I have good reason for posting this material. In terms of dates and timelines I will explain shortly with some created graphics and movie referances. I know little of history, but I do know where we lost the plot and become unplugged. All I can say to you this post is just a energy timeline when men were gentleman and ladies were treated as goddesses. My graphics will speak for themelves. I was a Templar Knight in a past life.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries, sometimes referred to as the Suppression of the Monasteries, was the administrative and legal processes between 1536 and 1541 by which Henry VIII disbanded monasteries, priories, convents and friaries in England, Wales and Ireland; appropriated their income, disposed of their assets and provided for their former members. He was given the authority to do this in England and Wales by the Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in 1534, which made him Supreme Head of the Church in England, thus separating England from Papal authority; and by the First Suppression Act (1536) and the Second Suppression Act (1539). Although some monastic foundations dated back to Anglo-Saxon England, the overwhelming majority of the 825 religious communities dissolved by Henry VIII owed their existence to the wave of monastic enthusiasm that had swept England and Wales in the 11th and 12th centuries; in consequence of which religious houses in the 16th century controlled appointment to about a third of all parish benefices, and disposed of about half of all ecclesiastical income. The dissolution still represents the largest legally enforced transfer of property in English history since the Norman Conquest.
Context
The dissolution of the monasteries in England did not take place in political isolation. Other attacks on the historic institutions of Western Roman Catholicism had been under way for some time, many of them related to the Protestant Reformation in Continental Europe; however, the religious changes in England under Henry VIII and Edward VI were of a different nature from those taking place in Germany, Bohemia, France, Scotland and Geneva. On the Continent, while the nobles were acquiring a taste for Church plunder, there was the added element of mass discontent against ecclesiastical power and wealth among common people and the lower levels of clergy and civil society. In England the early Reformation was directed from the highest levels of society, but was met with widespread popular suspicion; spilling over, in other occasions and localities, into active resistance.
The dissolution resulted in few modifications to the practice of religion in England's parish churches; and in general the English religious reforms of the 1530s corresponded in few respects to the precepts of Protestant Reformers, and encountered much popular hostility when they did. The Protestant flavour of innovations expressed in the Ten Articles was reversed when Henry VIII expressed his desire for continued orthodoxy with the Six Articles of 1539, which remained in effect until after his death.
Cardinal Wolsey had obtained from the Pope 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. Henry wanted to change this, and in November 1529 Parliament passed acts reforming apparent abuses in the English Church. They set caps on fees for probating 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. These sought to demonstrate that establishing royal jurisdiction over the Church would ensure progress in "religious reformation" where Papal authority had been insufficient. The monasteries were next in line.
J.J. Scarisbrick remarked;
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 regime - as the first function of a Supreme Head empowered by statute "to visit, extirp and redress".
The stories of monastic impropriety, vice and excess that were to be collected by Thomas Cromwell's visitors may have been biased and exaggerated, although chronicled also by Sir Thomas More. Nevertheless, the religious houses of England and Wales, with the notable exceptions of those of the Carthusians, the Observant Franciscans, and the Bridgettine nuns, had long ceased to play a leading role in the spiritual life of the country; and other than in these three orders, observance of strict monastic rules were partial at best [1] . Donations and legacies now tended to go instead towards parish churches, university colleges, grammar schools and collegiate churches; which suggests public approbation of such purposes. Levels of monastic debt were increasing, and average numbers of professed religious were falling [2]. Only a few monks and nuns lived in conspicuous luxury, but most were very comfortably fed and housed by the standards of the time, and few any longer set standards of ascetic piety or religious observance [3]. Only a minority of houses could now support the twelve or thirteen professed religious usually regarded as the minimum necessary to maintain the proper round of the Divine Office. Extensive monastic complexes dominated English towns of any size; but most were less than half full.
