In Our Time - The Dissolution of the Monasteries

Episode Date: March 27, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Was Henry’s decision to destroy monastic culture in this country a tyrannical act of grand larceny or the pious destruction of a corrupt institution? When he was an old man, Michael Sherbrook remembered the momentous events of his youth: “All things of price were either spoiled, plucked away or defaced to the uttermost…it seemed that every person bent himself to filch and spoil what he could. Nothing was spared but the ox-houses and swincotes…” He was talking about the destruction of Roche Abbey, but it could have been Lewes or Fountains, Glastonbury, Tintern or Walsingham, names that haunt the religious past as their ruins haunt the landscape. These were the monasteries, suddenly and for many shockingly, destroyed during the reign of Henry VIII.The conflict was played out with a mix of violence, heroism, political manoeuvring and genuine theological disputation. But what was lost in terms of architecture, painting, treasure and in the religious habits of the monasteries themselves and of the common people who lived with them?With Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University; Diane Purkiss, Fellow and Tutor at Keble College, Oxford; George Bernard, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in his old age, Michael Sherbrook wrote about the momentous event of his youth, the dissolution of the monasteries. He wrote,

All things of price were either spoiled, plucked away or defaced to the uttermost. It seemed that every person bent himself to filsh and spoil what he could. Nothing was spared but the ox-houses and swine coats. He was talking about the dissolution of Rosh Abbey, but it could have been Lewis or Fountons, Glastonbury, Tinton or Walsingham. Names that haunt the religious passes, their ruins, haunt the landscape. To many, that pleasing and gentle word dissolution

meant destruction and ruin. Hundreds of monasteries and nunneries were shockingly looted and pillaged during the reign of Henry VIII, but it was the destruction of monastic culture in this country. Was it an overdue religious reform or the grandest of larceness? And did it change the social fabric of England and Wales, Walson for all? With me to discuss the dissolution of the monasteries Adéon Perkins, fellow and tutor at Keeble College Oxford,

George Bernard, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton, and Dermond McCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. Dermann McCulloch, when we talk about the monasteries, we tend to think of lonely, lonely, ruined buildings, but can you give us a sense of the church? extent of the monastic network in England and Wales in 1530s. Well, it's about 800 different institutions and an extraordinary variety of community, sort of consumer choice there.

You've got Benedictine houses, monasteries of various orders, Cistercians, premonstrotentians you could go on naming them, nunneries, colleges of priests there to pray for souls, but also friars, and a big distinction between monks and friars. Monks are solitaries in enclosed communities. Fries are out in the world, they're ministering to the general public. So you're talking about 800. We're talking about reaching into every, what we've now called town, city, village in the country.

Oh, yes. You'd be within half an hour's walk of a monastery, virtually anywhere in England, perhaps an hour's walk in Wales. And what was the function of the monastery in the community? We'll come back as it were to God in a moment, but generally in the community. Well, I don't think we should leave God out from the start, because this is about prayer. And prayer is a practical function for the medieval world.

They're there to pray. Pray for the souls of the founders in the case of the great monasteries, but pray for everybody in their search to get through purgatory after death towards heaven. That's what the function of monasteries and friaries really is. And for friars in particular, that's a public function. They're there to celebrate masses for the ordinary people. They're out in the world. They pray, but they also preach.

and these are practical functions. They're setting the mood of society by their preaching, then they hear confessions, and that is cleaning people's souls up. So I think we should start with God and then get on to some of the practical things. They also give out hospitality to the rich, they give out arms to the poor,

they sustain poor people, and of course they're huge employers, agricultural labourers, social functions, that sort of category are part of the world of the monastery? I stand correctly. It was quite right to start with God, damn it. I'm just a moment's penance on my part and we shall move forward now.

Would people who lived in the country, our country at that time, have thought these places have been here forever, these are part of the life we live, we can't conceive of a life without these? Were they most, many of them great buildings around us? Yes, the physical presence would be overwhelming, huge buildings, largest church in Europe, Bury St Edmonds,

that would dominate its area. So you'd physically feel them a lot, and you would not expect them to go. You might expect them to be trimmed, because monasteries had been dissolved since the 14th century, but that's a tidying up of the system. The dissolution of the 1530s is very different indeed. Can I talk, I'd like to go in even closer

to what the monasteries were doing, Darren Perkins. Can we step inside for a moment? If Dermot would sign up as a monk in 1530, what sort of life would he be letting himself in for? Well, Brackett, what I say by saying, it would depend on what order he chose to embrace. But let's say he chose to enlist as a Benedictine, which is perhaps still a template for monastic orders.

