Dissolution of the monasteries
The dissolution of the monasteries, occasionally referred to as the suppression of the monasteries, was the set of administrative and legal processes between 1536 and 1541, by which Henry VIII disbanded all Catholic monasteries, priories, convents, and friaries in England, Wales, and Ireland; seized their wealth; disposed of their assets; destroyed buildings and relics; dispersed or destroyed libraries; and provided for their former personnel and functions.
Though the policy was originally envisaged as a way to increase the regular income of the Crown, much former monastic property was sold off to fund Henry's military campaigns in the 1540s. Henry did this under the Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in 1534, which made him Supreme Head of the Church in England. He had broken from Rome's papal authority the previous year. The monasteries were dissolved by two Acts of Parliament, those being the First Suppression Act in 1535 and the Second Suppression Act in 1539.
It has been described as "the greatest dislocation of people, property and daily life since the Norman Conquest" in Britain. Historian George W. Bernard argues that:
Background
At the time of their suppression, only some English and Welsh religious houses could trace their origins to Anglo-Saxon or Celtic foundations before the Norman Conquest of 1066. The overwhelming majority of the 625 monastic communities dissolved by Henry VIII had developed in the wave of monastic enthusiasm that swept western Christendom in the 11th and 12th centuries. Few had been founded later than the end of the 13th century; the youngest was the Bridgettine nunnery of Syon Abbey, founded in 1415.Typically, 11th- and 12th-century founders endowed monastic houses with revenue from landed estates and tithes appropriated from parish churches under the founder's patronage. As a consequence, religious houses in the 16th century controlled appointment to about two-fifths of all parish benefices in England, disposed of about half of all ecclesiastical income, and owned around a quarter of the nation's landed wealth. An English medieval proverb said that if the abbot of Glastonbury married the abbess of Shaftesbury, their heir would have more land than the king of England.
200 more houses of friars in England and Wales constituted a second distinct wave of monastic zeal in the 13th century. Friaries, for the most part, were concentrated in urban areas. Unlike monasteries, friaries had no income-bearing endowments; the friars, as mendicants, were supported financially by donations from the faithful, while ideally being self-sufficient and raising extensive urban kitchen gardens. File:Hans Holbein, the Younger, Around 1497-1543 - Portrait of Henry VIII of England - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1|King Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries took place in the political context of other attacks on the ecclesiastical institutions of Western Catholicism. Many of these were related to the Reformation in Continental Europe. By the end of the 16th century, monasticism had almost entirely disappeared from those European states whose rulers had adopted Lutheran or Reformed confessions of faith. They continued in states that remained Catholic, and new community orders such as the Jesuits and Capuchins emerged alongside the older orders.
The religious and political 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. Across much of continental Europe, the seizure of monastic property was associated with mass discontent among the common people and the lower levels of clergy and civil society against powerful and wealthy ecclesiastical institutions. Such popular hostility against the church was rare in England before 1558; the Reformation in England and Ireland was directed from the king and high society. These changes were initially met with popular suspicion; on some occasions and in particular localities, there was active resistance to the royal programme.
Humanist criticisms of Late Medieval Western monasticism
Dissatisfaction with regular religious life, and with the gross extent of monastic wealth, was common amongst late medieval secular and ecclesiastical leaders in the Latin West. G. W. Bernard says there was:File:Hans Holbein d. J. - Erasmus - Louvre.jpg|thumb|upright=1|Desiderius Erasmus by Holbein; Renaissance humanist and influential critic of religious orders. Louvre, Paris.
Erasmus had made a threefold criticism of the monks and nuns of his day, saying that:
- in withdrawing from the world into their own communal life, they elevated man-made monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience above the God-given vows of sacramental baptism; and elevated man-made monastic rules for religious life above the God-given teachings of the Gospels;
- notwithstanding exceptional communities of genuine austere life and exemplary charity, many abbeys and priories were havens for idle drones, concerned only for their own existence, reserving for themselves an excessive share of the commonwealth's religious assets, and contributing little or nothing to the spiritual needs of ordinary people;
- many monasteries were deeply involved in promoting and profiting from the veneration of relics, in the form of pilgrimages and purported miraculous tokens. The cult of relics was by no means specific to monasteries, but Erasmus was scandalised by the extent to which well-educated and highly regarded monks and nuns would participate in fraud against gullible lay believers.