Nor was it insignificant that Cromwell and Henry, from 1534 onwards, were constantly seeking for ways to redirect ecclesiastical income to the benefit of the crown; efforts they justified by the contention that much ecclesiastical revenue had been improperly diverted from royal resources in the first place. Princes throughout Europe were facing severe financial difficulties due to sharply rising expenditures, especially to pay for armies, fighting ships and fortifications. Most tended sooner or later, to resort to plundering monastic wealth, and taxing the clergy. Protestant princes might claim a godly authority to do so; Catholic princes might seek the approval of the Papacy. The wealth of the Church offered a standing temptation for secular rulers; and idle monastic wealth was the most exposed target.
Finally, it is probably not coincidental that the dissolution of the monasteries coincided closely with the introduction of the printing press to England. This invention not only aided reformers in spreading their religious texts, it also made redundant the monasteries' most valuable service to the monarch - their painstaking copying of manuscripts.
English precedents
By the time Henry VIII turned his mind to the business of monastery reform, royal action to suppress religious houses had a history stretching back more than 200 years. The first case was that of the so-called 'Alien Priories'. As a result of the Norman Conquest some French religious orders held substantial property through their daughter monasteries in England. Some of these were merely agricultural estates with a single foreign monk in residence to supervise things, others were rich foundations in their own right (e.g. Lewes Priory which was a daughter of Cluny and answered to the abbot of that great French house). Owing to the fairly constant state of war between England and France in the Late Middle Ages successive English governments had objected to money going overseas to France from these Alien Priories ('trading with the enemy') whence the French king might get hold of it, and to foreign prelates having jurisdiction over English monasteries. Furthermore, after 1378, French monasteries (and hence alien priories dependent on them) maintained allegiance to the continuing Avignon Papacy, and so their suppression was supported by the rival Roman Popes, conditional on all confiscated monastic property eventually being redirected into other religious uses. The king's officers first sequestrated the assets of the Alien Priories in 1295-1303 under Edward I, and the same thing happened repeatedly for long periods over the course of the Fourteenth Century, most particularly in the reign of Edward III. Those Alien Priories that had functioning communities were forced to pay large sums to the king, while those that were mere estates were confiscated and run by royal officers, the proceeds going to the king's pocket. Such estates were a valuable source of income for the Crown in its French wars. Some of the Alien Priories were allowed to become naturalised (for instance Castle Acre Priory), on payment of heavy fines and bribes, but for the rest their fates were sealed when Henry V dissolved them by act of Parliament in 1414. The properties went to the Crown; some were kept, some were subsequently given or sold to Henry's supporters, others went to his new monasteries of Syon Abbey and the Carthusians at Sheen Priory, others went to educational purposes. All these suppressions enjoyed Papal approval, though successive 15th century Popes continued to press for assurances that, now that the Avignon Papacy had been defeated, the confiscated monastic property would revert to religious and educational uses.
