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Not Just the Tudors
Dissolution of the Monasteries
00:53:09
Suzannah explores the dissolution of some 800 monasteries and nunneries by King Henry VIII.
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. All across England, the atmospheric ruins of monasteries are today a reminder of a lost world. Before they were closed, monasteries and nunneries were not just vital and thriving centres of spiritual worship. They were also practically rooted in their communities, places of employment, education, welfare and culture. The dissolution of the monasteries was a change of almost unrivalled magnitude. It's easy to be distracted by the lurid behavior of Henry VIII and the high politics of the Reformation and forget what was going on for ordinary people in the cities and towns and villages of England. Carried out between 1536 and 1541, the dissolution of the monasteries was driven by Henry's break with Rome and desire for wealth. The closure of more than 800 religious houses saw a massive transfer of property which reshaped England's socioeconomic landscape. And while it enriched the crown and the nobility, it also led to increased poverty and the loss of social services previously provided by monasteries. I've been travelling the length and breadth of England to make two new documentaries for History Hit and in this episode of Not Just the Tudors, here's a chance to hear more of the conversations I've had around the country with experts in the dissolution of the monasteries. Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. He specialises in the history of the Reformation and of Protestantism. He's been my guest on Not Just the Tudors before, talking about what Catholics and Protestants believed and the first printed English Bible. I caught up with him at the ruins of Easby Abbey or the Abbey of St Agatha's just outside Richmond in North Yorkshire, which is one of the best preserved monasteries of the pre Monstrotensian White Canons and has over the centuries been a favorite subject for artists including JMW Turner.
- [03:05]
Alec Ryrie
Alec, can we talk a bit about the background to the dissolution. Had monasteries been dissolved before?
- [03:11]
Professor James G. Clark
Monasteries have been dissolved for centuries. The idea that these foundations should be suppressed, their assets taken and moved to some other purpose. This is an old idea that happened in the 15th century. There'd been a particular wave of them. In the 1520s, Cardinal Wolseley gets permission to suppress a whole series of monasteries around England to fund his two new prestige foundations, his school at Ipswich and Cardinal College that he founds at Oxford. And he has his young fixer, Thomas Cromwell, to go out around the country doing this. So the idea of repurposing monastic wealth and using it for some other pious or charitable purpose is perfectly well established. There's been a series of schemes put forward to Parliament in the early 1530s, during this period, when Parliament is putting more and more pressure on the Church. Schemes for dissolution are part of that mix. A number of different measures are used to try to work out which particular monasteries, which foundations ought to be dissolved. So the scheme that actually makes it into Parliament in the spring of 1536, to dissolve all of the houses, simply with an income below 200 pounds, uses this incredibly crude, rough and ready measure to decide who's going to be in this net and who's out of it. The pretenses that this is all about reform and corruption. But if you were really trying to reform corruption, that's not how you would do it. It's a way of making an attack on the monastic estate, seizing a group of relatively poorly defended assets, whether it's always intended as a first step, or if it's simply an attempt to do something which Parliament has been trying to do in one form or another for a number of years. We don't know quite what the plan behind this is.
- [05:09]
Alec Ryrie
So I'm interested in the ways in which it differs from previous dissolutions and whether we can understand there to be a level of reform in there. According to the words of the act, it's getting rid of corruption. But you're saying it's doing that fairly crudely. How do we make sense of it?
- [05:28]
Professor James G. Clark
The words of the act are very idealistic. This is all about taking these pious assets that aren't being used and putting them towards education and hospitals, building roads, all these wonderful things. But the fact that the monasteries chosen for dissolution are listed simply by this crude financial measure almost immediately gives the lie to that. I think it's fairly clear that nobody takes that especially seriously at the time. There has been this serious attempt to gather evidence they've gone looking for, and to some extent, exaggerating even fabricating evidence of corruption in the monastic estate. But they're not then using that to target particular institutions. That could have been done. It would get into arguments back and forth about each individual house. The great advantage of the 200 pound measure is that it's simple. They've got the data, so they can very clearly say who's in, who's out, and there's no arguing about it. And although there's this rhetoric about using it for pious purposes, what actually happens is that the resources go to the Crown, they go to this new institution, the Court of Augmentations, that's been created to handle this influx of funds from the Church. And it's then up to the King's own charity what he chooses to spend it on, whether he wishes to spend it on charitable purposes or if he finds that he's got something slightly more urgent that he needs to do with it.
- [07:01]
Alec Ryrie
But if he wanted money. If the game is really about wealth, then why start with the poor monasteries?
