Puritanism which broke out within her walls, and CHAP prostrated her vital powers for so long. VI of social The social results of the dissolution may then be Summary summed up in a few words. A large body of almost results folstarving people was formed by the ruined monks, lowing the and those who had been maintained by them, either tions in labour or charity. Rents were enormously raised by those to whom the monastic lands fell by grant or purchase, the new lay landlords exacting three or four times as much as had been required by the old Church landlords. The poverty of the poor, and the wealth of the rich, drew away class from class, and introduced that disintegration of society which caused so much trouble in the seventeenth century. The schools of the monasteries were not efficiently replaced by the new foundations which were substituted for them, the universities themselves were far less frequented than formerly, and solid learning was replaced by superficial, few devoting themselves to real study. The recuperative power of the English character enabled it to withstand the force of this social convulsion, but not immediately and even when poor-laws were substituted for almsgiving, Elizabethan mansions for monastic houses, classical elegance for scholastic solidity, printed plays and sonnets for manuscript tomes of theology, it did not at once bring conviction to all minds that England had been much of a gainer by the dissolution of the monasteries. And on the whole question it may be said that we must ever look back with shame on that dissolution, as on a series of transactions in which the sorrow, VI CHAP the waste, the impiety that were wrought, were enough to make angels weep. It may be quite true that the monastic system had worn itself out for practical good; or at least that it was unfitted for those coming ages, which were to be so different from the ages that were past. But slaughter, desecration, and wanton destruction, were no remedies for its sins or its failings nor was covetous rapacity the spirit of reformation. A blot and a scandal were indelibly impressed upon our history; and every bare site, every ruined gable, is still a witness to what was nothing less than a great national tragedy. CHAPTER VII S REFORMATION OF LAY GRIEVANCES AGAINST THE CLERGY [A.D 1529-A.D. 1535] EVERAL important subjects have been set aside CHAP in the preceding chapters to prevent the narrative from becoming embarrassed, it being impossible to give clear views of history in the form of annals. The reader is now, therefore, asked to go back again, and after a cursory review of earlier events, to trace out a group of laws passed during the ten years which followed the fall of Wolsey, some of which were directly, and some indirectly associated with the progress of the Reformation. 1. ALLEGED EXTORTIONS OF THE CLERGY VII London In proceeding to do so, it will be right first to Discords observe a strong shadow of discontent with the state between clergy and and administration of ecclesiastical laws which was laity in thrown over the Church in London about the time when Wolsey's power was beginning to expand. The event has been grossly misrepresented for party CHAP purposes, but it shows there was much discord between clergy and laity about comparative trifles. VII There are frequent indications indeed that the clergy had then, as in later times, a large body of opponents among the tradesmen of the metropolis, always ready to make their opposition as obnoxious as possible, and influenced by their prejudices to an extent inconsistent with the principles of justice, and even of ordinary fair-play. A well-known instance of the kind, now to be narrated, is the case of Richard Hunn, a London tailor, of whom Foxe has A.D. 1515 made a martyr, but whose true story is known, through a close investigation which it underwent at the hands of that experienced judge Sir Thomas More, who says he "knew this matter from top to toe." Stripped of its martyrological sensationalism, that story offers a good illustration of the state of feeling in 1514-1515, and is as follows: Hunn's case, Hunn's child, Stephen, died in infancy, in the parish where it was put out to nurse, upon which the usual mortuary fee (equivalent to the modern burial fee) was required by the clergyman of the parish. This fee was ordinarily paid in kind, not in money, and by long established custom consisted of the second best horse or other animal in the deceased person's possession, if rich, or the garment that he last wore, In the case of an infant, the mortuary fee bearing sheet," which Hunn, the father, Hunn is refused to deliver up to the clergyman, or any equivalent for it, requiring him to render his services gratis ; a proceeding of which the tailor himself had probably never shown an example. On this refusal, Hunn was sued for the fee in the proper court of law, that of the Bishop of London's official, or ordinary. Hunn sued for a mortuary fee if poor. was the " VII cal lan action stirred up a great agitation about this suit, and openly CHAP used language among his acquaintances which was accounted heretical, interlarding his speeches, also, with virulent abuse of the clergy. For this he is also im was called before Fitzjames, the Bishop of Lon- for abusive prisoned don, and he ultimately acknowledged that although and heretithe words charged against him were not exactly guage those he had used, yet they represented truly the substance of what he had said. Before, however, Hunn had been brought to acknowledge his fault, he had begun a cross action for præmunire against Brings an the clergyman who had sued him for the fee, on a against the ples that the suit was laid in a court which derived clergyman its jurisdiction from a foreign authority,' an action at once overruled by the judges, the spiritual court being declared to have full cognizance of the question. Hunn had been imprisoned by the bishop (in the ordinary course of his jurisdiction) in one of the towers of old St. Paul's, commonly used for such a purpose, and invidiously called the "Lollard's" Tower. The adverse decision of the Westminster judges, the total failure of his litigious schemes, and probably some shame at the position into which he had brought Commits himself preyed upon the mind of the man, and he hung himself from a beam of the chamber in which he was confined. The coroner's jury returned a marvellous verdict, which extends over several pages of Foxe's volume, and which is more like a French act d'accusation than a verdict, and the upshot of which Factious is a finding of wilful murder against the judge-the coroner's Bishop of London's chancellor, and the officers in jury 1 Bishop Burnet represents this case to have been carried into Wolsey's court as legate: but Wol sey was neither cardinal nor legate suicide verdict of |