May 2007

Parish History Episode 73- A Land Without Monks

The Dissolution of the Monasteries was complete. The monks had gone from all of England and Wales. For nearly a thousand years (more than a thousand years in the case of Wales), the great abbeys had been prominent in the spiritual life of the Kingdom, and nowhere more prominent than in Northumbria. Aidan, who had come here from Iona, had been a monk, and so also his successors, such as Cuthbert, Bede and Alcuin. Augustine, who had come from Rome, had also been a monk, as also his successors, such as Paulinus. The leaders of the Church in Anglo-Danish times, under the Normans, and in the High Middle Ages, had mostly been monks. And now King Henry had driven the monks out of their abbeys, pensioned them off, and scattered them abroad.

It was a drastic, a revolutionary, change. How fared the Church, the Kingdom, the social fabric of the nation, as these changes kicked in? Was the Dissolution a good or a bad thing for England?

Well, first of all, what King Henry did was wrong, and would have been wrong even if it had not been done out of greed for money. As he had done once before when he divorced Queen Catherine, he was compelling those who had committed themselves to a vocation to abandon their covenant. No doubt there were some disgruntled monks and nuns for whom being turned adrift with a pension or a dowry was a form of liberation, but that was no justification for disrupting the lives of others who merely wished to remain true to their vows. And it is true that King Henry was not uniquely wicked. Other kings had done as much or worse, and so had some popes. Pope Clement V had colluded with the King of France in the torture and despoilation of the Templars. His successor, Pope John XXII, had sentenced over a hundred Spiritual Franciscans to death by burning. And, two centuries after the time of King Henry, Pope Clement XIII would dissolve the Jesuit Order. But, yes, what King Henry did was wrong.

If King Henry had intended to enrich himself from the spoils of the monasteries, he did not in practice make himself as wealthy as he had hoped. He found it prudent to give much of what he stole away to his cronies. It is often asserted that by so doing he assured the loyalty of the English aristocracy to the Reformation. This assertion is possibly exaggerated. In other countries of Northern Europe where the aristocracy gained less, they yet remained committed to Protestantism. Again, those lords in France and Spain who gained by the suppression of the Templars or the Jesuits did not necessarily cease to be Catholics. But still, it may be assumed that, in enriching themselves from the booty taken from the monasteries, the English nobility may have become better disposed to the arguments of the Reformers.

Here, in the North-East, where great monastic houses were few, the laity gained little by the suppression of the monasteries. Indeed, thanks perhaps to the sudden departure of Leigh, Henley and Blythman, following the disinterment of the Incorrupt Body of Saint Cuthbert, the Church in this region, both at diocesan and parochial levels, remained relatively affluent. The Bishop still possessed mineral rights over the whole county, and was greatly to benefit from them as coal-mining expanded, while the actual mines, though worked by lay contractors, remained for the most part the property either of the Bishop or of the Dean and Chapter, the latter body representing the estates of the old monastery of Durham (also of Finchale, Tynemouth and other Benedictine houses).

In Houghton itself, the only monastic property directly involved in these sequestrations seems to have been Rainton Mill (a water-mill, used for grinding corn), which ended up in lay ownership.

At the time of the Dissolution it was claimed that the King would transfer much of his gains to be used more beneficially in the pastoral service of the Church, or in education. Very little of this promise was kept. Five additional dioceses (Chester, Peterborough, Oxford, Gloucester and Bristol) were founded, out of the estates of neighbouring abbeys, but otherwise there was little gain for the Church, and almost none for education.

It is sometimes claimed that the Dissolution of the Monasteries was a tragedy for English education. Certainly there had been a time, seven or eight centuries before, when the monasteries of Northumbria had been the schoolmasters of all England, even of Europe, but those days were now long past. Of all the monastic houses closed down by Henry VIII, the only one in Durham Diocese which seems to have given formal education to boys was that at Durham itself, which maintained both a grammar school (now Durham School) and a “song school”, where choir boys were both taught the art of singing, and instructed in a trade to serve them in adult life.

Education had, in fact, passed the monasteries by. The friars still played an important rôle in the universities, though they were regarded as old-fashioned by the men of the New Learning. However by this time, most boys who obtained an education did so either in the grammar schools, which had begun to spring up in many towns of England during the Fifteenth Century; or in the guild schools, run by guild merchants for the benefit of their sons; or in the chantry schools, run in most towns and many villages by chantry priests, who thereby earned extra pocket money to augment the fees that they took for singing Masses for the dead. The chantry schools gave only elementary education, but, unlike the grammar schools or the guild schools, were usually open to girls as well as to boys. In the Diocese of Durham there were four important grammar schools, those at Darlington, Durham, Hexham and Alnwick, as well as a few others which never properly established themselves. In the South of England there were even greater grammar schools, such as those at Eton, Harrow and Winchester, which later became famous as “public schools”. Guild schools have survived to the present day in London (Goldsmiths’, Haberdashers’, Merchant Taylors’), but rarely elsewhere. There seem to have been some in Newcastle at one time, but no present schools claim continuity with them.

If a knight or a merchant wished to prepare his son for a career in a learnèd profession such as the Law, he would send the boy to a grammar school or a guild school, not to a monastery. So the Dissolution hardly affected such education: even Durham School managed to extricate itself from the fate of Durham Monastery, and to keep going as a lay school.

