If people know anything about Henry VIII, it’s that (in descending order): he had six wives (divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived), he left the Catholic Church in a huff, and (sharp descent here) he dissolved the monasteries.
Let’s talk about the monasteries.
Dissolving religious houses wasn’t new. For centuries, smaller monasteries either had blinked out of existence on their own or were dissolved so their endowments (their revenue-generating lands and churches) could be redistributed to other religious houses or used to fund colleges. Beyond pissing off some manageable number of people, that wasn’t controversial. What was new under Henry was the scale. And the purpose.
Oh, and where the money went.
Irrelevant photo: sunset
The why? of it all
First off, we’re using monasteries here as shorthand for not just monasteries but also abbeys, convents, and any religious houses that I’ve forgotten. It’s inaccurate and sexist but it’s simpler. Forgive me.
If you roll all those religious houses together, you’ll have the wealthiest institution in Tudor England, owning a quarter of the country’s cultivated land and a lot of expensive bling, because devotion to god worked better when it was surrounded by gold and silver and jewels.
All that bling was not only expensive, it was important. How would anyone know you had wealth if you didn’t show it off? It was what people and institutions did with it.
This being a time when wealth was measured not in bitcoins but in land and expensive objects, it was almost inevitable that Henry would cast his eye in the direction of those monasteries. His government was permanently short of money (blame wars–they’re expensive–and, um, lifestyle issues), and the monasteries not only had all those riches, they were aligned with the pope, who was now Henry’s enemy, what with Henry jumping into that huff and leaving the church, so they were a base of power capable of opposing him.
The mechanics of dissolution
In 1536, Henry’s government went after monasteries that had an income of less than £200 a year and fewer than 12 “inmates.” Sorry–not my word. They were probably counting nuns, monks, or friars but not their servants. They were closed down and their buildings, land, and money went to the crown.
To give a sense of what £200 was worth, you could’ve bought 42 horses or 160 cows with it. It was the daily wage of 6,666 skilled artisans–or of one working for a long damn time.
Then in 1539, the government moved against the larger monasteries, and by the next year they were being closed at the rate of 50 a month. The land and buildings of both large and small houses were sold and the bling–the movable assets–auctioned off.
In the first stage of dissolution, the confiscated buildings weren’t badly damaged, although lead was stripped from the roofs (it was valuable stuff), glazing was removed, and bells melted down. The plan was to sell or use the buildings themselves, and some of the buildings were repurposed for grand homes. You’ll still find stately homes called SomethingOrOther Abbey, and yes, they were once abbeys.
In the later stages of the dissolution, orders went out to pull down the buildings: “Pull down to the ground all the walls of the churches, steeples, cloisters, fraters [refectories], dorters [dormitories], chapter houses.” This wasn’t cheap. The cost of tearing down Furness Abbey was 10% of the money raised by selling its property.
Many of the buildings were partially pulled down and left to decay. Today, they make scenic ruins and people pay admission to wander through, take selfies, brush up against a bit of history, and then buy tea and sandwiches.
The courts
All this confiscating and selling created a major administrative headache, and in 1535 the Court of Augmentation was set up to sort through the monasteries’ assets and income. Then in 1540, the Court of First Fruits and Tenths took charge of money the monasteries had once sent to Rome, because the end of the monasteries didn’t mean the end of the payments people owed them.
What were first fruits, though? The first year’s profits that the new holder of a benefice owed the church. (A benefice was a church office that brought revenue to the person who held it.) And the tenths? The 10% of each year’s income that the benefice’s holder owed the church each year until forever. All that had to be assessed, catalogued, dealt with.
The courts were part of Thomas Cromwell’s work of replacing the king’s medieval household administration with something we’d recognize today as a civil service.
The treasury came out of the dissolution some £1.5 million richer. That would’ve been lifetimes of work by those skilled artisans we were talking about.
The monks, nuns, and servants
That accounts for the income, the bling, and the land and buildings, but it leaves the people who made their lives in the monasteries unaccounted for. So let’s do numbers. Some people love numbers.
Roughly 14,000 monks, nuns, and friars were de-monked, de-nunned, and de-friared when the monasteries closed. If they cooperated, they received pensions. If they didn’t–well, some 200 people were executed for opposing the dissolution.
I haven’t found a number for the servants who were now out of jobs and I don’t know if they were counted.
Monks and canons typically received a pension of around £5 or £6 a year, which was roughly what a chaplain was paid.
What’s a canon? I had to look it up. “A member of the chapter of (for the most part) priests, headed by a dean, which is responsible for administering a cathedral or certain other churches.”
Did you really need to know that?