- [07:10]
Professor James G. Clark
The game is about wealth. It's always about wealth. It's fundamentally about wealth, but it's never only about wealth. If the King was doing the whole business of dissolution simply in an attempt to get as much cash as possible, then he would probably have left some of the monasteries alone, because they're more trouble than they're worth. The extent to which he's rubbing powerful people up the wrong way by taking assets that really matter to their families equally. There are other potentially equally lucrative assets out there in the chantries and the cathedrals that he thinks about, but he doesn't take. So the comprehensive attack on the monasteries, it's clearly about money, but it's not just about money. The advantage of the small houses, first of all, there's a lot of them and maybe only 200 pounds each, it adds up. But also they tend to be places that they don't have powerful patrons in the same way. So you dissolve these small houses, each individual one at least, the hope is not going to stir up that much trouble, politically or locally. Given what happens in the autumn of 1536, that looks, in retrospect, like a miscalculation. The belief that this could be a relatively painless way of attacking the monastic estate. But that seems to be what's going on here. There is a connection, at least in the regime's rhetoric, between small houses and corruption. They try to make this link. Maybe they believe it, it avoids them confronting the really big set piece institutions, not least. One of the things that we forget is that the abbots of the great monasteries have seats in the House of Lords. These people have a significant voice in Parliament. So you're going to struggle to get legislation through that's directly attacking them, whereas the smaller monasteries around, they could probably be brought round to that one.
- [09:10]
Alec Ryrie
How should we make sense of this? Also in the light of what is going on in high politics, in. In Henry's decision to be made Supreme Head of the Church of England to break with Rome, where does it fit into the broader story of England's Reformation?
- [09:27]
Professor James G. Clark
A Reformation, the break with Rome that Henry pushes through wouldn't necessarily involve an attack on the monasteries, but it does raise the question for a couple of reasons. Wherever there have been reformations, if we want to call them that, elsewhere in Europe at this time, in Germany and Scandinavia, it creates a problem for these institutions that are so much tied up with the traditional life of the Church. If you're a Protestant theologian, Henry viii, of course, is not one of them, then you would look at these things and say, they're redundant, they're just parasites on the Commonwealth. And what happens in most countries where a Protestant Reformation is put through is that the monasteries are simply closed to new entrance and they are allowed to wither and die out generationally. What Henry VIII chooses to do to push through this much more aggressive attack on them over a period of four years is almost unparalleled. Sweden's the only other place where you find something of that level of aggression being pushed through. And of course, it's partly because of money. One of the things that Henry's very clear about when he declares himself to always have been Supreme Head of the Church, is that means that he has full jurisdiction over all of the clergy and also over all of the Church's property. As supreme head, it's his to deploy however he likes. And if he looks at the monastic and station and thinks, I could do better things with this, to serve some of my other responsibilities, such as fighting a war with the French, then he's going to use it for that and do so in good conscience as far as he's concerned. But he also has a particular worry about the monasteries, because they don't fit neatly into his notion of an English Church that's under the jurisdiction of an English king. The monastic orders are international networks. They look to superiors who are based in Rome. Elsewhere in Europe, they don't neatly fit under English jurisdiction in that kind of way. And some of the monasteries, some of the monastic orders, particularly the Carthusians and the Observant Franciscans, had been the main centers of opposition to Henry's seizure of control over the Church in England in the mid-1530s. That sense from the theologians that these people are just redundant parasites gets matched with Henry's sense that these people are at best subversive and at worst, quite possibly traitors. Under those circumstances, why wouldn't you take this enormous amount of money that they're sitting on?
- [12:17]
Alec Ryrie
What about the theology? If monks were praying for the souls of the dead passing through purgatory, how is that affected by Henry's beliefs, his reformation?
- [12:28]
Professor James G. Clark
This is a really tricky subject because Henry and his regime never confront this question directly. For a lot of the evangelical preachers around the regime, including people like Archbishop Cranmer himself, this is absolutely part of what's being implied here, that the monasteries had become these great factories of prayer for the dead, the sort of central industry of the late medieval Church. The main places where this is being done, it's almost become their main purpose. And so if you're closing them down, even just shuttering some of them, that implies at least that you're being pretty cavalier about prayer for the dead. You think, clearly, it doesn't matter as much. Henry VIII himself always blows hot and cold on this. He's very keen on people praying for him himself once he's died, you know, splendid masses for his soul, but is also willing to be quite cool about the whole notion of purgatory. And you see this in the years after the dissolution, when the regime's rhetoric about prayer for the dead becomes softer and more and more general. But the evangelicals were popping up and saying, look, because we've dissolved the monasteries, that must mean we're abandoning purgatory, we're abandoning prayer for the dead. The regime never goes the whole way on that. You could say that what the dissolution does is, in practical terms, an enormously effective attack on the doctrine of purgatory. It rips the heart out of it as a lived experience in England, but they never quite follow that through with admitting the magnitude of what they've done. It does mean that when, in the reign of November 6, the new regime there comes to say, no, actually, this whole purgatory thing is part of the scam that they think that the old church has been, and we're going to get rid of it by that stage, they're pushing it an open door. The damage has already been done.
