The friars, not being self-supporting, were by contrast much more likely to have been the objects of local hostility, especially since their practice of soliciting income through legacies appears often to have been perceived as diminishing anticipated family inheritances. The removal of over eight hundred such institutions left great gaps in the social fabric. abbey, group of buildings housing a monastery or convent, centred on an abbey church or cathedral, and under the direction of an abbot or abbess. It was envisaged that some houses might offer immediate surrender, but in practice few did; consequently, a two-stage procedure was applied, the commissions reporting back to Cromwell for a decision as to whether to proceed with dissolution. There are several recorded instances where groups of former members of a house set up residence together, but no cases where an entire community did so; and there is no indication that any such groups continued to pray the Divine Office. His intention in destroying the monastic system was both to reap its wealth and to suppress political opposition. 18th century Church of England 19th century Church of England Church of England (recent) Catholic emancipation With his king and the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer (in office 1533-55 CE), Cromwell masterminded the English Reformation which saw the Church in England break away from the Pope in Rome and such momentous acts as the Dissolution of the Monasteries. [10], The stories of monastic impropriety, vice, and excess that were to be collected by Thomas Cromwell's visitors to the monasteries may have been biased and exaggerated but the religious houses of England and Waleswith the notable exceptions of those of the Carthusians, the Observant Franciscans, and the Bridgettine nuns and monkshad long ceased to play a leading role in the spiritual life of the country. All these suppressions enjoyed papal approval but successive 15th-century popes continued to press for assurances that, now that the Avignon Papacy had been defeated, the confiscated monastic income would revert to religious and educational uses. Dissolution of the monasteries 1536-1540 - The National Archives The Dissolution of the Monasteries - History Learning Site Cromwell had already instigated a campaign against "superstitions": pilgrimages and veneration of saints, in the course of which, ancient and precious valuables were grabbed and melted down, the tombs of saints and kings ransacked for whatever profit could be got from them, and their relics destroyed or dispersed. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that only in 1580 did overall levels of charitable giving in England return to those before the dissolution. The secularised former monks and friars commonly looked for re-employment as parish clergy; and consequently, numbers of new ordinations dropped drastically in the ten years after the dissolution and ceased almost entirely in the reign of Edward VI. Between 1536 and 1540 over 850 monastic institutions were shut down by the Tudor regime. [citation needed], Otherwise in this later period, donations and legacies had tended to go instead towards parish churches, university colleges, grammar schools and collegiate churches, which suggests greater public approbation of such purposes. Consequently, one unintended long-term consequence of the dissolution was the transformation of the parish clergy in England and Wales into an educated professional class of secure beneficed incumbents of distinctly higher social standing; one that furthermore, through intermarriage of one another's children, became substantially self-perpetuating. As the last abbot had been appointed to the see of Norwich, the abbey endowments were transferred alongside him directly into those of the bishops. While Thomas Cromwell, vicar-general and vicegerent of England, is often considered the leader of the dissolutions, he merely oversaw the project, one he had hoped to use for reform of monasteries, not closure or seizure. The Act of 1539 also provided for the suppression of religious hospitals, which had constituted in England a distinct class of institution, endowed for the purpose of caring for older people. Where nuns came from well-born families, as many did, they seem commonly to have returned to live with their relatives. Rather than risk empanelling a jury, and with papal participation at this juncture no longer being welcome, the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Audley, recommended that dissolution should be legalised retrospectively through a special act of Parliament. [citation needed], By early 1538, suppression of the friaries was widely being anticipated; in some houses all friars save the prior had already left, and realisable assets (standing timber, chalices, vestments) were being sold off. [citation needed]. In this lesson, we will aim to answer the enquiry question, 'why did Henry VIII make a break from Rome?' We will do so by considering the different reasons behind his decision. Late Medieval Monasteries and Their Patrons: England and - DeepDyve The closing of the monasteries aroused popular opposition, but recalcitrant monasteries and abbots became the targets of royal hostility. Subsequently, however, sympathetic landowners housed monks or friars close to several ruined religious houses, allowing them a continued covert existence during the 17th and 18th centuries, subject to the dangers of discovery and legal ejection or imprisonment. Monks or nuns who were aged, handicapped or infirm were marked out for more generous pensions, and care was taken throughout that there should be nobody cast out of their place unprovided for (who might otherwise have increased the burden of charity for local parishes). Irish monasteries, by contrast, had experienced a catastrophic decline in numbers of professed religious, such that by the 16th century only a minority maintained the daily observance of the Divine Office. In almost all