+Source.+--27 Henry VII. cap. 28. (_Statutes of the Realm_, III. 575.)
Forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is
daily used and committed among the little and small abbeys, priories,
and other religious houses of monks, canons, and nuns, where the
congregation of such religious persons is under the number of twelve
persons, whereby the governors of such religious houses, and their
convent, spoil, destroy, consume, and utterly waste, as well their
churches, monasteries, priories, principal houses, farms, granges,
lands, tenements, and hereditaments, as the ornaments of their
churches, and their goods and chattels, to the high displeasure of
Almighty God, slander of good religion, and to the great infamy of the
King's highness and the realm, if redress should not be had thereof.
And albeit that many continual visitations hath been heretofore had,
by the space of two hundred years and more, for an honest and
charitable reformation of such unthrifty carnal and abominable living,
yet nevertheless little or none amendment hath been hitherto had, but
their vicious living shamelessly increases and augments, and by a
cursed custom so rooted and infested, that a great multitude of the
religious persons in such small houses do rather choose to rove abroad
in apostasy, than to conform themselves to the observation of good
religion, so that without such small houses be utterly suppressed, and
the religious persons therein committed to great and honourable
monasteries of religion in this realm, where they may be compelled to
live religiously for reformation of their lives, there cannot else be
no reformation in this behalf:
In consideration whereof the king's most royal majesty, being supreme
head on earth, under God, of the Church of England, daily finding and
devising the increase, advancement and exaltation of true doctrine and
virtue in the said Church, to the glory and honour of God, and the
total extirping and destruction of vice and sin, having knowledge that
the premises be true, as well by the accounts of his late visitations,
as by sundry credible informations, considering also that divers and
great solemn monasteries of this realm, wherein (thanks be to God)
religion is right well kept and observed, be destitute of such full
numbers of religious persons, as they ought and may keep--has thought
good that a plain declaration should be made of the premises, as well
to the Lords spiritual and temporal, as to other his loving subjects,
the Commons, in this present Parliament assembled: whereupon the said
Lords and Commons, by a great deliberation, finally be resolved, that
it is, and shall be much more to the pleasure of Almighty God, and for
the honour of this his realm, that the possessions of such small
religious houses; now being spent, spoiled and wasted for increase and
maintenance of sin, should be used and converted to better uses, and
the unthrifty religious persons, so spending the same, to be compelled
to reform their lives: and thereupon most humbly desire the king's
highness, that it may be enacted by authority of this present
Parliament, that his majesty shall have and enjoy to him and his heirs
for ever, all and singular such monasteries, priories, and other
religious houses of monks, canons and nuns, of what kinds of
diversities of habits, rules, or orders soever they be called or
named, which have not in lands, tenements, rents, tithes, portions,
and other hereditaments above the clear yearly value of two hundred
pounds.