- [14:29]
Alec Ryrie
What does Henry want the money for?
- [14:32]
Professor James G. Clark
Kings always want money, but Henry VIII in particular has concerns about security and about the threat of invasion. War is the sport of kings. He's always keen on pursuing martial glory, has been since his earliest days. But the Reformation itself drastically changes England's security situation. There are two great powers in Europe, France and the Holy Roman Empire. Spain is also part of that one. England, for most of Henry's lifetime, seen itself as holding the balance between these two. It's not a power of the same rank as either of them, but hopefully it can play them off against one another and ally with one against the other. Henry's great nightmare is that these two will form an alliance against him and decide to combine the two great Catholic powers to suppress the schismatic regime in England and force him from the throne. And it's not an unrealistic fear. And of course, the only thing you can do when faced with a threat like that, as well as doing whatever you can diplomatically to try to scrabble together some sort of solution, is to rearm. So he's desperate for cash to pour into building fortifications all along the south coast of England and a whole series of other projects, building up the navy to try to guard against what he sees as this very real threat of an invasion.
- [16:03]
Alec Ryrie
What's the spiritual impact of the closure of the monastery?
- [16:07]
Professor James G. Clark
For ordinary people, this is really hard to pin down, but it's clearly momentous. It lives long in memory. A hundred years later, you find people talking about abbey time as this distinct era. It's the dissolution of the monasteries, much more than the break with Rome or the persecution under Mary. That's the event that that's inscribed into popular memory. That's because it has a momentous physical impact in some parts of the country, but the spiritual impact is huge as well. The breaking of prayer for the dead, of the system of purgatory as a living system, even if the doctrine is formally maintained, this is when the heart of it is ripped out. And the witness of the monasteries to a particular kind of Christian life, an ideal of what that life ought to be, had been an ancient, a powerful one, a sign of continuity stretching back to the first conversion of England in the 6th century. The breaking of that continuity, which the monasteries represent more than anything else, is a really sharp side of just how much England has been taken into a new world.
- [17:30]
Alec Ryrie
What's the long term impact of the distillation?
- [17:33]
Professor James G. Clark
The long term impacts are so pervasive, it's difficult to pull them out. This completely reshapes the landscape, the economy, the religious life of England. But if I was going to pick on one thing, I would say this is the point where the landed class of England bring not just the country as a whole, but the church itself under their control, where it's going to remain for centuries to come. This is the gentry takeover. The monasteries had been great patrons of church life across the country. They appoint priests in a third or half of parishes. The monasteries had the central role in the governance and oversight of the church. Church around the country, a great many parish priests are appointed. Churches are patronized by monasteries. When the monasteries are dissolved, all of those rights and powers go with the land to the new landholders. People are saying, in the reign of Henry viii, this is monstrous, it's corrupt that these lay landholders should find themselves with these spiritual authorities. But it's seen as part of the property it carries on. And that remains a fundamental feature of how the English Church is governed, really right up until the 20th century.
- [18:51]
Alec Ryrie
And I suppose it reflects Henry as a member of the laity, being in charge of the church. It is the total mix of church and state that happens at this point.
- [19:02]
Professor James G. Clark
Yeah, I would say it's not so much a mix of church and state as the state's takeover of the church, its willingness to subordinate the church fundamentally to the interests of the lay elite of the land holding elite. The dissolution of the monasteries, the way that these ancient foundations are getting ransacked, allowed to fall into ruin, and then the lead from their roofs being used to re roof the grand houses of the new rising gentry. That's just a symbol of the nature of what's happening across the whole country. But it could have been different. You could imagine an outcome of the dissolution where all of this property, or much of it, remains under royal control, and you could have then ended up with a much more centralized, autocratic, financially independent crown than you actually get. So something much more like what happens in some other European countries. So maybe we should be grateful that Henry VIII blows all this money and hands it out to the gentry, because otherwise we could easily have found ourselves with an autocratic, absolute monarch. In the 17th century.
- [20:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
For monks, the very heart of their life was the daily office, a pattern of worship that was made up of psalms, hymns, prayers and readings that punctuated their days and their nights. At fixed points, the canonical hours, eight times a day, they interrupted whatever they were doing and knelt to repeat words that became as familiar to them as as their own names. This pattern of ancient spiritual discipline reminded them to orient their entire lives around seeking God. At Fountains Abbey near Ripon in North Yorkshire, the Cistercians were the strictest of all the monastic orders. Their vision was one of simplicity and self sufficiency. Every aspect of their daily life was highly regulated, from their food to their clothing, from the design of their buildings through to the hours of their day. Professor James G. Clark is the author of the Dissolution of the A New History. He came on to, not just the tutors in March 2022 to talk about the end of the monasteries. It's well worth checking out that episode. I was pleased to catch up with James again at Fountains, where I asked him what more we might know about the life of monks there and how we can find out more about what happened to them after they were forced out of their monastery.