Girls’ education did however suffer. By this time it was common for girls of all but the poorest classes to be taught reading and writing and arithmetic at the chantry schools, and those schools continued to operate throughout King Henry’s reign.

Some nunneries, however, did provide the daughters of the wealthy with what amounted to a grammar school education. Many women in Tudor England, including Anne Askew, Catherine Parr, Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth I, were renowned for their learning; and though all those four women were to become champions of the Protestant Reformation, they all owed their education either to nuns, or to private tutors who had themselves been taught in nunneries. It would be a long time before England would know many more such “bluestockings”.

Fine musical traditions were growing up in England in the Sixteenth Century, and, though some losses were undoubtedly suffered with the dissolution of the monasteries, the tradition itself survived: indeed, as liturgical changes brought in new rites (after the death of King Henry, and the accession of his son, Edward), a need for new compositions arose. In the great churches of London, the high standards of music already achieved in the early years of the Tudor dynasty, were continued, and new settings for the Reformed Liturgy would be written by composers like Tallis and Byrd (though the latter was certainly out of sympathy with the “new religion”). In Durham, the existing standards of music - with five organs available in the cathedral, and choirs of men (“lay clerks”) and boys, as well as monks - would be maintained, at least until Queen Mary’s reign.

As monasteries elsewhere were broken up, a number of fine organs must have come on to the market, to be sold off cheaply in badly run sales. Many of these organs probably came in to the possession of country houses, or of parish churches. Perhaps one was installed in our church.

We have no record of an organ at Houghton until 1602, when the churchwardens paid a bill for the repair of the organ. It may have been an instrument which had once been played in a monastic chapel, though it might well have been a more modern and up-to-date piece of equipment.

Presumably congregational singing took place, with organ accompaniment, during Morning and Evening Prayer in Bernard Gilpin’s time. There would then, however, have been no hymns as we understand them, but only metrical versions of the psalms. Other musical instruments, as well as organs, might also have been used to accompany the singing.

The rites were changing, and the services must have been better understood by the people, but the Reformation also brought great losses. The promises of re-investing the confiscated wealth from the abbeys in improved pastoral care and in education were not kept. However, after King Henry’s death, during the reign of his son, the chief criticism made against the destruction of the monasteries was not that it harmed education or music, but that it removed support from the needy poor. Much rural poverty, unemployment and depopulation existed, especially in some regions of the Midlands, the Fenlands and East Anglia, where much arable land was being turned over to sheep pasture, in order to provide the wool which was so important for English exports and for our native textile industry. It was argued by many that in former times men who had lost their livelihood on the land would have been supported by the charity of the monks.

All religious houses of course commended the practice of charity, indeed of all seven Corporal Works of Mercy, and many extensively practiced benevolence in various forms. However, they had never in practice prevented destitution, and it would appear that every winter many peasant children would die of hunger or of diseases related to malnutrition. Against that, many vagrants were sustained in a life of wandering from abbey to abbey, and such men were loud in their complaints when the abbeys suddenly disappeared from the landscape.

If that implies inefficiency in the relief of need, it can also be noted that the great religious houses were not entirely guiltless of the practice of creating enclosures of formerly arable land for the purpose of extending sheep pastures, the practice which contemporary opinion held was the cause of most rural poverty and depopulation. The Cistercians had at one time been ruthless in their destruction of villages in order to make space for their flocks of sheep, and Benedictine abbeys were sometimes highly efficient in turning over land to more profitable but less labour-intensive agricultural uses. The last Abbot of Peterborough, prior to the transformation of the abbey into a cathedral, was a noted encloser, and a demolisher of peasant houses - even though his area contained some of the best arable land in England.

Finally, on the debit side of the monastic account, we can note that one result of the Reformation, everywhere in Europe, was a growing gulf between the standards of literacy and of poor relief between Protestant and Catholic Europe. In the North, literacy became more and more general, while South of the Alps, and even more South of the Pyrenees, education lagged far behind, full adult literacy not being achieved until the Twentieth Century. While in both halves of Europe improvements to agriculture greatly reduced the threat of famine, the parochial poor relief practised in Protestant Europe appears to have been far more effective in relieving destitution than was the work of the religious orders in Catholic Europe.

In the North, the secular parishes took over, in effect, both the educational and the charitable work performed by monks and nuns in the South, and we will try to describe the beginnings of this process in next month’s article. However, it must be admitted that the parish system was not all that effective in England and Wales, if compared to the standards attained in many other Protestant countries. Scotland, bedevilled by many dynastic wars, had a slow start, but by the late Eighteenth Century it was a long way ahead of England, and was managing to teach reading and writing to almost every boy and girl.

Having stated all the above points, it cannot be denied that there were still losses to the community in the elimination of the religious orders, particularly the women’s orders, and particularly in the care of the sick. At the time of the Reformation, medicine seems to have been almost totally divorced from Christianity.

The wealthy sick were tended by academic physicians, who tended to be humanists, sceptical of religion, while the poor were tended by village “wise women” who lived in constant fear of being arraigned before an ecclesiastical court and being burnt as witches. But, by the Seventeenth Century, nursing orders were beginning to appear in Catholic Europe (most prominently, the Sisters of Charity), and these soon began to show unprecedentedly high standards in the care of the sick and the dying. Eventually their work would be copied by deaconesses and by professional hospital nurses in Northern Europe, and the uniforms worn in our hospitals are still influenced by the costumes of the Sisters of Charity.

Dick Toy

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