey) and John Haile (the Vicar of Isleworth, the town where Syon Abbey stood) were hanged, drawn, and quartered for refusing the swear to the royal supremacy.  The process—usual for treason—was that the condemned person was hanged until near death, then cut down while still alive and cut open with his heart and entrails removed, and then the corpse cut into four pieces to be taken and displayed at four different points of the realm. Sir Thomas More and John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, would go to their deaths—simple beheadings—later that summer for refusing to swear to the same act.   Carthusians William Exmew, John Davy, William Greenwood, Thomas Green, William Holm, Thomas Johnson, Humphrey Middlemore, Sebastian Newdigate, Walter Pierson, Thomas Redying, John Rochester, and James Walworth, followed Houghton, Lawrence, and  Webster to their deaths rather than swear to the supremacy. 
Several Franciscans, especially among the Observant Franciscans at Greenwich—a house particularly important to Henry and the Tudors because of its proximity to the Royal Palace and the site of Henry’s Marriage to Katherine of Aragon as well as his own baptism and the baptism of his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth—resisted the Royal Supremacy.  Friars Anthony Brookby, Thomas Courtt and Thomas Belchiam refused to take the oath and paid with their lives.   Friars Richard Risby and Hugh Rich were Observant Franciscans from other convents who refused to swear to the supremacy and were martyred for their stalwart loyalty to the Holy See.  Henry, in exasperation declared that the Observant friars were “disciples of the Bishop of Rome and sowers of sedition.”  Some sources say that there were more martyrs among the Franciscans and Carthusians, but their names have been lost.  That is certainly possible but the comprehensive lists of English martyrs from this times make the historian conservative in estimating the numbers much beyond those actually known and recorded.   On the other hand, searching through various records—and the English were great keepers of records—to identify various other religious and their divergent fates is exactly the sort of work that doctoral students do.  Various charters, wills, ordination records, etc. make it possible to reconstruct with considerable accuracy the memberships of various abbeys, monasteries, and friaries at any point from the fourteenth century through their dissolution in the sixteenth.  These lists can be checked against not only court records but appointments to ecclesiastical benefices subsequent to Henry’s disbanding of the religious foundations and that would be of immense help in discovering the fate of many of the religious who either took or refused the oaths of royal supremacy.  As it is, given the number of religious in England in 1535—approximately fifteen thousand—the number of martyrdoms is remarkably small.  It should also be noted that there are approximately two dozen Benedictines or Cistercians executed in the period, as well as a Premonstratensian  presumably for refusing to swear to the supremacy, though some may have been connected more with the Pilgrimage of Grace.  By and large the religious or the other orders all subscribed to the royal supremacy without much hesitation.  Many, no doubt, considered a temporary sort of thing that would resolve itself and reconcile with the papacy in a period of time.  And indeed one would have thought that with Katherine’s death in 1536 that the reason for the break was over—especially as Ann was to go to the scaffold only five months after Katherine’s death and Henry was free to make a new beginning.   But by this time Henry had plans for his Church of England and those plans did not admit of any other person at its head than he himself. 

Celibacy--The Financial Foundation For a Sexless Clergy

The portal at Chartres Cathedral
Because of the relics it holds, one
of  the more significant
pilgrimage cathedrals in Europe. 