- [21:24]
Professor Lucy Wooding
One of the frustrations for the historian of the dissolution is that we have very few first hand descriptions of this extraordinary dramatic moment. All we have, and we don't have very many of these, are the deeds of surrender, the formal legal document that transfers the monastery and all of its properties over to the Crown. They're signed often by the members of the community themselves. And in those personal signatures, perhaps we capture a little of the moment, the humanity of the moment, that the life and the place that you have known for decades, in many cases is coming to a close and you're stepping away. But beyond that, it's very hard to capture how this would have affected them. I'm struck sometimes when I look at these documents by the variations in hand that you can tell the different ages, the rather shaky script in the signature of one of them, of an elderly person. This is the only life they've known for years. At Fountains. The abbot was a man in late middle age. He was a priest here before the reign of Henry VIII in 1508. Decades of life extinguished.
- [22:39]
Alec Ryrie
And you can imagine, perhaps into that gap, something of how traumatic it must have been if your life had been at an extraordinary institution like this. You had lived in these beautiful spaces and you're now exiled from them. It must have been heartrending.
- [22:57]
Professor Lucy Wooding
Yes. I think we have to assume that you may be dislocated from the place, but emotionally that bond can never be broken. It's striking across the country how many communities of former monks and nuns not only stay within the vicinity of their former home, but also they stay closely in contact with one another. And in fact, it's very touching when we find evidence of that in surviving documents. Wills are particularly good for this in telling us something of the network that was maintained, those old bonds of freedom, fraternity. This was a community of brothers and sisters in a monastery. Those do endure. And when they come to make a will at the end of their life. They often refer to one other individual who they had lived alongside in their monastery at Fountains. We know that there's a cluster of the former monks who are living not very far away at all. They're living in Ripon and they're all together in one parish in the town of Ripon. And as one by one they die off, we catch a glimpse of them in their wills. In the case of women, women often supported with smaller pensions at the dissolution than the men, they do sometimes set up house together and actually revive that sense of a common life, a community of sisters. And in a number of locations around the country, we find these women cleaving together, in a sense, in some sort of faint reimagining of their old life.
- [24:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Because actually the monastic life as a.
- [24:39]
Alec Ryrie
Monk or as a nun had not in itself been outlawed, it's just that.
- [24:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Their places had been taken away from them.
- [24:48]
Professor Lucy Wooding
Absolutely right. The monastic life, in essence, is the life of devotion to a spiritual discipline in common, in the company of a community. And Henry VIII and his regime do not destroy that principle, nor has he stripped the men of their priesthood. And so they're living outside the monastery in the world. But these men are clergy, and the men and the women who'd known that life, they remain, of course, fully engaged with that sense of a life of spiritual discipline and of the benefits and the virtues of that common life. And it's fascinating to see glimpses of it still flickering away as the years roll by after they've had to leave.
- [25:36]
Alec Ryrie
So we have wills, we have the deeds of surrender.
- [25:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Is there anything else for the historian.
- [25:41]
Alec Ryrie
Find to try and track down the lives of these people after the dissolution?
- [25:45]
Professor Lucy Wooding
It's very difficult. We have the records of pensions being paid, but in fact only those members of monastic communities who left in the later phases of closures, the end of the 1530s, after the suppression of the smaller monasteries in 1536, it's only those that are in receipt of annual pension payments, so immediately we only have the record of a portion of the total number, 10 to 12,000 people. The friars are much more difficult to trace. They don't receive the same financial support, and again, it's difficult to find them. They're less likely to show up in wills. A will, after all, is a record of property. If you don't have very much property, you may not have left much of a will. They're also slippery in the sense that certainly many of the men, when they came into the monastery, they took an alias name, and many of Them, when they are forced to leave, they revert to a family name. But if we have no record of that family name, it's very difficult to find them through the archives.
- [27:11]
Alec Ryrie
When it comes to Fountains, for example, what do we know about pensions?
- [27:16]
Professor Lucy Wooding
Fountains? It's interesting because it does seem to be a community of men, roughly of the same age and career stage, as it were. We know that they're all priests, so none of them are still working their way towards being a fully ordained priest. The abbot, naturally, the head of the community, receives the most substantial pension. There is a big disparity between what the superior, the abbot abbess, receives and the rest of the community. Here, the abbot receives a pension of £100 annually.
