CHAP

VI

After the jewels and plate, the next things to which the visitors turned their attention were the A.D. 1538 lead and the bells, respecting which there are also many entries in the letters and accounts of the visitors. Sometimes they appear to have been either too busy or too indifferent to go further in the work of destruction, but there were many cases in which nothing more was done, simply because the buildings were too massive to be destroyed, except at the cost of more money than the materials could be sold for.

Destruc

buildings

"It may please your good Lordship to understand," writes tion of the John Freeman to Cromwell, "that the King's Commission commandeth me to pull down to the ground all the walls of the churches, steeples, cloisters, frater-houses, dormitories, chapter-houses, with all other houses, saving them that be necessary for a farmer. Sir, there be more of great houses in Lincolnshire than be in England beside suppressed of their values, with thick walls, and most part of them vaulted, and few buyers of either stone, glass, or slate, which might help the charges of plucking down of them. Wherefore, I certify your Lordship that it will be chargeable to the King, the down-pulling of them, if I should follow the commission, by the least 1000 pounds within the shire. Therefore, I think it Bells and were best to avoid this charge, to take first down the bells and lead, which I am about to do; for I had both a plumber and finer from London with me with all necessaries to them appertaining; which bells and lead will rise well and to a great sum, by the least six or seven thousand marks: and this done, to pull down the roofs, battlements, and stairs, and let the walls stand, and charge some with them as a quarry of stone to make sales of, as they that hath need will fetch.""

lead sold

Thus was the utter ruin of the monks' dwellings

4 Ellis' Orig. Letters, III. iii. 268. The present writer remembers an old sexton of Tynemouth who told him that he had often

blown up portions of the priory church there with gunpowder, to sell the stones; and that houses were built with them.

and offices, and of the Houses of God, brought about CHAP as it might have been brought about by a company

VI

of Mahometans or Pagans. In some accounts which A.D. 1538 are preserved are such entries as these:

stained glass, carva ings, tiles,

&c.

"Sold to Ralph Sheldon, Esqre., and Mr. Markham, the iron and glass in the windows of the north side of the cloister. . . . Item, received of the same Mr. Greville for a little table and the paving stone there. . . . Item, sold to Mr. Selling. Markham the paving tile of the north side of the cloister. Item, the pavement of the east side of the cloister sold to servant of the Bishops of Worcester [Latimer]. . . . Item, the glass of the east side of the cloister sold to Mr. Morgan.. Item, sold to Thomas Norton a buttress at the east end of the church. . . . Item, the pavement in the choir, sold to Mr. Streets. Item, the friars seats in the choir, sold to John Laughton. Item, the roof of the church, sold to Sir Thomas Gilbert and Edmund Wetherins of Chekeley parish. . . . Item, the glass and iron in the windows of Saint Michael's chapel, sold to John Forman. . Item, the timber of the said chapel, sold to William Loghtonhouse. Item, the shingle

of the same chapel, sold to William Bagnall."5

Almost more sad than this spirit of merchandize is the wanton sacrilege recorded of himself by the infamous Dr. London :

"At Reading I did only deface the church: all the windows Dr. London only being full of friars; and left the roof and walls whole to the defaces King's use. . . . At Aylesbury . ... I only sold the glass churches

windows and their ornaments with their utensils. I left the house whole, and only defaced the church. . . . At Warwick . . . I defaced the church windows and the cells of the dormitory as I did in every place, saving in Bedford and Aylesbury, where were few buyers."6

But when it began to be fully understood that this

5 Supp. of Monast., Camd. Soc., pp. 266-278.

6 Ellis' Orig. Letters, III. iii. 131.

A.D. 1538 spoliation.