The royal transfer of monastic estates to educational foundations proved an inspiration to the bishops, and as the 15th century waned such moves became more and more common. The subjects of these dissolutions were usually small and poor Benedictine or Augustinian communities (especially those of women) with few powerful friends; the great abbeys and orders exempt from diocesan supervision such as the Cistercians were unaffected. The consequent new foundations were most often Oxford University and Cambridge University colleges, instances of this include John Alcock, Bishop of Ely dissolving the Benedictine nunnery of Saint Radegund to found Jesus College, Cambridge (1496), and William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester acquiring Selborne Priory in 1484 for Magdalen College, Oxford. In the following century Lady Margaret Beaufort obtained the property of Creake Abbey (whose religious had all died of Black Death in 1506) to fund her works at Oxford and Cambridge, an action she took on the advice of such a staunch traditionalist as John Fisher Bishop of Rochester. In 1522 Fisher himself is also found dissolving the women's monasteries of Bromhall and Higham to aid St John's College, Cambridge. That same year Cardinal Wolsey dissolved St Frideswide's Priory (now Oxford Cathedral) to form the basis of his Christ Church, Oxford; in 1524 he secured a Papal bull to dissolve some 20 other monasteries to provide an endowment for his new college. In all these suppressions, friars, monks and nuns were absorbed into other houses of their respective orders. The conventional wisdom of the time was that the proper daily observance of the Divine Office of prayer required a minimum of twelve professed religious, but by the 1530s only a minority of religious houses in England could provide this; and accordingly most observers were agreed that a systematic reform of the English church must necessarily involve the drastic concentration of monks and nuns into many fewer, larger, houses; potentially making much monastic income available for more productive religious, educational and social purposes. But what may have represented a consensus in general principle, often faced strong resistance in practice. Members of religious houses proposed for dissolution might resist relocation; the houses invited to receive them might refuse to co-operate; and local notables might resist the disruption in their networks of influence. Moreover, the bishops found intractable opposition when they sought to enforce the rigorous observation of monastic rules; especially in respect of their attempts to require monks and nuns to remain within their cloisters. The King actively supported Wolsey, Fisher and Richard Foxe in their programmes of monastic reform; but even so, progress was painfully slow, especially where religious orders had been exempted from episcopal oversight by Papal authority.
Continental precedents
While these transactions were going on in England, elsewhere in Europe events were taking place which presaged a storm. In 1521, Martin Luther had published 'De votis monasticis' ('On the monastic vows'), 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. Luther also declared that monastic vows were meaningless and that no one should feel bound by them. Luther, a one-time Augustinian friar, found some comfort when these views had a dramatic effect: a special meeting of the German province of his order held the same year accepted them and voted that henceforth every member of the regular clergy should be free to renounce their vows, resign their offices and get married. At Luther's home monastery in Wittenberg all the friars, save one, did so.
News of these events did not take long to spread among Protestant-minded (and acquisitive) rulers across Europe, and some, particularly in Scandinavia, moved very quickly. In Sweden in 1527 King Gustavus Vasa secured an edict of the Diet allowing him to confiscate any monastic lands he deemed necessary to increase royal revenues; and to force the return of donated properties to the descendants of those who had donated them. In one fell swoop, Gustav gained large estates and a company of diehard supporters. The Swedish monasteries and convents were simultaneously deprived of their livelihoods, with the result that some collapsed immediately, while others lingered on for a few decades before persecution and further confiscations finally caused them all to disappear by 1580. In Denmark, King Frederick I of Denmark made his grab in 1528, confiscating 15 of the houses of the wealthiest monasteries and convents. Further laws under his successor over the course of the 1530s banned the friars, and forced monks and nuns to transfer title to their houses to the Crown, which passed them out to supportive nobles, who were soon found enjoying the fruits of former monastic lands. Danish monastic life was to vanish in a way identical to that of Sweden.
In Switzerland, too, monasteries came under threat. In 1523 the government of the city-state of Zurich pressured nuns to leave their monasteries and marry, and followed up the next year by dissolving all monasteries in its territory, under the pretext of using their revenues to fund education and help the poor. The city of Basel followed suit in 1529 and Geneva adopted the same policy in 1530. 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 has survived.
It is inconceivable that these moves went unnoticed by the English government and particularly by Thomas Cromwell, who had been employed by Wolsey in his monastic suppressions, and who was shortly to become Henry VIII's chief minister. However, Henry himself appears to have been much more influenced by the opinions on monasticism of the humanists Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, especially as found in Erasmus's work In Praise of Folly (1511) and More's Utopia 1516. Erasmus and More promoted ecclesiastical reform while remaining faithful Catholics, and had ridiculed such monastic practices as repetitive formal religion, superstitious pilgrimages for the veneration of relics and the accumulation of monastic wealth. Henry appears from the first to have shared these views; never having endowed a religious house, and only once having undertaken a religious pilgrimage (to Walsingham in 1511). 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. Henry himself corresponded continually with Erasmus; prompting him to be more explicit in his public rejection of the key tenets of Lutheranism, and offering him church preferement, should he wish to return to England.