- [27:46]
Professor James G. Clark
Huge.
- [27:46]
Professor Lucy Wooding
Which is very significant, more than some monasteries were worth annually. There are 15 of the monks who receive a pension of £6, and then there are seven who receive, just a touch below that, £5, 6 shillings and 8 pence. And then we have eight monks who just received £5 of flat £5. Now, those figures for the monks are pretty typical. Between four and six pounds we would find for monks across much of the country. As a pension level, five or six pounds is what, at the lower end of the scale, a parish priest might receive in their annual stipend in Henry VIII's England. So it's the equivalent, if you like, of what if these men had then gone on to hold benefice in the secular church, what they might have expected. The pensions paid at the dissolution of a monastery are funded from the income of the monastery. So that's the other variable that is at work across the country. If you are a member of a less wealthy monastery, then you can expect that your pension will be reduced accordingly. So the Crown Henry's regime is, of course, managing the process, drawing only on the resources within the institution that is being broken up and closed. It did well to be the monk of a dissolved monastery, such as Fountains. Fountains is worth more than £1,000 a year. You could expect to be in receipt of a reasonable pension.
- [29:30]
Alec Ryrie
When it comes to nuns, are they in receipt of the same sort of pensions?
- [29:35]
Professor Lucy Wooding
They're not as substantial because few nunneries are as wealthy as the largest of the monasteries of men. There are a handful, Shaftesbury Abbey in Dorset, hugely wealthy, where nuns are getting pretty close to the levels of pension that the men are. But there also seem to be more novice girls at nunneries at the time of the dissolution, and they are being let go with really very low pensions indeed. So the nuns are not in the same position. And of course, the women entering into the secular world do not have the opportunities for future employment. Many of the men who leave their monastery have the opportunity to become priests in Henry VIII's church and they do and receive income. Of course, for the women, beyond their pension, the prospects of livelihood lie with their family. And it's clear that not many of them really want to return to their family and to that sort of household existence.
- [30:32]
Alec Ryrie
It's interesting that we've got institutions where there are a lot of novices, they're not getting money. It suggests that the institutions that are thriving, even if they're not massive to start, but they're taking in new people, they've got fresh blood, but they're punished for that, really.
- [30:47]
Professor Lucy Wooding
Yes, in a way. It's certainly the case that it's the most unfortunate position to be in, to be on the threshold of your monastic career at this point, when it all is being dismantled, because we know men who are novices at the time of the dissolution who've not yet been able to progress to ordination. They can't go off into Henry VIII's church and find a position either. So, yes, the liveliness of these places just prior to the dissolution, then almost turns back on them in the aftermath because of the difficulty of navigating that post dissolution life.
- [31:22]
Alec Ryrie
I feel for the women who are going into this life of learning now they've got to go get married and look after a household and do all of that domestic stuff.
- [31:33]
Professor Lucy Wooding
It's very tough for ex monastic women. In fact, the options aren't as wide as you suggest, because as long as the King lives, they can't marry either. So the prospect is of a return to that household of often father, uncle, elder brothers, younger brothers, who are going to close in around you and determine your options. Not surprisingly, few of the women regard that as an attractive prospect, which is why I think we see a good many of them pooling their pension resources together and establishing a household of their own. It's heartening perhaps to see that degree of self determination in the face of a way of life being cut off for them, that they improvise and take a rental property and live together and in some instances live together for a number of decades afterwards.
- [32:30]
Alec Ryrie
What is the wider impact on the local economy of the closure of the monasteries?
- [32:35]
Professor Lucy Wooding
It's a mixed picture because there is a high degree of continuity. Those who were the lessees or tenants of monastery property in the immediate term do not experience a significant upheaval. The Crown is managing an extraordinary and unprecedented process of redistribution of property, of sort of conveyance. And of course, it's not in the Crown's interest to throw it all up in the air, and they don't. And so tenants of this or that farm or agricultural estate find themselves with a new landlord. But in the short term, with terms and conditions remaining much as they are, those ripples occur a little bit further out from the moment of closure. In most parts of the country, change comes first and foremost when the Crown is no longer the proprietor, but when the Crown has granted out this or that monastery estate to a new secular landlord, a local family. And it tends to be at that point that suddenly those who'd taken their living, their livelihood from property connected to a monastery or from land connected to a monastery suddenly find that the ground beneath them is beginning to look rather more unsettled. The terms of the tenancy have changed, or the bounds of the property they thought they were renting are now disputed by the new landlord. We have to see that happening over a number of years. It's not as if there is a sudden clap of thunder and everything changes. I think we do have to understand that a central hub and market in a local economy has suddenly been extinguished. And whether you looked here to the monastery for your livelihood or whether you rather regarded it as a ready source of trade for your own goods, it's gone. And that process has been multiplied across the country, and that does see relatively quickly, by the middle of the 16th century, a number of provincial towns really suffering a kind of step change in the nature of their economic life, that smaller provincial towns, in many cases their whole way of trade had been configured around a large corporation at the centre of it. And it has gone, it will not return. And patterns of economic life have to change accordingly. And that carries with it certain shocks, I think those in the sort of provisioning trade, the trade in manufactured goods and so on, are perhaps at the sharp end of that change. We know in some parts of the country that provincial town traders in wine, in fish, in foodstuffs for the fine dining of a great household, they simply can't operate anymore because that large monastery, or in some cases several monasteries, have simply gone.