His life would be dominated by the daily office, the monastic hours. Whatever he was doing, his day would be punctuated by the ringing of bells that called him to prayer, the principal charisma magic of, Benedictine's is prayer. And it starts at 2 o'clock in the morning with the hour of matins. So he'd get up at 2 and recite that office. And then he'd get up again about three hours later and say, Lord's, depending on the time of year, because that's said to coincide with sunrise.

And the rest of his day would be broken by the calling of the bell to prayer. And the point of that is that any other activity has to take second place to prayer. But there were lots of other activities in which he could have engaged, depending on the monastery he was at. all Benedictines had to do around about three hours, sometimes as much as six hours of work a day. And that could involve anything from farming, growing your own food. There was an ideal of self-sufficiency in the Benedictine rule to working in, for example, a monastic scriptorium, copying out books, illuminating prayer books, reproducing sacred or alternatively philosophical or learned texts. And he could be involved in doing that.

and the work of the scriptorium could be anything from producing a sophisticated learned commentary on Aristotle to ruling lines for other monks to write on depending, and he would start as a novice with the line ruling part and hope to work up. I'm sure he would work up to the learned commentaries later in his career. Can we just emphasize, which Dermott quite rightly, made us start with,

the centrality of prayer at this time, which was quite a difficult concept for most of us to reimagine. or to imagine for the first time. These 800 buildings with these thousands and thousands of people were devoted to praying. And that was taken, that was the given. Yeah, that's what the hours enforced. They enforced a regimen of praying. And nowadays, perhaps we like to think of prayer as spontaneous.

But the hours weren't meant to be spontaneous. They were meant to be a command, and they were meant to enjoin a command to pray on everybody, all the monks within the community or nuns, Benedictine order of nuns also had a system of ours. But also lay people would have heard the bells across the fields and knowing that the monks were coming to pray.

And it was a reminder, a constant reminder of the need to pray almost incessantly to turn your entire day into a prayer. The labour that you did in the scriptorium or the agricultural labour that you did or cleaning the monastery, I mean, that was prayer too. And it was imbued with the significance of prayer. So everything you did made your monastery a point of contact between heaven and earth

and a visible, audible point of contact between heaven and earth. The way you prayed, of course, was really governed by music. If you're a Benedictine, what you were doing was Plain Song, which forces you to attend very closely and attentively to every single word of a prayer so that you can't just sort of scramble over a, you know, Hell Mary, full of grace, help me find a parking place. You have to focus and think, about the words because of the way they're ornamented musically

and so it'd encourage a meditative, thoughtful kind of prayer. And in these open in remarks, to what extent were they centres of learning for men and women? Really important. One of the... Well, monasteries and nunneries if you're bringing women, yes, of course. One of the crucial things about both monasteries and nunneries is that a lot of the work that both monks and nuns did

was educational work. There were schools associated with, with both monasteries and convents in which lay children could be educated. But as well, novices were educated. Was it entry, as it were entry, were people from around the neighbourhood of these great monasteries and Londoners and said,

any sort of person able to sort of scramble in. I mean, as it's been pointed out, a lot of them were servants worked on the estates who were not monks' nuns. But could others get in and get onto an educational ladder that way? Yes, to some extent that really is true. The problem was less that the monks and nuns wouldn't admit them, then that families sometimes couldn't do without their labour, and that's the

problem with all systems of education in the pre-modern world. It's not a problem of entry qualifications so much as that people often can't do without the wages or the labour of a child. That's on this moment before we move across to George. The education of women was, for that time, very well taken care of. We can go back to the 7th century of Hilda up in Whitby, but that was tradition went through. I mean, there was real learning, there was, there was, there's of Aristotle, there were learned people coming at, learned women, able to find their education there. Yes, that's certainly true. And I really want to stress that nunneries were incredibly important as an outlet for women,

as an alternative to marriage. Certainly right down through the gentry, it was possible for women to gain a really sophisticated education that was part of the mainstream of European intellectual culture in a convent. It's possible to exaggerate that, however. That wouldn't have been true of every country. convent in the country. And there was some small poor convents where the nuns were

living lives that were very little different from the lives they would have lived if they'd stayed with their family. Okay, George Bernard. Can we talk about Thomas Cromwell, who became a central figure in the dissolution? What relation did he have to Henry the 8th to start with? Well, Thomas Cromwell was the man who'd acquired legal

expertise and became a legal fixer for Cardinal Worsy, particularly, and after Cardinal Worsesie's fall, he then moves and becomes emerges as Henry VIII's leading councillor. Relevantly for us, after Henry VIII has broken with Rome, declared his royal supremacy and got an act of Parliament giving him powers to visit monasteries. At the beginning of 1535, Thomas Cromwell has appointed his vice-gerent in spirituals.