Reforms
Pilgrimages to monastic shrines continued until forcibly suppressed in England in 1538 by order of Henry VIII, but the dissolution resulted in few modifications to England's parish churches. The English religious reforms of the 1530s corresponded little with the movement by Protestant Reformers, and encountered much popular hostility when they did. In 1536, Convocation adopted and Parliament enacted the Ten Articles, containing some terminology and ideas drawn from Luther and Melanchthon; but any momentum towards Protestantism stalled when Henry VIII expressed his support for the Six Articles of 1539, which remained in effect until after his death.Cardinal Wolsey had obtained a papal bull authorising some limited reforms in the English Church as early as 1518, but reformers had become increasingly frustrated at their lack of progress. In November 1529, Parliament passed Acts reforming apparent abuses in the English Church. They set a cap on fees, both for the probate of 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 Acts were meant to demonstrate that 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 in his biography of Henry VIII:
File:Cromwell,Thomas01.jpg|thumb|upright=1|Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein: Chief Minister for Henry VIII and Vicegerent in Spirituals; created the administrative machinery for the Dissolution. Frick Collection, New York City
The stories of monastic impropriety, vice, and excess that were to be collected by Thomas Cromwell's visitors to the monasteries, including Richard Layton and Thomas Legh, may have been exaggerated but the religious houses of England and Wales—with the notable exceptions of those of the Carthusians, the Observant Franciscans, and the Bridgettine nuns and monks—had long ceased to play a leading role in the spiritual life of the country. Other than in these three orders, observance of strict monastic rules was partial at best. The exceptional spiritual discipline of the Carthusian, Observant Franciscan and Bridgettine orders had, over the previous century, resulted in their being singled out for royal favour, in particular with houses benefiting from endowments confiscated by the Crown from the suppressed alien priories.
Donations and legacies had tended to go instead towards parish churches, university colleges, grammar schools and collegiate churches, which suggests greater public approbation. Levels of monastic debt were increasing, and average numbers of professed religious were falling, although the monasteries continued to attract recruits right up to the end. Only a few monks and nuns lived in conspicuous luxury, but most were comfortably fed and housed by the standards of the time, and few orders demanded ascetic piety or religious observance. Only a minority of houses could now support the twelve or thirteen professed religious usually regarded as the minimum necessary to maintain the full canonical hours of the Divine Office. Even in houses with adequate numbers, the regular obligations of communal eating and shared living had not been fully enforced for centuries, as communities tended to sub-divide into a number of distinct familiae. In most larger houses, the full observance of the Canonical Hours had become the task of a sub-group of 'Cloister Monks', such that the majority of inhabitants were freed to conduct their business and live much of their lives in the secular world. Extensive monastic complexes dominated English towns of any size, but most were less than half full.
From 1534 onwards, Cromwell and King Henry wanted to redirect ecclesiastical income to the Crown – they justified this by contending that they were reclaiming what was theirs. Renaissance princes throughout Europe were facing severe financial difficulties due to sharply rising expenditures, especially to pay for armies, ships and fortifications. Many had already resorted to plundering monastic wealth. Protestant princes would justify this by claiming divine authority; Catholic princes would obtain the agreement of the papacy. Monastic wealth, regarded everywhere as excessive, offered a standing temptation for cash-strapped authorities.
Almost all official action in the English dissolution was directed at the monasteries. The closing of the monasteries aroused popular opposition, but resistors became the targets of royal hostility. The surrender of the friaries, from an official perspective, arose almost as an afterthought, once it had been determined that all religious houses would have to go. In terms of popular esteem, the balance tilted the other way. Almost all monasteries supported themselves from their endowments; in late medieval terms 'they lived off their own'. Unless they were notably bad landlords, they tended to enjoy widespread local support; they also commonly appointed local notables to fee-bearing offices. The friars were by contrast much more likely to have been the objects of local hostility, especially since their practice of soliciting income through legacies appears to have been perceived as diminishing family inheritances.