- [35:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
My thanks to Professor James Clark. When we think of monasteries, it's easy to lump them all into one group. But as we've been hearing in actual fact, there were many different types of monastic orders. So in the 6th century, the earliest had been the Benedictines, founded because they were following The Rule of St. Benedict, a kind of directive for living a holy life. But in the 11th and 12th centuries, a couple of different orders appeared that were trying to take monastic institutions back to the principles of St. Benedict. So they were the Carthusians, which is Latin for charterhouse, who were renowned for their austerity, and the Cistercians, who believed very much in a sort of model of self sufficiency and manual labor. There were also the friaries, people who were going out, being in the community, helping poor people. So when we talk about the dissolution of the monasteries, we're actually talking about the closure of many different types of houses, including, as Professor Clark mentioned, nunneries. Professor Lucy Wooding has also appeared before on not just the Tudors, talking about Henry VIII, what you really need to know, and 17th century revolutionary England. I caught up with her at the ruins of Godstow Abbey, just northwest of Oxford. Godso housed an order of Benedictine nuns which was suppressed in 1539 under the Second act of Dissolution. I asked Professor Wooding how important places like Godso were for the local community.
- [37:11]
Professor Lucy Wooding
I think people sometimes forget that these places were not isolated pools of piety distant from the rest of the world. They're very deeply integrated in, into society. We often say that everybody in England in the early 16th century lives within walking distance of some kind of monastic community. And here at Godstow, it's not very far to the Benedictines at Ainscham or the Cistercians at Tame. There's a whole kind of network of these houses across the countryside. And they're not just integrated at the highest level. Obviously, we know of some quite high profile women who join these communities. And the abbess of Godstow, Lady Catherine, is very well connected and so on. But although they received patronage from popes, from bishops, from the royal family, they also get a lot of grants from the locals, from the citizens of Oxford here in Godstow. So they connect at all different levels, I think, of the sort of social pyramid.
- [38:30]
Alec Ryrie
And do you think there's any distinction between what it meant to locals to have a monastery versus having a nunnery?
- [38:38]
Professor Lucy Wooding
That's an interesting question. We're lucky with Godstow because we have quite good records. So the cartularists, so the charters in both Latin and from around the beginning of the 15th century, and then an English translation of them from the mid 15th century, these survive and there's been some very interesting work done on them. And certainly the nuns here were no less popular than the mail houses in terms of people asking them for prayers or whatever. And in fact, in some cases they seem to have been slightly more popular and you get people recording in their grants their affection for the community, so they use little affectionate phrases to describe the nuns. They're certainly just as important. I think sometimes we get the impression from some of the secondary literature that the nunneries are less important and they certainly sometimes tended to be less wealthy, but I don't think, in the view of the locality, they had any less significance.
- [39:33]
Alec Ryrie
I think there's something about the fact that we use the term monasteries when we talk about the dissolution of the monasteries. It's like this. It's a male pronoun, as it were. Sort of encompasses all of the houses, which do include a lot of priories and abbeys that are filled with women.
- [39:47]
Professor Lucy Wooding
Indeed, yeah.
- [39:48]
Alec Ryrie
Is there something particular in the case of Godstow that we need to note in terms of its relationship to the dissolution? It feels like it was more surprising than some of the other closures.