That's to say, the King's deputy, with responsibility particularly for monasteries. This I see as partly as an assertion of authority of the King's authority, but also it's intended to reform, to examine what's going. on. Cromwell masterminds organizes the Valor ecclesiastigress, the great survey of monastic wealth that's carried out in 1535-36, remarkable administrative achievement. And then when the dissolution, which we were going to go on to talk about, takes place, Cromwell is the organiser, the enforcer, the correspondence is very largely to or from him. But a word of caution there that Thomas Cromwell falls in 1540, just a month after last monastery is dissolved,

and his papers are confiscated, and they are now available in the National Archives, our main source of information for what goes on in the 1530s, and there's a danger that that rich archive maybe exaggerates, distorts our understanding of Cromwell's role. We talk about Thomas Cromwell's dissolution of monasteries, and I would very much want to put Henry VIII into that picture too. It seems to me that you can explain a lot of what happens by the preferences and interests of Henry VIII. Not that I'd want to suggest that Henry is some kind of potentate acting on a whim.

I think Cromwell, Henry VIII, are part of reflect something wider. And referring to what Sir Dian and Dermott have been saying, we have to, I think, distinguish between ideals, realities and perceptions. And the ideals of the monastic life were very much as you've just been describing. And to large extent, perhaps they were being realised. But in the early 16th century, there was a current among bishops, among churchmen, among scholars of whom Erasmus is perhaps the most striking, who were not so sure that monasteries were fulfilling the right functions, that they were perhaps not monks and nuns not living up to the strict rules they were supposed to, living lives of hypocrisy,

or that the ceremonies that Diane was describing were, well, how useful really were they? And the relics were occurred? And the relics were... Literally bones of contention. In danger of being seen as superstitious of fostering idolatry rather than the proper worship of God. So what in your judgment is Henry the 8th's part in this? Because you're right. I mean, at school we taught this dreadful man, at Cromwell and this passionate man, Henry the 8.

And somehow Henry the 8 sort of slightly got away with it, but he shouldn't have done, should he? Indeed not. Indeed not. I'm sorry to be 1066 that moment. Didn't mind. It was going to be quite... But Henry VIII was, he was, he had, you have the view that he was prompting, he was alongside Cromwell, but as usual in his Machiavellian way, he kept his hands clean, so if something fell, he would not fall, or some person fell, he would not fall with him. That's very much my view of Henry Dick, that he is a rather muskeld politician

than he's often given credit for, that what he's good is entrusting his leading ministers with the responsibility for policies of which he's fully aware, maybe not in every detail, but essentially aware, and maintaining what used to be said in the late Reagan years his deniability, that he could deny that he'd had anything to do with.

Don't me to answer a question that some listeners might be asking themselves. Was Henry VIII's decision to marry Anne Boleyn? and to break with the Pope in that sense and make of himself a supreme ruler. Was that the key lever for his subsequent next few years attack on the monasteries?

Well, Henry the 8's decision to marry Anne Boleyn is almost secondary to his desire to be not married to Catherine of Aragon. And the problem, again, I'm afraid it's all God, it's always God with the 16th century. He really believed that he should not have married Catherine of Aragon. In fact, did not marry Catherine of Aragon.

and the proof was that he hadn't got a son. Alongside that comes a love, absolutely passionate love for Anne Boleyn. And that combination of believing that he's got to do God's will by getting rid of Catherine and wanting to marry Anne is the force which pushed him against the Pope, clashed with Rome, and the only way through was to do God's will by breaking with the Pope. So I'm with George on the idea that Henry is a man with big idea. and the first big idea is breaking with Rome. And then he's given the means by a clever minister, Thomas Cromwell.