To understand why celibacy for the lower clergy, priests in particular, became such an important issue in the medieval period we have to understand several other factors.  Sex is not one of them; the real issue was not sex but property.
      First we need to understand how churches—parish churches in particular—were financed.  Churches almost invariably were built by a wealthy patron.  Often it would be a nobleman building a church for the serfs who share-cropped his land. Usually the founder of the church, if it is a rural parish, also sets aside land for the priest to farm to help support the priest and his family.  That land is called a “Glebe.”   In towns or cities it might be a wealthy townsperson (towns were fairly small –a “large” city like Paris might have 10,000 inhabitants in the Central Middle Ages, say for example, the year 800) who builds a parish church out of an act of devotion or penitence.  A King or major nobleman such as a Duke or Count might establish an abbey of monks or nuns and provide the lands that in turn would provide the revenue to construct their abbey Church.  A Cathedral would receive generous donations from the townspeople that would be collected and along with ecclesiastical taxes placed on the canons (the Cathedral clergy who were also usually rectors of the principal churches in town) would finance the various building stages of the Cathedral Church which more often than not would take several centuries to build (and often to rebuild in more up-to-date architectural styles).  As churches were built various persons would make bequests, usually in return for prayers for their souls after they died. These bequests were not usually money or gold, but lands that the church would own but rent out to provide more income.  Grandma dies, and she leaves a vineyard to the parish Church and the rector rents it out and the rent brings in ₤ 2 s10 d 4 (two pounds sterling, ten shillings, and four pence).  That would not be much today but in the year 800 it might be equivalent to a thousand dollars or more in purchasing power.  (You need to remember that is more than two and a half pounds of silver). Or uncle George dies and in his will he leaves a shop in town to the Church and rent comes in at  ₤ 1 s5 d3.  It all adds up. Of course Grandma or Uncle George might not leave their bequest to the parish Church, but to the monastery church or even to the Cathedral. 
      Another source of income for rural parish churches besides the rents from lands left them, are tithes.  Each Christian (which at this point is just about 100% of the population, the Jews living mostly in the towns) is obligated to contribute 10% of his produce to the support of the Church.  This is not a free-will offering.  Quite to the contrary.  At harvest a man called the Reeve shows up with the Sheriff and collects the Church’s share of the harvest.  And usually they choose the ten percent, the best ten percent, to cart off for the church.  Livestock and poultry are usually factored in to this collection as well.  Coinage or produce are often substituted for eggs, milk, and other perishables.  In fact, as the Middle Ages progress and coinage takes the place of barter, people might make a financial settlement with the Rector in place of the tithe of produce. 
       Urban parishioners did not usually farm, but they were expected to tithe as well—in coin or product or labor given to the Church.  Goldsmiths, cloth merchants, and other guild members might donate vestments or church ornaments or even finance the construction of a chapel, a sacristy, or other building project.  This would be especially true in the city where citizens vied for the opportunity to give rich gifts to the Cathedral Churches.  Rural nobility, on the other hand, usually preferred to give their gifts of chalices or vestments or artwork to a monastery or abbey. 
         Monasteries only had a right to the tithes of the tenants on monastic lands.  As they were not parish churches their only “parishioners” were those who worked for the abbey or were parishioners for a parish church that might belong to the abbey.  But they usually received a dowry from the family of each new monk—a land grant more often than not—and as the monks came from the land-owning nobility this built up monastic land-holdings often to great wealth.  In England at the time when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries (1536-1541) the monasteries  collectively owned more land than the Crown!  That was one of the reasons he closed them down—and confiscated their lands.  In fact, the Church owned over a third of the land in England when Henry came to the throne! When he needed money who knew whose piggy-bank to break.  It wasn’t only about Katherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn that we have a Church of England today. 
          Monasteries often received bequests from pious folks—again primarily the wealthy as they had the lands to give.  Land was given in exchange for prayers for the living and/or the dead.  Grandma dies and leaves her vineyard to the monks; in exchange every year on the anniversary of her death they are obligate to offer a mass or sing a litany or hold a procession with prayers for the repose of her soul. 
         Monasteries and Cathedrals—and sometimes important parish churches, most in the cities—also acquired (either by gift or purchase) relics of the saints. If they were truly lucky they might acquire a relic of Christ or the Virgin.  Chartres still has a veil said to be that of the Virgin Mary.  The Sainte-Chapelle in Paris was built in the thirteenth century (a little later than most of our other examples) to hold the crown of thorns and other souvenirs that King Saint Louis IX of France brought back from the Crusades.  Relics were great money-makers.  Pilgrims flocked from great distances, hundreds of miles, to see relics or visit a particular shrine.  At the shrine they paid for meals and lodging at various inns, spent money on different amusements, and left their donations for the privilege of seeing a piece of bone that allegedly  belonged to an apostle, a bloody tunic that had belonged to a martyr, a piece of Christ’s cross, or whatever the local attraction was.  When the left, the officials of the Church showed up at the Inn or tavern or house of prostitution and collected the Church’s share of the income the pilgrims had brought.  And I am not trying to be funny or shock about the local brothel being part of the pilgrim economy.  This is a religion that still believed in Original Sin and knew it made money. 
         All this provided income for Churches—great and small.  How does that contribute to the enforcement of celibacy?  Well stay tuned.  We can’t fit the whole story into one entry.