The heads of religious houses did better, and as in everything else at this time, connections mattered. Family mattered. One abbot who was close to Cromwell received £100 a year–roughly the income of a rich country gentleman. Cooperation also mattered. Those who played along might be allowed to wander out into the secular world in possession of some of the house’s bling or cattle.
Nuns–you won’t be surprised to learn–got less, sometimes no more than £1 a year. Even after the convents closed, they weren’t allowed to marry, although some did anyway. But many found no choice but to return to their families. Convents had long been refuges both for women who didn’t want to marry and dumping grounds for the unmarriageable daughters of the gentry and middle-ranking families. Both groups of women were likely to be seen as burdens if they returned home.
As for the servants, there would’ve been more of them than of monks or nuns. Sawley Abbey’s 18 monks had 42 servants–farmhands, plumbers, cooks, kitchen boys, carpenters, grooms, masons, laborers, and washerwomen.
A monastery would also have had a steward–far higher up the scale than a washerwoman but still a servant–who managed legal relationships and relations with the outside world.
With the closing of the monasteries, the servants who lived there, as many did, would have been homeless in addition to unemployed. Some dissolution commissioners made provision for them–which implies that some didn’t. At Furness Abbey, the servants were owed a good bit of back pay, and the commissioner made sure this was paid, although they got nothing, as far as I’ve read, beyond that.
Almsmen living at the abbey received a cash settlement.
Gain and Losses
Although the politically well connected and the backers of Henry’s reforms were in the best position to profit from the sales of land and buildings, traditional Catholics also bought up property. This created a group of wealthy families whose interests now lay with keeping the Church of England in place. Even when Mary took the throne and restored the Catholic Church, she couldn’t re-establish the monasteries. Whether you count that as a gain, a loss, or simply clever politics depends on your point of view.
The closing of the monasteries created some concrete problems that no one seems to have planned for. The monasteries had been home to massive libraries–collections of illuminated manuscripts. But the printed book was replacing the hand-copied one, so who needed those old things? Some were saved but many were destroyed.
Monastic and convent schools had educated boys and girls (separately of course, you barbarian), and the church had offered one of the very few ways a bright boy could climb out of poverty. With the closing of the monasteries, the schools closed.
The church also ran hospitals, and many of these were attached to monasteries. Those were lost.
Let’s not let the word hospital fool us, though. It shares a root with hospitality, and not all hospitals dealt with illness. In England and Wales, 47% housed the poor and elderly. Another 12% housed poor travelers and pilgrims and 10% cared for the non-contagious sick. The rest housed lepers.
Monasteries also gave alms in the form of money or food to the poor. Not enough to keep them from being poor, mind you, and not enough to make a dent in their own riches, but when people are hungry–and this was a society full of people living on the edge–food is food.
No one made plans to replace any of this.
Nursery rhymes
According to legend, the nursery rhyme about Little Jack Horner come from this time.
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said ‘What a good boy am I!
Thomas Horner was (allegedly) steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury, and before the abbey was destroyed Whiting was supposed to have sent Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie with the deeds to a dozen manors hidden inside. Because if the Court of Augmentations couldn’t find them, they couldn’t claim them. Possession is nine-tenths and all that.
Again supposedly, Horner opened the pie somewhere along the way and stole the deeds to the manor of Mells, in Somerset, which had lead mines, making the plum in the rhyme a play on the Latin plumbum, meaning lead.
A Thomas Horner did become the owner of the manor, but that doesn’t prove he found it in a pie and doesn’t explain why he’s called Jack.
Notes from the U.K. 
What I always find surprising about all of this is how many monasteries, convents, abbeys etc. there were for so few monks and nuns. That’s what made it relatively easy for Henry VIII to close them down. Dissolution did affect more people than just the monks and the nuns, as you point out.
In the medieval town here the priests for five out of the six parishes came from the local monastery and the tithes in those parishes belonged to the monastery. I’m doing this from memory, so this might not be entirely correct. There was a lazar house, although I’m not sure whether or not it was still there by this point. There was also a hospital and there was a friary within the town walls.
A friend has lent me a history of Southampton which covers a wider period than my own books, so I might have a look to see what was left here to dissolve.
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You make an interesting point–one that should’ve been obvious from the few numbers I included but which hadn’t struck me. It would be even more interesting to compare that to the numbers of a few centuries earlier, when the monastic movement may have been (and I suspect was) stronger.