And I think that's also the pattern with the dissolution of the monasteries. Big idea, Henry. Practicality is Cromwell. But also, perhaps more important, this is to add to what George says, Cromwell keeps him at it. Cromwell keeps him on course, because one of the great things about Henry VIII is he keeps changing his mind. That was clear when Cromwell fell.

and the 1440s were a time of drift and changing minds all the time. So if you look at the dissolution, you've got to see that pattern. Henry Cromwell side by side and other actors as well, putting their three pennyworth in. There is that George mentioned that Valor Ecclesiasticus, the stock-taking that Cromwell did. Was there also, was there propaganda in that? Was the idea that there such things were happening these dreadful, corrupt monasteries, sexual, license, goodness knows what was going on. We can't even talk about it. It's so terrible, but they have to be crushed because of that.

That was another prong of the plan. The Valor is separate from the campaign of propaganda, which was gathered by Cromwell's commissioners, different set of commissioners, to those taking the values. They look for scandal, as they should, because visitors like bishops, who were visitors before, were always supposed to look for scandal. But the problem is here, what's the agenda?

is it to reform the monasteries or is it to discredit them? And it's very difficult for us to be sure how to use their reports. We do know that at least one of them, Richard Leighton, seems to have changed one of his reports to a more negative report than his first draft. And we don't know, but it's possible that that was prompted by the kind of response that the positive report got. That suggests that there's a degree of detraction. We don't actually have all the reports.

extant. We only have the surviving reports from the north and eastern summary of the others, so it's a bit difficult to assess them. And the other problem that we have is that we do have surviving bishops' reports from earlier eras that are equally scandal-ridden, actually. I mean, there are surviving reports of the 12th century with runaway nuns and priests and nuns bedding down very comfortably in dormitories together and monks with children and thotomitical monks praying on choir boys. I mean, there's plenty of that from earlier eras. So I think it would be wrong. to say, oh, the monasteries were particularly corrupt in the early 16th century, and that's why they were dissolved,

which in earlier generation of perhaps rather Whiggish historians, were a bit prone to say. I think it would be right to say that the vistas did uncover real corruption, but it was probably business as usual. Now, can we move in now with George Bernard to the action, as it were? In 1536, Henry was granted an active parliament to dissolve the smaller monastic houses, about 400 of them. But that autumn, 1513, there was this great rebellion in the north of the

England, a source of great rebellions in this country. This one was called the Pilgrimage of Grace. What were they rebelling about and how important was that in the scheme of things? Well, I do see the rebellion is very much a response to the dissolution of the monasteries, smaller monasteries. If we might go back

briefly to the context of the dissolution of smaller monasteries, I do see part of that concern about the condition of monasteries, a sense that perhaps the smaller monasteries in particular were not fulfilling what they should, Already several bishops in the 1500s, 1510s, 1520s had dissolved a number of small monasteries

using the revenues to found a college at Oxford or Cambridge or grammar school, Cardinal Walsy, famously. Often this is seen in terms of personal aggrandizement, but I think it can be seen as a measure of reform as well. And it does seem to me this is the background to the dissolution of the small monasteries. And I would see that in 1536 not as a stepping stone to the first, as it were, taste which leads to the dissolution a lot. more or less sincere intended to reform, reforms which these surveys had been picking up. But the pilgrimage of grace was pivotal, and I want to get to that, because they came, and they were, as you say, against the closing of the monasteries, and Henry Gates, we know, started to write vitriolic letters about these terrible people

from the monitors coming, trying to attack his authority as the emperor. He saw it as intact. And we must also remember that a lot of these monasteries owed allegiance to father and sister, and father houses on the continent and finally to the Pope, to another power, because the Pope would become, in his eyes, another power. So he's got another power inside his country marching on London. It's not good, and it was very... I think that's crucial, and I think the political dimension of this is very important.

I mean, it shows the perceptions that clearly there are a very large number of people in England who don't share the kind of concerns about the state of the monasteries which we've just been talking about and are prepared in the north of England to rise up against it. It does seem to me that the dissolution is central to that rebellion. When there is bargaining by the King's lieutenants in early December, they're not strong enough to attempt to tackle them the rebels militarily. There is a bargain. One of the conditions, one of the few specific conditions,

that the monasteries will stand until Parliament meets. Yeah, we tend to forget that the Pilgrimage of Grace actually won. And the proof of that is that its leader, Robert Ask, was invited to court to spend Christmas of the King. That's an extraordinary thing. and Henry must have been humiliated by that. And, of course, he then tricked them out of their victory by not giving them the concessions he demanded