such instances, these were parish churches in the ownership of houses of Augustinian or Premonstratensian canons, orders whose rules required them to provide parochial worship within their conventual churches, for the most part as chapels of ease of a more distant parish church. The destruction of English monasteries under Henry VIII transformed the power structures of English society. Some still resisted, and that autumn the abbots of Colchester, Glastonbury, and Reading were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, their houses being dissolved and their monks, on these occasions, receiving a basic pension of 4 per year. After the disposal of their monastic lands and buildings, the majority of monks, friars and nuns were given money or pensions. [8][9][pageneeded], Cardinal Wolsey had obtained a papal bull authorising some limited reforms in the English Church as early as 1518, but reformers (both conservative and radical) had become increasingly frustrated at their lack of progress. Worcester Priory (now Worcester Cathedral) had 600 books at the time of the dissolution. The 1536 Act established that, whatever the claims of founders or patrons, the property of the dissolved smaller houses reverted to the Crown; and Cromwell established a new government agency, the Court of Augmentations, to manage it. Even the crypt of King Alfred the Great was not spared the looting frenzy. In general, the suppression commissioners were less inclined to report serious faults in monastic observance within the smaller houses than the visiting commissioners had been, although this may have been coloured by an awareness that monks and nuns with a bad reputation would be more difficult to place elsewhere. If, however, the pensioner accepted a royal appointment or benefice of greater annual value than their pension, the pension would be extinguished. [citation needed], Pensions granted to nuns were notably less generous, averaging around 3 per annum. Muckross Abbey. J. J. Scarisbrick remarked in his biography of Henry VIII: Suffice it to say that English monasticism was a huge and urgent problem; that radical action, though of precisely what kind was another matter, was both necessary and inevitable, and that a purge of the religious orders was probably regarded as the most obvious task of the new regimeas the first function of a Supreme Head empowered by statute "to visit, extirp and redress". However, Henry himself appears to have been much more influenced by the opinions on monasticism of the humanists Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, especially as found in Erasmus's work In Praise of Folly (1511) and More's Utopia (1516). After various pieces of legislation were introduced into England that ended the Pope's authority during the early 1530's, the monasteries became the focal point of the king's attack as it was assumed that they would remain loyal to the Pope. [citation needed], The royal transfer of alien monastic estates to educational foundations inspired bishops and, as the 15th century waned, they advocated more such actions, which became common. [19] In the end, six abbeys were raised to be cathedrals of new dioceses; and only a further two major abbeys, Burton-on-Trent and Thornton, were re-founded as non-cathedral colleges. However, these new arrangements appear to have taken a considerable period to gain general acceptance, and the circumstances of the church in the late 1530s may not have encouraged candidates to come forward. The existing incumbent rectors and vicars serving parish churches formerly the property of the monasteries continued in post, their incomes unaffected. Henry remained resolute however, and from 1541 as part of the Tudor conquest of Ireland he continued to press for the area of successful dissolution to be extended. [citation needed], In addition, about a quarter of net monastic wealth on average consisted of "spiritual" income arising where the religious house held the advowson of a benefice with the legal obligation to maintain the cure of souls in the parish, originally by nominating the rector and taking an annual rental payment. In the north of England, centering on Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, the suppression of the monasteries led to a popular rising, the Pilgrimage of Grace, that threatened the Crown for some weeks. In April 1533, an Act in Restraint of Appeals eliminated the right of clergy to appeal to "foreign tribunals" (Rome) over the King's head in any spiritual or financial matter. Religious superiors met their bishops' pressure with the response that the austere and cloistered ideal was no longer acceptable to more than a tiny minority of regular clergy, and that any attempt on their part to enforce their order's stricter rules could be overturned in counter-actions in the secular courts, were aggrieved monks and nuns to obtain a writ of praemunire. Erasmus had made a threefold criticism of the monks and nuns of his day, saying that: Summarising the state of monastic life across Western Europe, David Knowles said,[This quote needs a citation]. The landed property of the former monasteries included large numbers of manorial estates, each carrying the right and duty to hold a court for tenants and others. In the 1530s CE, there were still some 800 monasteries spread across England and Wales, but many were in decline. Nevertheless, the public stance of the government was that the better-run houses could still expect to survive, and Cromwell dispatched a circular letter in March 1538 condemning false rumours of a general policy of dissolution while also warning superiors against asset-stripping or concealment of valuables, which could be construed as treasonable action. Diarmaid MacCulloch further suggests that "customary male cowardice" was also a factor in the reluctance of the government to confront the heads of female religious houses. Opposition was concentrated in the houses of Carthusian monks, Observant Franciscan friars