30 when was Henry's first poor law act created and what did it mean? Dissolution of the monasteries Flashcards | Quizlet [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. 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. [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. An Act of Elizabeth's first parliament dissolved the refounded houses. granted to Richard Longe 1540/1 Shengay Preceptory: Soham Monastery: Saxon monks Elsewhere, they fell into . Moreover, it was by no means clear that the property of a surrendered house would automatically be at the disposal of the Crown; a good case could be made for this property to revert to the heirs and descendants of the founder or other patron. 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. From the beginning of 1538, Cromwell targeted the houses that he knew to be wavering in their resolve to continue, cajoling and bullying their superiors to apply for surrender. [36] When Mary died in 1558 and was succeeded by her half-sister, Elizabeth I, five of the six revived communities left again to exile in continental Europe. [30], Along with the destruction of the monasteries, some of them many hundreds of years old, the related destruction of the monastic libraries was perhaps the greatest cultural loss caused by the English Reformation. This included refounding eight out of nine previous monastic cathedrals (Coventry being the exception), as well as six completely new bishoprics (Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford, Peterborough, Westminster) with its associated cathedrals, chapters, choirs, and grammar schools; refounding monastic institutions at Brecon, Thornton, and Burton on Trent as secular colleges; and endowing five Regius Professorships at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the endowment of the colleges of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Christ Church, Oxford and the maritime charity of Trinity House. [18], In May 1538, the monastic cathedral community of Norwich surrendered, adopting new collegiate statutes as secular priests along similar lines. Adopting a financial criterion was most likely determined pragmatically; the Valor Ecclesiasticus returns being both more reliable and more complete than those of Cromwell's visitors. There were nearly 900 religious houses in England, around 260 for monks, 300 for regular canons, 142 nunneries and 183 friaries; some 12,000 people in total, 4,000 monks, 3,000 canons, 3,000 friars and 2,000 nuns. The status of 'founder' was considered in civil law to be real property, and could consequently be bought and sold, in which case the purchaser would be termed the patron. In 1521, Martin Luther had published De votis monasticis (On the monastic vows),[14] a treatise which declared that the monastic life had no scriptural basis, was pointless and also actively immoral in that it was not compatible with the true spirit of Christianity. The destruction of English monasteries under Henry VIII transformed the power structures of English society. Pensions averaged around 5 per annum before tax for monks, with those for superiors typically assessed at 10% of the net annual income of the house and were not reduced if the pensioner obtained other employment. These changes were initially met with widespread popular suspicion; on some occasions and in particular localities, there was active resistance to the royal program. Where dissolution was determined on, a second visit would affect the arrangements for closure of the house, disposal of its assets and endowments and provisions for the future of the members of the house; otherwise, the second visit would collect the agreed fine. The term abbey is also used loosely to refer to priories, smaller monasteries . This list may not reflect recent changes. [citation needed], The remaining monasteries required funds, especially those facing a new need to pay fines for exemption. [27] By 1535, of 8,838 rectories, 3,307 had thus been appropriated with vicarages;[28] but at this late date, a small sub-set of vicarages in monastic ownership were not being served by beneficed clergy at all. Now, there were copycat musterings passing up through Yorkshire as far as Northumberland, and to the west as far as the gateway into Wales. [citation needed]. Renaissance princes throughout Europe were facing severe financial difficulties due to sharply rising expenditures, especially to pay for armies, fighting ships and fortifications. Some smaller abbeys had already closed because of a lack of recruits when Henry VIII forcibly suppressed all monasteries between 1536 and 1540. . [citation needed], However, this apparent consensus often faced strong resistance in practice. Existing tenants would have their tenancies continued, and lay office holders would continue to receive their incomes and fees (even though they now had no duties or obligations). Nearly 500 years after dissolution, English monasteries still - Crux The closing of the monasteries aroused popular opposition, but recalcitrant monasteries and abbots became the targets of royal hostility. 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. Monastery of San Jernimo de Buenavista, Seville. They were, after all, Englishmen, and shared the common prejudice of their contemporaries against the pretensions of foreign Italian prelates. Thomas Cromwell - World History Encyclopedia Most observers were in agreement that a systematic reform of the English church must necessarily involve the drastic concentration of monks and nuns into fewer, larger houses, potentially making much monastic income available for more productive religious, educational and social purposes. and . It also covers the build-up to the dissolution. Even in houses with adequate numbers, the regular obligations of communal eating and shared living had not been fully enforced for centuries, as communities tended to sub-divide into a number of distinct familiae. [citation needed]. Explore monasticism in the High Middle Ages, the impact of the Crusades, the growth of education, and the birth of the university to understand how universities replaced monasteries as. [citation needed], In the autumn of 1535, the visiting commissioners were sending back to Cromwell written reports of all the lurid doings they claimed to have discovered, enclosing with them bundles of purported miraculous wimples, girdles and mantles that monks and nuns had been lending out for cash to the sick, or to mothers in labour. 