and letting them rebel again, at which point he could crush them. At Carlisle of all places. Yes, a key place. Absolutely. It would be more important in English history than Carlisle. Few places, but then, of course, the action becomes much nastier. There are abbots who are hanged for treason. There are hundreds in the north hanged,

for being traitors to the king. That sense of fury in Henry that his authority has been counted. Did this unleash it, Tom? Is this a turning point? I know we're going very fast over this territory, but was his reaction to the pilgrimage of grace and the humiliation,

which made him have to ask Robert asked the Yorkshire lawyer to his court for Christmas time, did this turn him and say, these are my enemies? I think that's right. And what it does do is make him listen to those voices who have insidiously, insistently, via Cromwell in particular, saying,

monasteries are no good, monastries are no good. And there are always two voices around Henry. There's the conservative voices, talking about the tradition of the church, and that must be upheld, and there are these much more radical voices listening to the Reformation and its message about monasteries. And all through the dissolution, you have to hear that dialogue between two voices in Henry's mind.

And also, as I think George said, one of you said, there's a feeling that these people are, praying all the time when they should move out and teach and form grammar schools as Woosley was saying this is past, this has had it this relics, erasmus

is mocking the relics, the giant finger of St Peter and the blood of Christ and that sort of thing, but what happened after the pilgrimage of Christend, when you moved, they moved into the monosures the bigger monasteries then, didn't they? Yeah, that's right.

You moved on against them, I mean, yeah. Yeah, and most Abbots and Abbas has actually negotiated with the government. It's disappointing if you're a traditionalist but the vast majority of people complied and you could see why they complied. What were they complying with?

Well, basically they tried to negotiate good deals for themselves and sometimes for the religious dependent on them like a good pension or if they were ordained priests a job as priest in the church where they'd previously been for example an abbot or a monk. And we've got lots of correspondence surviving the Abbas of Godstow, for example, near Oxford.

All her letters survive diligently ringing an extra 50 quid or so a year out of the Cromwellian administrators. Other people did sort of stand fast and determinedly say you're not dissolving me, and the result tended to be, as you've already heard, violence. If we take the Abbott of Glastonbury as perhaps the best or the nastiest example, he wouldn't comply with the dissolution at all. and they sort of dug themselves in rather like a guerrilla cell. But of course, troops were found to winkle them out, and he ended up being hanged on Glastonbury tour, and his quarters were nailed to the gate of the monastery.

So he was treated as a traitor, and Glastonbury, perhaps more than any other Abbey, can claim to have been seriously blackwashed. People were determined to prove that there was something the matter with this man, that he'd stolen monastic property, which he almost certainly hadn't, that there'd been all kinds of abuses when previous reports had been extremely favourable.

and there is a very clear case to say that was a bit of a show trial. Yeah, seriously black propaganda. George Bernard. It's important to remember that the smaller monasteries were dissolved by Act of Parliament. Parliament passes a law and then Commissioners are sent round to enforce that. The larger monasteries from the end of 1537, 38, 39 were not dissolved in that way. There was another Act of Parliament in 1539, but that simply confirmed the legality of what was being done. And the way this operated was that commissioners would go round,

and persuade abbots and monks to surrender their monasteries to the king. And they went round over two years doing that. And that's a hugely important point to make. And the great thing to draw out of it is that at no stage in the 1530s was monasticism officially condemned. The first act of 1536 said that monasteries are good things. We're getting rid of the smaller ones to strengthen the bigger ones. And that last act says, oh, look, all the monasteries have gone.

Now, that's hugely important because it means that the Church of VIII, England, after the Reformation, had never officially condemned the monastic life, which meant in the 19th century, you could revive it. And it's unique among Protestant Reformation that that should be so. You made God central quite rightly, right at the beginning of this program, Dermen, wasn't there a feeling, or was there a feeling, around the country, look, these places we've known all our lives, these places that have been here from time immemorial are being attacked, and God isn't intervening. because look at the prayers that are going up the battalions of prayers every 24 hours a day and yet God is not listening Exactly the street cred of monasteries must have gone

by the simple fact that they were dissolved I think the other element is that it's very difficult for anyone to see the whole picture to really believe that all monasteries could go It might be an inappropriate But I think in a sense of a right comparison To see the Holocaust in the same light You cannot believe that such an event could take place.