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Despite having read ‘Dissolution’ by C.J. Sansom, it wasn’t until I visited Rievaulx Abbey 5 years ago that I started to understand how great the fall in numbers had been. In the twelfth century there were about 650 men there, including lay brothers and servants. It was a Cistercian abbey, so things were not the same as in other abbeys. When the abbey was dissolved, there were only 125 men, of whom 23 were monks., This is according to the English Heritage guidebook. Rievaulx is huge. The idea of it serving any purpose with only 23 monks is laughable.
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Which leads me to want to examine the dissolution from another angle: that Henry was pushing a wagon that was already in motion.
Thanks, as always, for your comments. They’re unfailingly interesting.
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In Edward VI’s time, the money from the dissolution of the chantries was used to found the Edward VI Grammar Schools. A lot of them are still going, and they’re excellent schools. Henry could have done so much with the money from the monasteries, which was way more than Edward got, but he had to waste it on trying to invade France. Annoys me every time I think about it!
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Thanks for mentioning that. I didn’t go that far ahead into the story and hadn’t known it. From what I’ve read, it sounds like nobody really thought about the gaps the closing of the monasteries would leave and they weren’t prepared to fill them. And then, of course, there was all that wondrous warfare to conduct. Who could resist?
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When I did a spell of teaching history, the Tudor era was one of my favourite bits. It was basically a soap opera in historical form. Way more fun to teach than I expect it was to live through!
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For those who did manage to live through it. I do understand why people wanted to be close to the king–money and power and prestige, of course–but even so I can’t imagine why anyone would’ve wanted to be close to him. Waaaaaay too dangerous. But yes, lots of fun to read about and, I’m sure, to teach.
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Thanks for this. It’s a subject we covered at school but I don’t remember much being said about the knock-on effects, apart from the bit about the loss of help to the poor and sick. The sad fact is that history as a subject then (it may have changed?) was concerned with political power and the nasty habits of the ruling élite. Was it simply that the powerful didn’t think things through before they did them? Or, more likely, I think, they just didn’t care at all about the consequences for anyone outside their immediate circle.
Henry VIII was a bad king and a worse human being in my opinion, not that it matters a jot what I think about someone who’s been dead for centuries… and don’t get me started on the way the Tudors managed to grab the throne. My teacher clearly quite approved of Henry VII, goodness knows why. History only shows us that nothing much changes, the ruthless can always somehow gain sway over the rest of us by violence, bribery, deceit, threats. It’s still happening as I type and no doubt will continue long after I’m gone. And on that cheerful note, thanks again!
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Well, that cheered me up this morning.
When I was in school, history was taught terribly–you almost couldn’t remember what you read because it had no substance. It was basically a list of events you might manage to recognize when you heard about them: Teapot Dome; the South Sea Bubble. Imagine my surprise when I found out there were interesting stories behind them.
On the university level, what’s called social history–the history of ordinary people–is getting some recognition, but I doubt it’s fought its way into the schools yet. It might wake up the kids dozing in the back row if it did.
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It certainly did a while back, after O-levels I and some other pupils were offered a weeks course testing the the social history part of a new A-level curriculum. It was great fun using the 1851 census and contemporary directories to plot the social structure of a number of Suffolk villages on the cusp of the arrival of the railways. My O-level course in the middle 1970s had a fair amount on the Factory Acts and the rise of trade unionism. I suspect general dumbing down and politicisation has thinned the teaching of history subsequently.
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Wow. Now that’s real teaching. In college (or university if we’re speaking British) I took a women’s history course that had us looking through 1950s magazines to see what we could learn from the ads. It was fabulous.
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As being related to a Carmelite Monk (my Great, Great, grandfather Père Hyacinthe Loyson) who was the head of the Carmelites in France and gave sermons at Notre Dame, he was not very complimentary of the monasteries as quoted in his biographies. Of course he left in disgrace after questioning the infallibility of the pope which gave him an out to get married who I believe was planned. He hated having to wake up during the night to ring the monastery chimes and having the wear sandals in the middle of the French winters, but his brother had it worse as a Dominican monk receiving self applied whippings and miserable living conditions. Then there was his sister who became a cloistered nun and wasn’t even allowed to visit her dying mother until her brother pleaded with the pope the let her out to see her, and she never returned to the monastery after her mother passed. My point is maybe Henry VIII did a good thing freeing the nuns and monks!
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So basically, they were held captive. I’m sure for some of the monks and nuns, being turfed out was freedom. For others–the ones who found it a good fit–I expect it was a disaster. And for the nuns, with £1 a year and very few honest ways to make a living, it would’ve been tough if their families didn’t welcome them.
Thanks for the tale, though. It adds some interesting information and a human dimension to this bit of history.