- [40:00]
Professor Lucy Wooding
I think Godstow is a really interesting test case. And when John Tregonwell first comes in 1535, he reports that the house is in good shape, that the community is virtuous. I think he finds one nun who had a lapse in virtue, but it was 13 or 14 years ago and she's been very virtuous since. They're realistic in their assessment, but Lady Catherine is quite clear that her community has nothing to fear. She says, we have always lived by God's law and by the King's law, so she doesn't have any apprehensions. And I think this tells us something really important about the dissolution, because we used to imagine that this was a plan that was made and then seamlessly enacted, and it's clear that it was much more piecemeal and random than that, and that at the start of the process, nobody ever imagined, even the King himself, that one day all monastic communities would be gone. And, of course, famously, Henry VII refounds two monasteries in the middle of the process. So I think Godster thought it would be safe, not just because Lady Catherine is very well connected, of course, she's quite good friends with Thomas Cromwell and we have a very interesting correspondence between them, but also because she has embraced reform and her community has embraced reform. And when another Commissioner comes. London, 1538. So three years after the original one, it's clear that there's a lot of tension because they both write indignantly to Cromwell, and Lady Catherine basically says, he's come and he's threatened me and my nuns and he's forcing us out of the religious life. And she says, we have no reason to do this because we don't believe in the Pope or Purgatory. We don't go on pilgrimage, we don't worship images. She paints a picture of a Catholic institution which has nonetheless taken on a lot of the reform ideas. So she is righteously indignant about this. And they use very interesting language as a community. They talk about how they have responded to God's word. There's some quite evangelical phrases that they're using, and they talk about how they expect to be justified and saved by Christ alone, which is coming quite close to the Protestant language of justification by faith alone. So I think Lady Catherine feels that she has taken on the spirit of the King's reforms in the 1530s, and that therefore there is nothing to fear. So I think when the final verdict comes, it must have been bewildering for them, a terrible shock.
- [42:38]
Alec Ryrie
In fact, it sounds like in some ways they're going further with their reformed thought than Henry VIII himself.
- [42:43]
Professor Lucy Wooding
They are certainly using language suggestive of that. Yeah.
- [42:47]
Alec Ryrie
What exactly happens, then? How is it dissolved?
- [42:51]
Professor Lucy Wooding
Ultimately, they are not in a position to resist royal pressure. Although it's interesting that the house closes towards the end of 1539. They're one of the ones that I suppose stands out longest. And partly that's because when Cromwell responds to Lady Catherine the year before, he says, no, don't worry, you're fine. Of course, everything's going to be all right. And so she's reconciled to this guy, London, who's been, you know, apparently threatening them. He responds in kindness, says, she threatened me. And apparently the local rector, who he describes as a rough man, was uttering threats as well, or so he claims. But now Cromwell says it's all going to be okay. And Lady Catherine, in fact, as a sort of peace offering, gives this commissioner, I think we're told, a mallard and a goodly heron gift of something tasty. And then the following year, it's all over, and somehow the nuns have to take up a new kind of role in society.
- [43:51]
Alec Ryrie
And do we have a sense of what nuns want to do? It's harder for them to have a career, to learn a craft, obviously would matter, depending on what age they were, whether there was the potential to marry or not. But there's got to be a number of women who have no other vocation, who have no other opportunity.
- [44:10]
Professor Lucy Wooding
Yes. And they're caught in a very awkward position because they are supposed to maintain their vows of chastity, because Henry VIII has views about this. They're less easy to see in the records because of course, a lot of monks go on to church jobs elsewhere. They become, if they're in a monastic house, which is also a cathedral, those cathedrals stop being monastic cathedrals and start being secular Catholic cathedrals. And so they can quite seamlessly stop being a monk and just be a member of the cathedral clergy, which is not so big a transformation. And of course, for other monks, it's still possible to find sometimes employment in the religious life, just not the monastic life. But women seem to have gone home to their families to a certain extent. Lady Catherine gets a very splendid pension. She gets a pension of £50 a year. Year. But her second in command, the prioress, gets a pension of a pound a year. On the whole, the pensions that were handed out were nothing very remarkable.
- [45:13]
Alec Ryrie
Do you feel like they're buying off Lady Catherine or her equivalent, the Abbots and Abbott's?
- [45:18]
Professor Lucy Wooding
I think so. And these were people who were very well connected. They come from the gentry or nobility. You don't want to alienate their families, so you try and treat them well. And, in fact, some of the abbesses and senior monastic clergy sometimes keep some of the property. They're able to hang on to some of the houses or they don't do so badly. But the rank and file, you suspect, had a much harder time. And the fact that they go back to their families near at hand takes us back to your first question. It reinforces how closely interlinked they were with the local community. Many of them resist, though, and they try to recreate their monastic life, but in a secular environment. I suppose the most famous one is Elizabeth Throckmorton from Denny in Cambridgeshire, and she goes back to Cofton Court with some of her nuns and they just keep wearing their habits and they keep obeying the monastic rule and they are still nuns, even if their houses have been taken away from them. And it is very interesting to see in wills and from later on in the period that people will still describe themselves as the Sisters of Godstone, or they will describe themselves in terms of their monastic identity even after the walls have been pulled down.
- [46:38]
Alec Ryrie
But then it becomes a generational change, because you can have a community, but the community will die out if you can't add any more sisters.