And only perhaps Henry and Cromwell and the Duke of Norfolk, one or two people, really saw that all of these houses were going to go until they did. How did it happen, Dan? So I'm on a Cromwell's action. No, I don't want to go on to Cromwell's agents. Sir Cromwell sends out its agents, the monasteries. They get there and they decide. What are they saying?

What do they do? With the smaller monasteries, what happened was that a bunch of people arrived, on the doorstep on Monday morning and went into the chapter house, called all the monks together and said, right, that's it, you're dissolved. Go away then. Off you go.

And then they basically stripped the monastery of any property that wasn't red-hot or nailed down, dismantled, in some cases, dismantled the buildings physically and created sort of huge lumber piles of all kinds of things, library books, timbers, everything. Let's switch to that now,

but let's just give it a little heading. Let's talk about what they did to the structure of the buildings. The people, the more powerful and compliant negotiated pensions. As has been pointed out, the people who worked there as servants and did a lot of the work, had nothing. They were just turfed out

and became vagrants, poor and so forth. But the consequence, can we talk, just spend this part talking about the consequences. First of all, to the people and then to the buildings. Well, one of the things that there's been some work on is what happened to the monks and nuns. We know that some of them got pensions

and some of them entered into a different form of religious life, like became parish priests, for example. Some nuns got married, and we know about this because it was actually illegal to get married, if you were a profess nun, and Henry was very against nuns getting married, unless they'd taken their vows before they were 20, in which case they were given a sort of dispensation.

And in the north of England, we have lots of records of nuns who got married and had children and were then prosecuted for doing so. Now, some of those nuns must have embraced their freedom. And, of course, as well as being sent as a female education, Convents could be dumping grounds for unmarriageable second daughters. So that happened. Well, what an education for a second?

Because this blocked the course of the opportunity of education women for a very long time to come, didn't it? Yes, absolutely. It's fair to say that women's education doesn't really even begin to recover till the early 18th century, certainly as far as sort of middling order women are concerned. What Convents really offered was an education in languages. you couldn't really participate in European educated culture

unless you were reasonably good at both Latin and French. And we certainly know that convents were good at imbuing girls with French and some were good at imbuing them with Latin. I mean, you don't get someone as sophisticated as the nuns of Sion among people without a title, really, until the era of Prince very firmly established. Can I come to the... Can we just go a little bit carefully now

about how this destruction took place? So you're dissolved as a monastery. you can't pray here anymore, you can't practice here anymore. And then what excuse did they give themselves for taking all the treasures, the treasure, literally the treasure of the Abisland, the gold, the masses of manuscripts they took, everything they could lay their hands on that had any value whatsoever? Well, it's a big legal contrite.

And the land. They owned a third of the land in the country. And the contract is to say that all this land belongs to the king, full stop, where it had been given by Norman aristocrats in the 12th. century, well, it now belongs to the king. And so the royal commissioner turns up and the house is surrendered by its inhabitants. Again, another contraic, how can they do that? A perpetual corporation surrendering themselves, it is surrendered to the king. And so the king can take anything valuable for his needs, particularly that essential job of an English king fighting the French. And so this is just taken out on those grounds, George.

Yes. And Abbots and monks had no right to grant their property in this way, They did. Well, another interesting detail is that it seems as if they were asked to sign declarations in which they denounce monasticism in principal terms. I mean, it isn't quite what Dermit was talking about as a national declaration against monasticism, but probably these statements, they're not all the same, were drawn up, and they say that they've been involved in dumb ceremonies. But perhaps we can divide them to three stages.

I'm going to stay with you, George, for a moment. The people involved, they go, The treasure and massive treasures from the little remains unbelievable cultural wealth, especially in manuscripts. Almost all of that goes. And then the locals move in and ruin it. I mean, they strip the lead off the roofs, they smash the stained glass windows, can you take that for the forward? What the man was talking about was it called at the beginning of the programme, Michael Sherbrook. It would be the King's Commissioners that would strip the roof.

they would take anything like that. And that was presumably done to stop any attempt to reprieple the monastery if something happened in the future. And of course, once a building loses its roof, it deteriorates very rapidly. Then I think the locals move in in the way that you... And take the stones. Yes. Yeah.