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. Monasteries encouraged literacy, promoted learning, and preserved the classics of ancient literature, including the works of Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Aristotle. Why did Henry VIII make a break with Rome? - Oak National Academy [17], In 1534, Cromwell undertook, on behalf of the King, an inventory of the endowments, liabilities and income of the entire ecclesiastical estate of England and Wales, including the monasteries (see Valor Ecclesiasticus), for the purpose of assessing the Church's taxable value, through local commissioners who reported in May 1535. Building stone and slate roofs were sold off to the highest bidder. Many applicants had been founders or patrons of the relevant houses and could expect to be successful subject to paying the standard market rate of twenty years' income. Doubled The resale of monastic land is estimated to have made . . - caring for the sick - place of catholic worship - sanctuary - education how may monasteries did Wolsey close in the 1520s? 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. Dissolution of the Monasteries - The British Library If the property with which a house had been endowed by its founder were to be confiscated or surrendered, then the house ceased to exist, whether its members continued in the religious life or not. [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. The practice of Catholicism in England was illegal, as was undertaking exile for the sake of religious freedom. A house of Dominican friars was established at Smithfield, but this was only possible through importing professed religious from Holland and Spain, and Mary's hopes of further refoundations foundered, as she found it very difficult to persuade former monks and nuns to resume the religious life; consequently schemes for restoring the abbeys at Glastonbury and St Albans failed for lack of volunteers. The Court of Augmentations retained around a third of the overall monastic income since it was necessary to continue making pension payments to former monks and nuns. S. St. Khach Monastery (Unus) [29], On the dissolution these spiritual income streams were sold off on the same basis as landed endowments, creating a new class of lay impropriators, who thereby became entitled to the patronage of the living together with the income from tithes and glebe lands; albeit that they also as lay rectors became liable to maintain the fabric of the parish chancel. The predominant academic opinion is that the extensive care taken to provide for monks and nuns from the suppressed houses to transfer to continuing houses if they wished, demonstrates that monastic reform was still, at least in the mind of the King, the guiding principle; but that further large-scale action against substandard richer monasteries was always envisaged. 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. His intention in destroying the monastic system was both to reap its wealth and to suppress political opposition. A very few of these, such as Saint Bartholomew's Hospital in London (which still exists, though under a different name between 1546 and 1948), were exempted by special royal dispensation but most closed, their residents being discharged with small pensions. Yet for some, the . However, although the property rights of lay founders and patrons were legally extinguished, the incomes of lay holders of monastic offices, pensions and annuities were generally preserved, as were the rights of tenants of monastic lands. [citation needed], Once it had become clear that dissolution was now to be the general expectation, the future of the ten monastic cathedrals came into question. 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. Consequently, the founder, and their heirs, had a continuing (and legally enforceable) interest in certain aspects of the house's functioning; their nomination was required at the election of an abbot or prior, they could claim hospitality within the house when needed, and they could be buried within the house when they died. But whole monastic libraries were destroyed, countless music manuscripts lost and Englandsrural landscape changed forever. By the time Henry VIII turned his mind to the business of monastery reform, royal action to suppress religious houses had a history of more than 200 years. They also objected to foreign prelates having jurisdiction over English monasteries. 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. However, after Cromwell's fall in 1540, Henry needed money quickly to fund his military ambitions in France and Scotland; and so monastic property was sold off, representing by 1547 an annual value of 90,000 (equivalent to 55,802,000 in 2021). Lists of monasteries cover monasteries, buildings or complexes of buildings comprising the domestic quarters and workplaces of monastics, monks or nuns, whether living in communities or alone (hermits). 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. If, however, the pensioner accepted a royal appointment or benefice of greater annual value than their pension, the pension would be extinguished. Nevertheless, there was during most of 1537 (possibly conditioned by concern not to re-ignite rebellious impulses) a distinct standstill in official action towards any further round of dissolutions. On the eve of the overthrow, the various monasteries owned approximately 2,000,000 acres (8,100km2), over 16 percent of England, with tens of thousands of tenant farmers working those lands, some of whom had family ties to a particular monastery going back many generations. Of all the friary churches in England and Wales, only St. Andrew's Hall, Norwich, Atherstone Priory (Warwickshire), the Chichester Guildhall, and Greyfriars Church, Reading remain standing (although the London church of the Austin Friars continued in use by the Dutch Church until destroyed in the London Blitz). Late Medieval Monasteries and Their Patrons: England and - DeepDyve 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. Over the medieval period, monasteries and priories continually sought papal exemptions, so as to appropriate the glebe and tithe income of rectoral benefices in their possession to their own use. If the adult male population was 500,000, that meant that one adult man in fifty was in religious orders.[1]. 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. An attempt was also made in 1530 to dissolve the famous Abbey of St. Gall, which was a state of the Holy Roman Empire in its own right, but this failed, and St. Gall survived until 1798. In practice, the Crown claimed the status of 'founder' in all such cases that occurred. Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk and Lord Treasurer proposed Thetford Priory, making extensive preparations to adopt statutes similar to those from Stoke-by-Clare, and expending substantial sums into moving shrines, relics and architectural fittings from the dissolved Castle Acre Priory into Thetford priory church. Even though, by midsummer, the immediate danger had passed, Henry still demanded from Cromwell unprecedented sums for the coastal defence works from St Michael's Mount to Lowestoft; and the scale of the proposed new foundations was drastically cut back. Between 1536 and 1540, on the orders of Henry VIII, every single abbey and priory in England was forcibly closed. Otherwise, the most marketable fabric in monastic buildings was likely to be the lead on roofs, gutters and plumbing, and buildings were burned down as the easiest way to extract this. From 1518, Thomas More was increasingly influential as a royal servant and counsellor, in the course of which his correspondence included a series of strong condemnations of the idleness and vice in much monastic life, alongside his equally vituperative attacks on Luther. By contrast, where monasteries had provided grammar schools for older scholars, these were commonly refounded with enhanced endowments; some by royal command in connection with the newly re-established cathedral churches, others by private initiative. Such estates were a valuable source of income for the Crown in its French wars. 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. Cromwell appointed a local commissioner in each case to ensure rapid compliance with the King's wishes, to supervise the orderly sale of monastic goods and buildings, to dispose of monastic endowments, and to ensure that the former monks and nuns were provided with pensions, cash gratuities and clothing. At the time of their suppression, a small number of English and Welsh religious houses could trace their origins to Anglo-Saxon or Celtic foundations before the Norman Conquest. This will include the religious, political and economic factors that led to the decision to break with Rome. Indeed, Henry's then chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey (l. c. 1473-1530 CE) had already shut down 29 monastic houses during the early 1530s CE. In the 1530s CE, there were still some 800 monasteries spread across England and Wales, but many were in decline. created in 1535 and meant that the charitable role of the monasteries was no longer so important. What was the dissolution of the monasteries? - Oak National Academy 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". In France and Scotland, by contrast, royal action to seize monastic income proceeded along entirely different lines. [31] At the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York, a library of 646 volumes was destroyed, leaving only three known survivors. [citation needed], Even while it had been stated that King's increased riches would make it possible to build or better fund religious, philanthropic, and educational institutions, only around 15% of the entire monastic money was really used for these reasons in actual reality. The verdict of unprejudiced historians at the present day would probably beabstracting from all ideological considerations for or against monasticismthat there were far too many religious houses in existence in view of the widespread decline of the fervent monastic vocation, and that in every country the monks possessed too much of wealth and of the sources of production both for their own well-being and for the material good of the economy. Erasmus and More promoted ecclesiastical reform while remaining faithful to the Church of Rome and had ridiculed such monastic practices as repetitive formal religion,[16] superstitious pilgrimages for the veneration of relics, and the accumulation of monastic wealth. 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. Extensive monastic complexes dominated English towns of any size, but most were less than half full. [citation needed], In 1522, Fisher himself dissolved the women's monasteries of Bromhall and Higham to aid St John's College, Cambridge. 1. An objective assessment of the quality of monastic observance in England in the 1530s would almost certainly have been largely negative. In 1554, Cardinal Pole the papal legate, negotiated a papal dispensation allowing the new owners to retain the former monastic lands, and in return Parliament enacted the heresy laws in January 1555. At the same time, the restrictions on 'pluralism' introduced through legislation in 1529 prevented the accumulation of multiple benefices by individual clergy, and accordingly by 1559 some 10 per cent of benefices were vacant and the former reserve army of Mass priests had largely been absorbed into the ranks of beneficed clergy. In the following century, Lady Margaret Beaufort obtained the property of Creake Abbey (whose religious had all died of sweating sickness in 1506) to fund her works at Oxford and Cambridge. The smaller houses identified for suppression were then visited during 1536 by a further set of local commissions, one for each county, charged with creating an inventory of assets and valuables, and empowered to obtain prompt co-operation from monastic superiors by the allocation to them of pensions and cash gratuities. Shown in the background is the execution of the Abbot of Colchester, one of three Benedictine abbots executed in that year. dissolved 1521 when the last prioress died and the remaining sisters left; given to St John's College, Cambridge . Many other parishes bought and installed former monastic woodwork, choir stalls and stained-glass windows. The last of them was Vreta Abbey, where the last nuns died in 1582, and Vadstena Abbey, from which the last nuns emigrated in 1595, about half a century after the introduction of reformation. Nevertheless, and particularly in areas far from London, the abbeys, convents and priories were centres of hospitality and learning, and everywhere they remained a main source of charity for the old and infirm. James Clark claims in The Dissolution of the Monasteries: The Lincolnshire rising lasted less than a week but before its end their cause was carried across the county's northern border. Muckross Abbey. [25], Once the new and re-founded cathedrals and other endowments had been provided for, the Crown became richer to the extent of around 150,000 (equivalent to 102,817,100 in 2021),[26] per year, although around 50,000 (equivalent to 34,272,400 in 2021)[26] of this was initially committed to fund monastic pensions.

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