Consequences of the Dissolution of the Monasteries
EducationConsequences of the Dissolution of the Monasteries
Today, the stereotypical image of a monastery is a building which contains a group of religious men who spend their days at prayer and tending their land in order to create a lifestyle of self sufficiency for their brotherhood.
In Tudor Britain however, a monastery was a completely different type of establishment which played a much larger role in society.
Monasteries were indeed the homes of religious orders, but they were also the original old people's home, hospital, school, a place of refuge for the sick and disabled and a pilgrims rest.
Monasteries had large gardens where food was grown in order to feed both the monks and their charges. Herbs were also grown which were used extensively in herbal medicines, one of the few medical aids of Tudor times.
Monasteries were also places of employment for many local people, as the monks employed servants in the larger establishments.
Therefore monasteries, abbeys, priories and convents were big business, which garnered their wealth from benefactor's generous donations and the selling of home grown produce and herbal medicines, with the head of these establishments held in very high regard by the general masses for the many services that they provided in the local community.
KING HENRY VIII
In 1530, the King and Queen Consort of England were the Catholic King Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon. They had by all accounts a very strong relationship, but after 24 years of marriage and no male heir, King Henry was becoming ever more frustrated with his wife. Catherine had actually produced six babies during their marriage, but only one of these babies had grown into adulthood, their daughter Mary.
In that day and age, the country had never witnessed a female on the throne, so King Henry felt duty bound to do something about the situation.
He decided to divorce Catherine in order to marry Anne Boleyn, one of the queen's lady in waiting, but things did not turn out the way he planned with his request to Pope Clement VII to be given permission to divorce, denied.
In his anger and frustration, the king ordered an act of supremacy, that would make him supreme head of the church in England and all authority in matters of the church falling unto him, the king, which resulted in the beginnings of a new Protestant state religion, The Church of England, the state religion of England to this day.
Image courtesy of Linda Kenney, wikimedia commons
ST BENET'S MONASTERY, NORFOLK, the only monastery to survive the dissolution.
In order to implement his new church, Henry revoked all ties with the the Papacy and Rome and in turn brought about the Dissolution of the Monasteries Act in 1536.
From 1536 until 1540, under the command of the king's regents in charge of the dissolution, Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, England's monasteries were raised to the ground and everything of value stripped from them and taken to the royal treasury.
By 1547 Henry had amassed, what would be in today's terms, £481 million, most of which he used in order to fund his military campaigns in France and Scotland.
Image courtesy of Viki Male, wikimedia commons
ALMS HOUSES, donated to the elderly by well meaning benefactors.
However, what Henry had unwittingly caused was a social disaster of massive proportions across the land, rendering thousands of elderly and vulnerable people without a home, denied the entire country of what small vestiges of medical aid there was on offer, denied many an education and denied pilgrims a retreat.
Of the 5,000 monks, 1,600 friars and 2,000 nuns from the 376 monasteries affected, all were given a pension and some went into church office, but servants of the monasteries and the businesses situated along pilgrimage routes and at pilgrimage sites were left without custom.
Although pilgrims are not considered an important group of people in this day and age, during Tudor times, pilgrims were habitual travellers who conveyed news and information to the masses as they made their way around the country, in short they were the social media of their day.
Culturally Henry had also denied future generations of hundreds of the country's finest monastic buildings, caused the loss of thousands of volumes of monastic books and scriptures from their libraries, as well as thousands of precious and semi - precious religious artifacts which he had melted down and thousands of effergies of saints and holy people which are now lost and gone forever.
ELISABETHAN SLUMS
All this culminated in social instability and the need for a complete social reform, which came by way of the Poor Laws, which were implemented in 1587 during the reign of Henry's daughter Queen Elisabeth.
However, until then, hundreds of the country's most vulnerable and needy people endured the misery of having nowhere to live, nothing to eat and no medical care or help and hundreds of people were left destitute by having no work.
There became a great need for buildings such as Alms Houses for the elderly, workhouses for the sick and poor and Foundling Hospitals for the babies of women unable to support themselves, most of which were funded by well meaning benefactors.
English cities witnessed transition on a massive scale, causing vast slum areas to spring up in all the country's major urban areas, resulting in higher pollution, an increase in disease and a higher crime rate.
The Catholic religion was rendered illegal, although Catholics were not treated badly, a new Archbishop of Canterbury was ordained and a new English book of common prayer compiled, both courtesy of Thomas Cranmer.
During the remainder of Henry's reign and the reign of his son King Edward VI the reformed church was slow to take off and with the accession of Queen Mary, known as Bloody Mary because of her bad treatment of Protestants, the country reverted back to Catholicism for five years, but in 1558 when Queen Elisabeth took the crown, the country reverted back to the wishes of her father and the Church of England saw a revival.
This new period rendered Catholics vulnerable to attack and cases of church vandalism were on the rise, which caused Catholicism to remain illegal in England right up until the 19th century.
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