The Ruins of the Monasteries and the New Buildings
In early Tudor times our towns were much more picturesque than they
are to-day. That was chiefly owing to the fact that there were in
every town so many religious houses, colleges, and hospitals. These
buildings all had grounds of their own in the town, some more, some
less; but these open spaces and garden grounds, though they were
not open to the public, all helped to make the town airy, and to
give variety to the view.
The buildings themselves were all different, and many of them were
hundreds of years old. Towers, spires, turrets, gables, gateways,
and archways in all styles of architecture abounded. There were, of
course, many things in the towns which we should not have liked,
but they had a pleasant variety and picturesque appearance which
our modern towns have not. Thousands of streets in our towns are
just rows and rows of houses--brick boxes with slate lids--all
alike, all ugly, and very dull and dreary to look at and to live in.
In the reign of King Henry VIII all the religious houses were
suppressed, and given up into the king's hands. The life that had
gone on in them for centuries came to an end. Both in town and
country districts there were many people besides those who actually
lived in them to whom this made a great difference--people who,
in one way or another, got their living out of the monasteries.
Shutting up the monasteries threw all these people, so to speak,
out of work, and created what we call a "very difficult problem".
That meant a great deal of suffering.
Nowadays, if a factory which has employed a number of people
is suddenly closed, it means suffering for those who have been
employed there and for their families. Now, though the monasteries
did not employ people in the way in which a factory does, it did
affect in many ways those who lived and worked and depended on them.
In these days, if people are thrown out of employment in one place
they are free to go and seek it in another; but that was not the
case in the reign of Henry VIII. If they wandered from their native
towns and villages they were treated as vagabonds. It is true
that the new persons, to whom the monastery lands were granted,
were supposed to do for the people on the land--the poor and the
sick--what the monasteries had done for them. But what they were
_supposed_ to do and what they _did do_ were very different things.
[Illustration: WOLLATON HALL, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
An Elizabethan mansion, built 1590-1. The Italian style is here
pervaded by a Gothic influence
[See page 142]]
It is pretty easy to see how things worked. A wealthy man managed
to get a grant of the property of several monasteries at a very
cheap rate. He did not want these places to live in; he wanted to
make money out of them. The first thing that he did was to strip
the buildings of everything which would fetch any money. The lead
was usually the most valuable part of what the king had left. The
roofs would be stripped, the graves broken open to get at the
leaden coffins, and the windows smashed for the sake of the lead.
Then the building was left standing a ruin. The poor people of
the district had been used to receive food daily at the monastery
gate, and no doubt had grumbled at the quality and quantity of the
food often enough. But now it was no use going to the monastery
gate, for the place was a ruin. They could not go to the new lord's
house, for that might be miles away. Even if they did find him,
he might be the owner of three or four such ruined monasteries.
How could he be quite sure that they were the poor he was bound to
relieve? And so the poor folk lost the daily food on which they had
depended.
Then as regards the land. The new landlord, perhaps, might farm his
fields; in which case the rents, instead of going to the monastery,
went into his pocket. But he was not always on the spot, and very
frequently the land was let out to tenants; an agent or steward
collected the rents, and the tenants never saw their landlord. But
many of these new owners found that the management of the estates
caused them a lot of trouble; and, naturally enough, from their
point of view, they wanted to get as much money out of the property
as they could at the least cost to themselves.
Now there was in this sixteenth century still a great demand for
wool, and many of these landlords found it would save trouble to
turn these monastery lands into sheep-runs. A very few men could
look after a great many sheep, and there would be no bother about
keeping up buildings and barns. If the people were got off the
land, there would be no poor to bother about relieving. So it
came to pass that much land, which had been cultivated for many
centuries, went out of cultivation, and the people were turned
adrift. It was a hard state of affairs. The rights which they had
had to relief from the religious houses were taken from them, and
the means of getting their living also taken away; they were robbed
of their employment, and punished for wandering, for not working,
and for begging.
There were, of course, many instances in which the new landlord
came and lived near the old monastery. In some cases the old
buildings were altered and turned into a dwelling-house; in others
the building material was used for building a brand-new house close
by. When this was the case the old custom of relieving the poor
who came to the gate did not quickly die out.
[Illustration: _Old Timbered House, at Presleigh, Radnorshire,
dated 1616_]
For instance, at Standon in Hertfordshire, there was a house
belonging to the Knights Hospitallers. When the house was
dissolved, much of the property at Standon went to Sir Ralph
Sadleir, who had been secretary to Thomas Cromwell, the "hammer of
the monks". He owned Standon Lordship, and when the poor were no
longer relieved at the Hospitallers' House in the village, they
trooped from Standon up to Standon Lordship, about fifty of them,
every day. That custom of relieving the poor was kept up there for
many years.