- [46:46]
Professor Lucy Wooding
Yes, there are a few houses which manage to tough it out. The most famous one, of course, is the Bridgetine House at Sion, which is a very splendid foundation. It's Henry V's foundation. It has impeccable royal connections, including its founder, St. Bridget. And when Henry I founds that house, he Gives it a great deal of autonomy and control of its lands and estates and so on. One of the first things that Henry wants to do is win over the nuns of Zion, and he's not very successful at all. And they also, when forced to leave their enclosure, relocate to local houses and continue to live their monastic lives. Eventually they go into exile. They're reinstated under Mary I. It's very interesting to see how many monastic houses are put back together and Mary only has five brief years, but still there's quite an interesting revival of some of the main monastic houses, including Westminster Abbey, of course. But then of course, they have to go into exile again. And they're not the only community that is drifting around northern Europe remembering their monastic past. And the Bridgertons wash up eventually in Lisbon and in the 19th century come home and they settled again somewhere near Exeter. And the last nun of Zion, I think that house, I think the house was dissolved about 10 years ago, which is an extraordinary story.
- [48:18]
Alec Ryrie
Wow. Are examples of resistance. But out of Germany, where convents are closed, we have some tales of much more violent resistance really stopping them coming in. Do we have anything similar in England, or is there a sense that for the most part, it's a kind of aqueous acquiescence?
- [48:37]
Professor Lucy Wooding
It depends where you are. Obviously, indignation at the dissolution or the start of the dissolution produces the pilgrimage of grace in the north. And that was the biggest rebellion faced by any of the Tudors. We argue a bit about how many thousands of people were involved in it. Some people think it's around 30,000, some people would say as many as 50,000. But it swept across seven northernmost counties of England. And yeah, I think a lot of that is fury at the thought that their monastic houses were going to be taken away. Variegated picture. Because of course, some of our leading Protestant reformers begin as monks and friars. It's not a clear cut question of identity. And clearly here in Godstone they were open to reform ideas. But no, I think there were strong feelings and sometimes very obvious resistance and sometimes more covert resistance, which you also see in the continent. So the mother house of that bridgetine order, which is in Vada in Sweden, this is problematic because Sweden takes a Lutheran power, but it's a very eminent monastic house and it's got strong royal connections. And the nuns are not prepared to go quietly. The story is that the nuns, forced to listen to Lutheran sermons, plugged their ears with wax, so they weren't going anywhere and they weren't listening to this. And in fact, they secured their partial refoundation later on in the century, although not long term. But there were some feisty women, I think, who knew their own minds.
- [50:15]
Alec Ryrie
Are there any other aspects of the dissolution that were particularly gendered that we need to consider?
- [50:21]
Professor Lucy Wooding
I suppose, some of the smaller monasteries, of course, the dissolution happens in two stages and Henry goes first for the smaller houses, claiming that they are not prospering and therefore they need to be removed. And some of those did tend to be nunneries, which in some parts of England command rather less patronage and sort of from the surrounding society. And I suppose in some of the rhetoric, you get the sense that the sins are perhaps held to be more lamentable when they are lapses of chastity on the part of women, because this is at a time when men got away with things in a way that women did not. These all female communities, I think, could engender some quite remarkable women, not least because if they join a convent when they're quite young, they will grow up in a community in which all of the authority figures are female and where learning is prevalent and books are to be had and copied. And, yeah, I think these women sometimes put up more of a fight than perhaps there's an authority were quite expecting, which you've got to think in terms of status as well as gender. So it's really quite grand. Houses like the Bridgeton one and Godstow also has a certain standing, the community, that I think gave them an added layer of protection, despite the fact that they were all female communities.
- [51:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
My thanks to Professor Lucy Wooding. So the dissolution of the monasteries had a profound and often devastating impact on the lives of monks and nuns. The abrupt transition from a life of religious devotion to secular existence must have been incredibly challenging, both emotionally and practically. Many faced significant hardships and a considerable number still fell into poverty. But not only did the dissolution disrupt individual lives, it also dismantled entire communities and ways of life that had existed for centuries. It marked a significant cultural shift, accelerating the spread of Protestantism and weakening Roman Catholicism in England. And its lasting impact can be seen in the redistribution of land ownership, the transformation of England's religious identity and the loss of significant cultural and educational institutions. If you want to learn more about the dissolution of the monasteries and see the places they left behind, then do search out my new documentary series on history hit. You can even see me trying my hand at illuminating a manuscript in Canterbury. You can find those and hundreds more documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. It's well worth it. Thanks to my researcher, Alice Smith, and my producer, Rob Weinberg. Remember, we're always eager to receive your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetutorshistoryhit.com and if you'd be so good as to follow not just the tutors from history, hit wherever you get your podcasts, you'll get each new episode as soon as it's released.