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Monasteries
The Dissolution of the Monasteries, sometimes referred to as the Suppression of the Monasteries, was the administrative and legal processes between 1536 and 1541 by which Henry VIII disbanded monasteries, priories, convents and friaries in England, Wales and Ireland; appropriated their income, disposed of their assets and provided for their former members. He was given the authority to do this in England and Wales by the Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in 1534, which made him Supreme Head of the Church in England, thus separating England from Papal authority; and by the First Suppression Act (1536) and the Second Suppression Act (1539). Although some monastic foundations dated back to Anglo-Saxon England, the overwhelming majority of the 825 religious communities dissolved by Henry VIII owed their existence to the wave of monastic enthusiasm that had swept England and Wales in the 11th and 12th centuries; in consequence of which religious houses in the 16th century controlled appointment to about a third of all parish benefices, and disposed of about half of all ecclesiastical income. The dissolution still represents the largest legally enforced transfer of property in English history since the Norman Conquest.
Context
The dissolution of the monasteries in England did not take place in political isolation. Other attacks on the historic institutions of Western Roman Catholicism had been under way for some time, many of them related to the Protestant Reformation in Continental Europe; however, the religious changes in England under Henry VIII and Edward VI were of a different nature from those taking place in Germany, Bohemia, France, Scotland and Geneva. On the Continent, while the nobles were acquiring a taste for Church plunder, there was the added element of mass discontent against ecclesiastical power and wealth among common people and the lower levels of clergy and civil society. In England the early Reformation was directed from the highest levels of society, but was met with widespread popular suspicion; spilling over, in other occasions and localities, into active resistance.
The dissolution resulted in few modifications to the practice of religion in England's parish churches; and in general the English religious reforms of the 1530s corresponded in few respects to the precepts of Protestant Reformers, and encountered much popular hostility when they did. The Protestant flavour of innovations expressed in the Ten Articles was reversed when Henry VIII expressed his desire for continued orthodoxy with the Six Articles of 1539, which remained in effect until after his death.
Cardinal Wolsey had obtained from the Pope 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. Henry wanted to change this, and in November 1529 Parliament passed acts reforming apparent abuses in the English Church. They set caps on fees for probating 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. These sought to demonstrate that establishing royal jurisdiction over the Church would ensure progress in "religious reformation" where Papal authority had been insufficient. The monasteries were next in line.
J.J. Scarisbrick remarked;
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 regime - as the first function of a Supreme Head empowered by statute "to visit, extirp and redress".
The stories of monastic impropriety, vice and excess that were to be collected by Thomas Cromwell's visitors may have been biased and exaggerated, although chronicled also by Sir Thomas More. Nevertheless, the religious houses of England and Wales, with the notable exceptions of those of the Carthusians, the Observant Franciscans, and the Bridgettine nuns, had long ceased to play a leading role in the spiritual life of the country; and other than in these three orders, observance of strict monastic rules were partial at best [1] . Donations and legacies now tended to go instead towards parish churches, university colleges, grammar schools and collegiate churches; which suggests public approbation of such purposes. Levels of monastic debt were increasing, and average numbers of professed religious were falling [2]. Only a few monks and nuns lived in conspicuous luxury, but most were very comfortably fed and housed by the standards of the time, and few any longer set standards of ascetic piety or religious observance [3]. Only a minority of houses could now support the twelve or thirteen professed religious usually regarded as the minimum necessary to maintain the proper round of the Divine Office. Extensive monastic complexes dominated English towns of any size; but most were less than half full.