and Bridgettine monks and nuns, which were to the Government's embarrassment, exactly those orders where the religious life was acknowledged as being fully observed. [citation needed], When Henry VIII's Catholic daughter, Mary I, succeeded to the throne in 1553, her hopes for a revival of English religious life proved a failure. Henry used promises to calm the unrest before swiftly beheading some of the leaders. At Luther's home monastery in Wittenberg all the friars, save one, did so. [citation needed], From 1534 onwards, Cromwell and King Henry were constantly seeking ways to redirect ecclesiastical income to the benefit of the Crownefforts they justified by contending that much ecclesiastical revenue had been improperly diverted from royal resources in the first place. Also opposing the Supremacy and consequently imprisoned were leading Bridgettine monks from Syon Abbey, although the Syon nuns, being strictly enclosed, escaped sanction at this stage, the personal compliance of the abbess being taken as sufficient for the government's purposes. motives, respectively. Monastic successors tended thereafter to prefer to sponsor university graduates as candidates for the priesthood; and, although the government signally failed to respond to the consequent need for expanded educational provision, individual benefactors stepped into the breach, with the refoundation as university colleges of five out of the six former monastic colleges of Oxford and Cambridge; while Jesus College, Oxford and Emmanuel College, Cambridge were newly founded with the express purpose of educating a Protestant parish clergy. By the Submission of the Clergy, the English clergy and religious orders subscribed to the proposition that the King was, and had always been, the Supreme Head of the Church in England. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like background: how many monasteries in 1529, what was the wealth of the mons like? In all these suppressions, the remaining friars, monks and nuns were absorbed into other houses of their respective orders. Great abbeys and priories like Glastonbury, Walsingham, Bury St Edmunds, and Shaftesbury, which had flourished as pilgrimage sites for many centuries, were soon reduced to ruins. From their correspondence with Cromwell it can be seen that the visitors knew that findings of impropriety were both expected and desired; however, it is also clear that, where no faults were revealed, none were reported. This is a guide to finding records at The National Archives on the dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1540. The local commissioners were instructed to ensure that, where portions of abbey churches were also used by local parishes or congregations, this use should continue. The dissolution of the monasteries, occasionally referred to as the suppression of the monasteries, was the set of administrative and legal processes between 1536-1541, by which Henry VIII disbanded monasteries, priories, convents, and friaries in England, Wales, and Ireland; expropriated their income; disposed of their assets; and provided for their former personnel and functions. Other Scots aristocratic families were able to strike similar deals, and consequently over 40,000 (Scots) per annum was diverted from monasteries into the royal coffers. Monastic orders had maintained, for the education of their members, six colleges at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge, of which five survived as refoundations. Crucially, having created the precedent that tenants and lay recipients of monastic incomes might expect to have their interests recognised by the Court of Augmentations following dissolution, the government's apparent acquiescence to the granting of additional such rights and fees helped establish a predisposition towards dissolution amongst local notables and landed interests. All the houses of the Observant Friars were handed over to the mainstream Franciscan order; the friars from the Greenwich house were imprisoned, where many died from ill-treatment. [citation needed]. Other than in these three orders, observance of strict monastic rules was partial at best. Henry wanted to change this, and in November 1529 Parliament passed Acts reforming apparent abuses in the English Church. As the medieval centuries progressed, many monasteries fell into the hands of the crown and increasingly fewer remained with lay patrons. Between 1536 and 1540 he took over 800 monasteries, abbeys, nunneries and friaries, some of which had accumulated great wealth and land (through bequests for instance). Where the King had been able to establish himself as founder, he exploited his position to place compliant monks and nuns as the head of the house while non-royal patrons and founders also tended to press superiors for an early surrender, hoping thereby to get preferential treatment in the disposal of monastic rights and properties. By the time of Henry's death (1547) around half of the Irish houses had been suppressed; but many continued to resist dissolution until well into the reign of Elizabeth I, and some houses in the West of Ireland remained active until the early 17th century. While these transactions were going on in England, elsewhere in Europe events were taking place which presaged a storm. what were the 4 main roles of the monasteries? Monastery | religion | Britannica Mesi Monastery. What was the dissolution of the monasteries? The dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s was one of the most revolutionary events in English history. By definition, the selection of poorer houses for dissolution in the First Act minimised the potential release of funds to other purposes; and once pensions had been committed to former superiors, cash rewards paid to those wishing to leave the religious life, and appropriate funding allocated for refounded houses receiving transferred monks and nuns, it is unlikely that there was much if any profit at this stage other than from the fines levied