General

CHAP utter ruin was to be effected, even the starving monks VI and their secular neighbours assisted in the work of In Scarborough the Bishop of Dover unlicensed found the black, white, and grey friars "so poor that plunder they have sold the stalls and parcloses in the church, so that nothing is left but the stone and glass, yet there is meetly good lead in these three places." In Warwickshire, writes London

ensues

Contem

count of

"The poor people thoroughly in every place be so greedy upon these houses when they be suppressed, that by night and day, not only of the towns, but also of the country, they do continually resort as long as any door, window, iron, or glass, or loose lead remaineth in any of them. And if it were so done only where I go, the more blame might be laid to me, but it is universally that the people be thus greedy for iron, windows, doors, and lead."8

Which testimony of the visitors themselves is curiously corroborated in the case of Roche Abbey by a subsequent writer, who says:

"I demanded of my father, thirty years after the Suppression, porary ac- which had bought part of the timber of the church, and all reasons for the timber in the steeple, with the bell-frame, with others his plundering partners therein (in the which steeple hung eight, yea, nine

bells, whereof the least but one could not be bought at this day for twenty pounds; which bells I did see hang there myself more than a year after the Suppression), whether he thought well of the religious persons and of the religion then used. And he told me, Yea: for, he said, I did see no cause to the contrary. Well, said I, then, how came it to pass, you was so ready to destroy and spoil the thing that you thought well of? What should I do? said he. Might I not, as well as others, have some profit of the spoil of the abbey? for I did see all would away, and therefore I did as others did. Thus you may see that as well they who thought well of the religion. then used, as they which thought otherwise could agree well 8 Ibid., 139.

7 Ellis' Orig. Letters, III. iii. 188.

VI

enough, and too well, to spoil them. Such a devil is cove- CHAP tousness and mammon! and such is the providence of God to punish sinners in making themselves instruments to punish A.D. 1539 themselves and all their posterity from generation to generation. For no doubt there hath been millions that have repented the thing since; but all too late.""

County after county was thus desolated, yet some a few of the more powerful monasteries, and especially houses those whose mitred abbots sat in Parliament, hold out still remained comparatively untouched. It became necessary, therefore, to break down the force of their active resistance and, scarcely less, of their "dead-weight" by some signal example. Two successive Abbots of Colchester1 were executed in the year 1539, and also the Abbot of Reading, all three being Lords of Parliament: and perhaps these were not all who suffered at that time in terrorem. the final act of the tragedy was ushered in by a deed of horrible atrocity, which has left its mark in Somersetshire hearts to the present day, and which may be classed with such detestable acts as the execution of the aged Countess of Salisbury, Bishop Fisher, and Sir Thomas More.

But

of the Ab.

bury

The last Abbot of Glastonbury was Richard Execution Whiting. Why he was singled out for an example bot of is not clear: but probably to show forcibly the over- Glastonpowering character of the royal will by destroying an ecclesiastic of immense moral weight and territorial influence. To adopt the language used ten years before respecting his friend Wolsey, the Abbot of Glastonbury was probably considered to be the "bell-wether" of the mitred abbots, and when he had

34.

Ellis' Orig. Letters, III. iii.

1 Thomas Marshall in January, and John Beach in December.

CHAP fallen the others would be without hope, and an easy VI prey. He was an old man, about eighty years of A.D. 1539 age, and had been long known for his practical piety and his great-souled hospitality. Every Wednesday

and influ

ence

and Friday the poor of the neighbourhood came in crowds to his gate, and as many as five hundred of His high the county gentry sometimes sat down at his table; character. while he had the sons of the latter living in the monastery, to the number of three hundred, for the purpose of an education such as is now given at Eton or Winchester, besides many other youths of a lower rank whom he gratuitously supported with the same object as a preparation for Oxford and Cambridge.

The visitors (or inquisitors, as Englishmen would call them elsewhere than in England) came suddenly to Glastonbury, at ten o'clock one morning at the end of September 1539, and found that the Abbot was at an outlying residence called Sharpham, about a mile distant from the abbey. Thither they hurried as quickly as they could, and finding the old The visi- abbot in his study, began to examine him on subamine him, jects of which he appears to have known nothing, and search and therefore could confess nothing: "and for that

tors ex

his house

his answer was not then to our purpose, we advised him to call to his remembrance that which he had as then forgotten, and so declare the truth." They brought him back to the abbey; and when the old man had gone to bed at night, began "to search his study for letters and books: and found in his study secretly laid, as well a written book of arguments against the divorce of his King's Majesty and the lady-dowager, which we take to be a great matters" (though poor Catherine had been dead four years!), "as also divers pardons, copies of bulls, and the