Nor was it insignificant that Cromwell and Henry, from 1534 onwards, were constantly seeking for ways to redirect ecclesiastical income to the benefit of the crown; efforts they justified by the contention that much ecclesiastical revenue had been improperly diverted from royal resources in the first place. Princes throughout Europe were facing severe financial difficulties due to sharply rising expenditures, especially to pay for armies, fighting ships and fortifications. Most tended sooner or later, to resort to plundering monastic wealth, and taxing the clergy. Protestant princes might claim a godly authority to do so; Catholic princes might seek the approval of the Papacy. The wealth of the Church offered a standing temptation for secular rulers; and idle monastic wealth was the most exposed target.
Finally, it is probably not coincidental that the dissolution of the monasteries coincided closely with the introduction of the printing press to England. This invention not only aided reformers in spreading their religious texts, it also made redundant the monasteries' most valuable service to the monarch - their painstaking copying of manuscripts.
English precedents
By the time Henry VIII turned his mind to the business of monastery reform, royal action to suppress religious houses had a history stretching back more than 200 years. The first case was that of the so-called 'Alien Priories'. As a result of the Norman Conquest some French religious orders held substantial property through their daughter monasteries in England. Some of these were merely agricultural estates with a single foreign monk in residence to supervise things, others were rich foundations in their own right (e.g. Lewes Priory which was a daughter of Cluny and answered to the abbot of that great French house). Owing to the fairly constant state of war between England and France in the Late Middle Ages successive English governments had objected to money going overseas to France from these Alien Priories ('trading with the enemy') whence the French king might get hold of it, and to foreign prelates having jurisdiction over English monasteries. Furthermore, after 1378, French monasteries (and hence alien priories dependent on them) maintained allegiance to the continuing Avignon Papacy, and so their suppression was supported by the rival Roman Popes, conditional on all confiscated monastic property eventually being redirected into other religious uses. The king's officers first sequestrated the assets of the Alien Priories in 1295-1303 under Edward I, and the same thing happened repeatedly for long periods over the course of the Fourteenth Century, most particularly in the reign of Edward III. Those Alien Priories that had functioning communities were forced to pay large sums to the king, while those that were mere estates were confiscated and run by royal officers, the proceeds going to the king's pocket. Such estates were a valuable source of income for the Crown in its French wars. Some of the Alien Priories were allowed to become naturalised (for instance Castle Acre Priory), on payment of heavy fines and bribes, but for the rest their fates were sealed when Henry V dissolved them by act of Parliament in 1414. The properties went to the Crown; some were kept, some were subsequently given or sold to Henry's supporters, others went to his new monasteries of Syon Abbey and the Carthusians at Sheen Priory, others went to educational purposes. All these suppressions enjoyed Papal approval, though successive 15th century Popes continued to press for assurances that, now that the Avignon Papacy had been defeated, the confiscated monastic property would revert to religious and educational uses.
The royal transfer of monastic estates to educational foundations proved an inspiration to the bishops, and as the 15th century waned such moves became more and more common. The subjects of these dissolutions were usually small and poor Benedictine or Augustinian communities (especially those of women) with few powerful friends; the great abbeys and orders exempt from diocesan supervision such as the Cistercians were unaffected. The consequent new foundations were most often Oxford University and Cambridge University colleges, instances of this include John Alcock, Bishop of Ely dissolving the Benedictine nunnery of Saint Radegund to found Jesus College, Cambridge (1496), and William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester acquiring Selborne Priory in 1484 for Magdalen College, Oxford. In the following century Lady Margaret Beaufort obtained the property of Creake Abbey (whose religious had all died of Black Death in 1506) to fund her works at Oxford and Cambridge, an action she took on the advice of such a staunch traditionalist as John Fisher Bishop of Rochester. In 1522 Fisher himself is also found dissolving the women's monasteries of Bromhall and Higham to aid St John's College, Cambridge. That same year Cardinal Wolsey dissolved St Frideswide's Priory (now Oxford Cathedral) to form the basis of his Christ Church, Oxford; in 1524 he secured a Papal bull to dissolve some 20 other monasteries to provide an endowment for his new college. In all these suppressions, friars, monks and nuns were absorbed into other houses of their respective orders. The conventional wisdom of the time was that the proper daily observance of the Divine Office of prayer required a minimum of twelve professed religious, but by the 1530s only a minority of religious houses in England could provide this; and accordingly most observers were agreed that a systematic reform of the English church must necessarily involve the drastic concentration of monks and nuns into many fewer, larger, houses; potentially making much monastic income available for more productive religious, educational and social purposes. But what may have represented a consensus in general principle, often faced strong resistance in practice. Members of religious houses proposed for dissolution might resist relocation; the houses invited to receive them might refuse to co-operate; and local notables might resist the disruption in their networks of influence. Moreover, the bishops found intractable opposition when they sought to enforce the rigorous observation of monastic rules; especially in respect of their attempts to require monks and nuns to remain within their cloisters. The King actively supported Wolsey, Fisher and Richard Foxe in their programmes of monastic reform; but even so, progress was painfully slow, especially where religious orders had been exempted from episcopal oversight by Papal authority.