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My great-great-grandmother, Emilie Jane Loyson, his wife, wrote an autobiography I published a few years ago. The nun’s story comes from her. She often visited her in the convent and was concerned about her declining mental and physical state. She pleaded with her future husband to do something because, eventually, she would die from being in her cloistered prison. She lived many years in her ancestral home in France after her mother passed, my great-great-great-grandmother. Her mother’s family was very religious with priests and nuns in every generation going back hundreds of years.
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I’m glad the tale’s been published. I hope there’s a historical society somewhere that you can give a copy to so it’s available to some future historian.
You’ve made me think about the period in (I believe) the early medieval period when kids were more or less signed over to monasteries long before they were old enough to make an informed decision. Not that they got a vote anyway. They were simply given. What a clever (not to mention determined) guy your great-great-whatever was to get himself kicked out.
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Yes, love won out over religion! They did start their own church in Paris though and he preached all over the world including the US with the help of his wife to translate. When his mother was with child she had a vision of a child dressed in robes floating above her pregnant belly! And yes it was a tradition then in France and in many Catholic countries to have one child enter the monastery as a priest or nun and not just in old times but even in recent history. I am planning on releasing a second edition of her autobiography in hardback and fully indexed. I will send one to the Vatican!
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I’m sure the Vatican will love it!
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I’ve just taken my students to the Tower of London for a school trip. Henry VIII was an absolutely revolting man, wasn’t he?
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Truly. And yet that period’s fascinating. Setting aside all the soap opera aspects, his reign marked a shift from a court open only to the aristocracy to one that made use of the talents of people without titles.
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Yes, there’s often a grain of goodness in the worst.
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Hmm. I’m not sure I’ll go that far, but that no picture is made only of one color? That seems certain.
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i have a thing about old buildings and this is painful. Not to mention throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Fascinating, thanks for posting.
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As do I. They’re as close as we can get to touching the past. I understand why they tore I’m still not sure why they tore down some of the buildings–destroy them so they couldn’t be reoccupied and used. But why they did that instead of selling them I’m not sure. Maybe there just weren’t enough buyers.
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Prior to the end of the Reich the old monasteries were secularised, by the damn French in occupied regions, but the death blow came 1802/03, the instrumentum is called Reichsdeputationshauptschluß. In some areas in Bavaria the (non French) barbarians filled potholes with them books. Artwork was melted. A self inflicted loss of unique, un-reproducable pieces.
Henry was not always the fat ham with that sly look, he was a young, self confident, good looking man at the start. I remember vaguely that emperor Karl V. met Heinrich two times, there must be sources about this, I have this from a biography of Charles. As we all, Heinrich changed over time, he “has become” as anybody else (auch er ist ein Gewordener, if one wants to put it a bit abit affected). And somehow a certain image of the man prevails.
I would have gulped down a few pints with him.
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He was young and handsome–at least when he was young. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was any nicer, or safer to be around, just better looking. Have a beer, but don’e get too close.
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Yes, Henry and Charles V met twice during the early years of Henry’s reign, when Henry was married to Charles’s Auntie Catherine and was hoping that Charles would marry either his sister Mary or his daughter Mary.
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I know this is off topic, but given the way they recycled names it’s a wonder anyone knew who anyone was.
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It didn’t help that they were a bit cavalier with spelling surnames as well. Royalty are okay but anyone else can be difficult to research until relatively recently.
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Ouch. I hadn’t thought about that.
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Mary Tudor, but Charles and Isabella were a happy couple. Her mother Maria also was an aunt of Charles.
Hail Mary !
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knowledge of this period of English history is tangential – it has given rise to a lot of ghost stories, haunted ruins, etc. etc. But such maneuvers all fit in with typical maneuvering over centuries. It’s discouraging to contemplate, but at this time in US history a welcome distraction. Thanks for all the info.
Beautiful sunset too – could have been seen at the time you were writing of.
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In one of the comments, somebody talked about the Tudor period as a soap opera, and it’s the soapy aspects that are best known, I think. The tangential ones. But hey, any knowledge of history is a place to start.
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Just by coincidence, I have just watched the Wolf Hall series and it is fantastically well cast and filmed (let alone the script which managed to condense two huge books into six episodes…). Don’t know how I missed it before, but the second season is out soon. Highly recommended.
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Absolutely. In the final season, there’s one scene shot by candlelight that’s worth watching the whole thing for. Just beautiful.
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Great yarn, and a lovely photo.
Yes, Wolf Hall is a gem. My partner and I were just talking about the dissolution, following from the question, “Is it Sunday night, Wolf Hall?” – we were wondering how the cathedrals survived. We made less than intelligent noises only.