But what can you do? I mean, I'm not sure that one should read any attitudes to monasteries into that sort of behaviour. I don't see this is somehow negotiating or collaborating with the government. It's making the best of the situation. Yeah, I think that's entirely right. I mean, we know from Hales Abbey, where we have records, that people came and they took 300-something-or-other stained-glass windows,

and they took lead, and they took beams. There's probably not an old house in England that doesn't have monastic beams in it. But that doesn't necessarily imply that they didn't believe in monasticism or that they were all Protestant, really. What it probably did, though, was produced the idea that the monasteries couldn't defend themselves, that we were discussing earlier. The fact that you could go and nick all this stuff and no lightning bolt came from the beyond.

and no saints struck you down, probably did convey a message. Well, I think Hales is an interesting case. This Gloucestershire Abbey where we have a detailed record of destruction, we have to remember that some monasteries were actually very unpopular. And Hales was one. It had a very controversial relic at its heart, the Holy Blood, which a lot of people didn't believe in. I mean, good Catholics didn't believe in.

Look at Barry St Edmund, a house which is very arrogant and treats its town in an arrogant way. Now, houses like that clearly had generated hostility, and there is a certain amount of glee when they go, and that the destruction in such cases may well be settling scores, centuries-old scores. Let's look at the consequences, staying with you, Dermott here. The consequences of this are massive and far-reaching, consequences to do with land, consequences to do with society,

consequences to do with the aristocracy and the gentry. Let's start, as we should with you with religion. How did it change the place of religion in this? country, this very swift, a few years, destruction of the monasteries, nunneries, friaries and so on. This was a huge blow to the old traditional world of religion, because these institutions have been so central. To destroy the monasteries destroyed a particular form of prayer. And that made the reformation much easier. It meant that the way was clear for a much more radical attack on the old world, because the church was now so much deprived.

of the past. There was a vacuum there into which Protestantism could flow. Also, it changed a sort of... Sorry, George, can I prompt you a little bit? The idea of pilgrimage, of course,

which had been a great fact of a life of course. Europe, let's stick to our own country. Enormous fact, of course, one of the faults of our literature with Chaucer and so on. That went. That was exactly the point

I was going to raise, that monasteries, particularly the larger monasteries, were great centres of pilgrimage. And again, that practice is not formally abolished, but if you dismantle the shrines, if you attack, in effect, the practice

and if no one comes to rescue the saints, then that diminishes. And that was a vital and flourishing part of late-ledger. The mention of the Walsingham, yes. Yes, indeed. That's right. And the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was dragged to Smithfield from Norfolk to be burned in Smithfield Marketplace.

And actually Latimer refers to her as the witch of Walsingham and the witch of Ipswich, the statue of Our Lady of Ipswich, as the Witch of Ipswich. It's almost as though they're trying to display the fact that these statues don't have any power to defend themselves. And it was the same with the Holy Blood of Hales, which was supposed to be the blood of Christ.

And I think several attempts were made to identify what it really was, sort of slightly implausibly applying a kind of empiricism, was it actually honey that was coloured with saffron, was it actually some sort of solid? But by the time they'd sort of poked and pride at it empirically and it hadn't done anything dramatic to them, it was felt to be worthless. So that whole kind of medieval system of piety through objects was discredited when the monasteries fell.

We've talked about the way to change the habits of a pilgrimage. We've talked about a place of prayer has been displaced as the centre of the visible church as a repersonable in this country talking about pilgrimages. We also mention relics, a sort of end towards the end of the great Adam. of relics. People like Erasmus had been skeptical, but this was pushed out. What about the land? Can we talk a little about what happened to this one third of the land of this country and how that changed things? Well, to him who shall be given as the motto and the dissolution, it's really the upper classes who get the land. The king wanted it. It seems that Cromwell's plan is to give the king a huge estate for good, and in that case he could probably have ignored Parliament. But the king had so many needs for money for his war, that the lands are sold off and the people who've got them

were the people with money. So it's a gentry, it's the nobility who really benefit here. Can you give us some examples? Or Diane, perhaps you want to come in. Who got hold of it and what they did with it and where it is or so or so. I want to give you two really crucial examples

of gentry who were living off what had been monastic lands. One is Oliver Cromwell and the other is Thomas Fairfax, the architects of the parliamentarian victory in the English Civil War. They were banked. Almost exactly.

100 years later, literally. by family monastic lands. And it's fair to say that the class of people who perhaps most strenuously and universally opposed Charles's notion of what the monarch might be were the greater gentry who'd been enriched by the dissolution of the monasteries. John, do you want to take that up?