Continental precedents
While these transactions were going on in England, elsewhere in Europe events were taking place which presaged a storm. In 1521, Martin Luther had published 'De votis monasticis' ('On the monastic vows'), 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. Luther also declared that monastic vows were meaningless and that no one should feel bound by them. Luther, a one-time Augustinian friar, found some comfort when these views had a dramatic effect: a special meeting of the German province of his order held the same year accepted them and voted that henceforth every member of the regular clergy should be free to renounce their vows, resign their offices and get married. At Luther's home monastery in Wittenberg all the friars, save one, did so.
News of these events did not take long to spread among Protestant-minded (and acquisitive) rulers across Europe, and some, particularly in Scandinavia, moved very quickly. In Sweden in 1527 King Gustavus Vasa secured an edict of the Diet allowing him to confiscate any monastic lands he deemed necessary to increase royal revenues; and to force the return of donated properties to the descendants of those who had donated them. In one fell swoop, Gustav gained large estates and a company of diehard supporters. The Swedish monasteries and convents were simultaneously deprived of their livelihoods, with the result that some collapsed immediately, while others lingered on for a few decades before persecution and further confiscations finally caused them all to disappear by 1580. In Denmark, King Frederick I of Denmark made his grab in 1528, confiscating 15 of the houses of the wealthiest monasteries and convents. Further laws under his successor over the course of the 1530s banned the friars, and forced monks and nuns to transfer title to their houses to the Crown, which passed them out to supportive nobles, who were soon found enjoying the fruits of former monastic lands. Danish monastic life was to vanish in a way identical to that of Sweden.
In Switzerland, too, monasteries came under threat. In 1523 the government of the city-state of Zurich pressured nuns to leave their monasteries and marry, and followed up the next year by dissolving all monasteries in its territory, under the pretext of using their revenues to fund education and help the poor. The city of Basel followed suit in 1529 and Geneva adopted the same policy in 1530. 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 has survived.
It is inconceivable that these moves went unnoticed by the English government and particularly by Thomas Cromwell, who had been employed by Wolsey in his monastic suppressions, and who was shortly to become Henry VIII's chief minister. However, Henry himself appears to have been much more influenced by the opinions on monasticism of the humanists Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, especially as found in Erasmus's work In Praise of Folly (1511) and More's Utopia 1516. Erasmus and More promoted ecclesiastical reform while remaining faithful Catholics, and had ridiculed such monastic practices as repetitive formal religion, superstitious pilgrimages for the veneration of relics and the accumulation of monastic wealth. Henry appears from the first to have shared these views; never having endowed a religious house, and only once having undertaken a religious pilgrimage (to Walsingham in 1511). 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. Henry himself corresponded continually with Erasmus; prompting him to be more explicit in his public rejection of the key tenets of Lutheranism, and offering him church preferement, should he wish to return to England.
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Monasteries
Last edited by horus on Tue Jan 18, 2011 1:29 am; edited 1 time in total