on exempted houses. Thomas Cromwell (l. c. 1485-1540 CE) served as chief minister to Henry VIII of England (r. 1509-1547 CE) from 1532 to 1540 CE. As well as being a financial document, it also serves as a piece of visual propaganda that promoted the royal agenda. Unlike monasteries, friaries had eschewed income-bearing endowments; the friars, as mendicants, expected to be supported financially by offerings and donations from the faithful, while ideally being self-sufficient in producing their own basic foods from extensive urban kitchen gardens. By establishing additional long-term liabilities, these actions diminished the eventual net return to the Crown from each house's endowments, but they were not officially discouraged; indeed, Cromwell obtained and solicited many such fees in his own personal favour. [citation needed]. The English and Welsh dissolutions produced a comparatively small amount of new educational endowments compared to the violent closure of monasteries elsewhere in Protestant Europe, but the treatment of former monks and nuns was more benevolent, and there was no analogue to the effective processes established in England to the efficient mechanisms established in England to maintain pension payments over successive decades. Owing to the fairly constant state of war between England and France in the late Middle Ages, successive English governments had objected to money going overseas to France from these alien priories, as the hostile French king might get hold of it. [citation needed], It has been argued[by whom?] They also objected to foreign prelates having jurisdiction over English monasteries. Changes were too drastic 2. When the Pope refused to grant Henry VIII a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he set up the Church of England. Just over half of the remaining property was left to be offered for sale at market prices (Henry gave away very little property to favored staff, and what he did give away tended to return to the Crown after its beneficiaries fell out of favor and were charged with treason). Wealth and religious Religious motives: Bad behaviour of . Congregations that had shared monastic churches for worship continued to do so; the former monastic parts now walled off and derelict. How many monasteries were dissolved in the 16th century? Since many former monks had found employment as chantry priests, the consequence for these clerics was a double experience of dissolution, perhaps mitigated by being economically in receipt thereafter of a double pension. Monasteries in the United States (2 C, 1 P) V. Monasteries in Vatican City (1 P) Monasteries in Vietnam (1 C) Pages in category "Monasteries by country" This category contains only the following page. Then, by the Concordat of Bologna in 1516, Pope Leo X granted to Francis I effective authority to nominate almost all abbots and conventual priors in France. The king's officers first sequestrated the assets of the alien priories in 12951303 under Edward I, and the same thing happened repeatedly for long periods over the course of the 14th century, most particularly in the reign of Edward III. Discover what happened to the many thousands of monks, nuns and friars whose lives were changed forever by the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The antiquarian John Leland was commissioned by the King to rescue items of particular interest (especially manuscript sources of Old English history),[32] and other collections were made by private individuals, notably Matthew Parker. Since the 12th century, it had become universal in Western Europe for the household expenses of abbots and conventual priors to be separated from those of the rest of the monastery, typically appropriating more than half the house's income. Ordinary monks and nuns were given the choice of secularisation (with a cash gratuity but no pension), or of transfer to a continuing larger house of the same order. Some books were destroyed for their precious bindings, others were sold off by the cartload. In Apr 1536, there were over 800 monasteries, abbeys, nunneries and friaries that were home to over 10,000 monks, nuns, friars and canons. The majority of those then remaining chose to continue in the religious life; in some areas, the premises of a suppressed religious house was recycled into a new foundation to accommodate them, and in general, rehousing those seeking a transfer proved much more difficult and time-consuming than appears to have been anticipated. They set a cap on fees, both for the probate of wills and mortuary expenses for burial in hallowed ground; tightened regulations covering rights of sanctuary for criminals; and reduced to two the number of church benefices that could in the future be held by one man. At the beginning of the 14th century there had been around 5,000 friars in England, occupying extensive complexes in all towns of any size. They continued in those states that remained Catholic, and new community orders such as the Jesuits and Capuchins emerged alongside the older orders.[5]. Find out more about the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Westminster Abbey, which had been retained as a cathedral, reverted to being a monastery; while the communities of the Bridgettine nuns and of the Observant Franciscans, which had gone into exile in the reign of Henry VIII, were able to return to their former houses at Syon and Greenwich respectively. The last surviving monks continued to draw their pensions into the reign of James I (16031625), more than 60 years after the dissolution's end. But although Elizabeth offered to allow the monks in Westminster to remain in place with restored pensions if they took the Oath of Supremacy and conformed to the new Book of Common Prayer, all refused and dispersed unpensioned. There were around 400 religious houses in Ireland in 1530many more, relative to population and material wealth, than in England and Wales.
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