It's certainly very, very interesting what happens to the land. What is striking is that most of it is sold at market prices, something like 20 years' purchase. It's not given away. That's right. And that implies that those who are buying already have some wealth. I suspect a lot of the purchase in the 1540s and 1550s are defensive. If you are a local landowner, perhaps a small one, there's a monastery in your area.

It's been dissolved. Its lands are available. If you don't buy them, someone else will, and that will upset the local balance of power. But the consequence of that for the family over generations may well be, if demography works in your favour, to strengthen the family. the resigning idea or the old idea that Henry the 8th

dissolved the monisters to get the money to fight the wars how much money did he get to fight how many wars and how did that work out well a very large sum not quite as much as he got from debasing the coinage another great contract played on the English people he used it to build

a large number of forts around the South Coast that the greater monastery is the last dissolution of the 1538 and 9 is mostly spent on these forts, which are still there, and they're very fine, and as usual, with such defence systems virtually useless.

They would never really put to much use and the French sailed past them and invaded past them. So it's squandered, in a sense, on security issues. It's not much used, except,

I will say as an academic, that he did found two major colleges. One at Trinity and one at Oxford, which still flourish, and are intended as the centre of the university. One's called Trinity, the other school, Christchurch, which means the same thing. So there are some good uses, but not nearly as much say as what the German princes did with their money from monasteries, which were put into hospital schools. What about hospital schools, the poor, which had been part of, so we read,

the monastery's function and purpose to what happened to, we know, Dan has briefly told us about women. What about looking after to the extent that they did the poor? It must have had a damaging impact. It is significant that in early 1536, when the smaller monastery was dissolved, there is one of the first poor laws, and Henry VIII comes to the House of Commons in person to press the case for the Commonwealth, asking members to consider this.

So I suppose there is an awareness that there might be implications, but, of course, as you say, the impact must have been very damaging in many cases. Yeah, and the monasteries. did provide a kind of rock bottom safety net in many areas for the poor of their communities. And without that system of sort of arms houses,

it was incumbent upon the nobility to step into the breach and they only stepped into the bridge occasionally. Some noble families did try and kind of take on the mantle of providing for their own tenants but many didn't and didn't bother at all. So the

result is that there are a series of vagrancy crises throughout the later Tudor period. People start worrying terribly about vagrancy. There are lots of vagrancy acts in vagrancy laws. It becomes illegal to be a masterless man. And that impacts on all kinds of people, including actors. And that

does suggest that it's very difficult to be sure about these things, that perhaps the dissolution of the monasteries created a kind of social problem. We'll say one positive result, which is an act of preservation, and that's cathedrals. Henry the 8th actually founded new cathedrals out of some of these monasteries. Some of them had been

cathedrals had been monasteries already, but he added to that number. And so if one of the glories of this country is the cathedral survival, it's thanks to Henry VIII. And he clearly took a very personal interest in this, the biggest structural change in the English church in the 16th century. We can thank Henry VIII for preserving Canterbury, Gloucester, places like that. George, Reg. Bernard. And I suppose we should raise the question of nostalgia and an increased interest in the past. people in the later 16th century

became increasingly conscious of these monastic ruins these bare ruin choirs were once the sweet birds sang and whether this is one of the factors that stimulates the growth of English antiquarianism and interest in the past in the late 16th, 3017th century certain sensibilities perhaps this develops more in the romantic period but nevertheless it does seem to me to be a legacy of the dissolution.

The laments begin already, Walter Rale's lament for Walsalli. Well, not that was later much of it. Mark wasn't too much later. There is an anonymous lament for Walsingham and then Rory drew on it for a ballad. But I think as well as all those kind of rather positive things, yeah, there's a growing nostalgia and there's people like John D

going around and trying to establish a universal library because the loss of the monastic libraries inspired him with the thought that there should be a library with a copy of every book ever produced in England. And sort of precursor of the British Library, you could almost say. So there are those sort of positive intellectual

outcomes. But conversely, I think of this little group of five or six former monks desperately trying to eke out a monastic lifestyle around the two dozen or so books they've managed to salvage. And hanging on like that into the early 1570s. And I think we should really think about the human cost that we're talking about thousands and thousands of people

who've given their lives to something that they've just been told is over. And destroying Anglo-Saxon manuscripts for which they will never be forgiven. Thank you very much, Dan Perkins, George Bernard. and Demit McCulloch. And thank you for listening. And next week we'll be looking at Newton's Three Laws of Motion. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast,

why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four.