Watching the first series of WH to catch up before the current one, it struck me how powerful in forming history a single, arbitrary cultural belief can be, in this case that the Royal line was only secure if the King had a son…or, now I think about it again, all the guff about who one could marry or divorce and still be Divinely blessed or even semi-respectable. If Henry had just been able to imagine – and persuade others – that a daughter was as good an aire as a son, how different things might have been. No beheadings and burnings at stakes, no fight with Rome, no dissolution of the monasteries, and probably none of that long persecution of Catholics. Guy Fawkes wouldn’t have tried to blow the top brass to kingdom come, and maybe the Irish Troubles would have been averted. On the other hand, chaos, human nature, and imaginary counterfactuals being what they are, some other stupid nonsense would no doubt have ensued instead.
I spied with my beady eye a couple of typos, by the way. “no one seem to have planned for,” and “With the closing of the monasteries, they schools closed.” Sounds like you be settling in nicely down there in the West-country, says I.
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My fingers are picking up the accent–is that what you’re saying. I may go back and correct the typos. I should. On the other hand, I’m getting lazy.
Okay, I will. Eventually. Thanks for mentioning them. I do have some pride left.
Counterfactuals are tempting, but–well, take Ireland. The colonization would’ve been different, but it would still have been colonization. Possibly less brutal, but who can say? Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to unravel the whole thing and knit it back together more peacefully?
The cultural belief that I find fascinating is that a king comes to be chosen by god once holy oil’s put on his head. Wow. Amazing.
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Re the accent, yes, you got my meaning. “They schools” reminded me of some of Thomas Hardy’s rural characters.
I’m far too pedantic – I should try to care less about the odd typo.
Yeah, it’s powerful stuff, that holy oil, but only when wielded by a priest, apparently. If we nick it from the local church or Canterbury Cathedral, take it home and sprinkle it, somehow it loses all its king-makery-ness. Doesn’t even make nice chips.
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DOESN’T MAKE NICE CHIPS? Well holy fish and chips, what is the purpose of the stuff?
You’ve gone and gotten me off on a tangent about whether I can anoint my cat and make him king. He already thinks he is.
Now that it’s not late evening and I’m not as tired, I will go fix the typos. They make a blog look sloppy and a blogger look careless. Thanks.
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I think “kontrafaktische Geschichtsschreibung” / counterfactual historiography is merely an intellectual game. But the Deutsche Historische Museum nevertheless has an actual exhibition about this, titled aptly “Roads Not Taken” (German history only, sorry).
I simply doubt that there is a gain of knowledge in this.
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I doubt it too. It’s fertile ground for fiction writers, though.
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I’m guessing that what Henry did not destroy, Cromwell took care of a little later?
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Ah, Cromwell the Second? I was about to say no, Cromwell was Henry’s man, but Cromwell II (a relative of Cromwell I, by the way)–hmmm. He–or at least the purists of his era, who he wasn’t entirely responsible for–is/are credited with destroying a lot of church decorations but by the time they came along the monasteries were pretty much toast.
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It’s recurring theme of history that we should all be wary of the ‘True Believers’ and I’m not just talking about religion. There are two kinds of leaders of any movement, religious, political, medical, social or whatever. The ones who do truly believe and the ones who see an opportunity to exploit a situation by pretending to believe. Either way, it ends in tears, whether in the destruction of beauty or, worse, in the destruction of lives and societies.
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Sigh. I was about to say I prefer the believers to the hypocrites, but it’s a question of which set of believers we’re talking about. Some of them, yes, self-righteous disasters. I’m not sure I’m ready to consign the entire category of sincere people to the wastepaper basket. Maybe we can agree that at least everyone needs a touch of realism and an appreciation of contrasting colors to modify their dominant commitment.
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They do make lovely ruins though😊
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Don’t they just!
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Loved this. Gloria
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If they cooperated, they received pensions….Bring in on!
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Is that bribery? Yes, and what’s your problem?
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That’s blackmail. Or, in today’s terms, positive reinforcement. If he could see us now…
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Positive reinforcement: take your pension and go away. We killed the last person who didn’t.
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Whereto?!
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I don’t think they much cared where the ex-nuns, monks, etc. went as long as they weren’t a political force anymore. A few groups did stay together as communities and (I think I’m remember this correctly) as long they stayed under the yet-to-be-invented radar they weren’t bothered.
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I’m continually surprised at the whitewashing of Henry VIII’s image. I feel he was responsible at least in part for people in England seeing Europe as ‘the other’ – which didn’t apply to Scotland so they don’t have that same attitude.
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I’ll need more convincing since England’s longstanding possessions in France meant centuries of conflict.
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