was asked to surrender at one time, another at another; the one for
this reason, the other for that. The suppression of Chertsey, the
example perpetually recurring in these pages, was solemnly promised to
be but a transference of the community from one spot to another; then
when the transference had taken place the second community was
ruthlessly destroyed. There is ample evidence to show that each
community had its special hope of survival, and that each, until quite
the end of the process, regarded its fate, when that fate fell upon
it, as something exceptional and peculiar to itself. Some, or rather
many, purchased temporary exemption, doubtless secure in the belief
that their bribe would make that extension permanent. Their payments
were accepted, but the contracts depending upon them were never
fulfilled.
When the Dissolution had taken place, apart from the private loot,
which was enormous, and to which we shall turn a few pages hence, a
methodical destruction took place on the part of the Crown.
In none of the careless waste which marked the time is there a worse
example than in the case of Reading. The lead had already been
stripped from the roof and melted into pigs; the timbers of the roof
had already been rotting for nearly thirty years, when Elizabeth gave
leave for such of them as were sound to be removed. Some were used in
the repairing of a local church; a little later further leave was
given for 200 cartloads of freestone to be removed from the ruins. But
they showed an astonishing tenacity. The abbey was still a habitation
before the Civil Wars, and even at the end of the eighteenth century a
very considerable stretch of the old walls remained.
Westminster was saved. The salvation of Westminster is the more
remarkable in that the house was extremely wealthy.
Upon nothing has more ink been wasted in the minute research of modern
history than upon an attempted exact comparison between modern and
mediæval economics.
It is a misfortune that those who are best fitted to appreciate the
economic problems and science of the modern world are, either by race
or religion, or both, cut off from the mediæval system, and even when
they are acquainted with the skeleton, as it were, of that body of
Christian Europe, are none the less out of sympathy with, or even
ignorant of, its living form and spirit.
The particular department of that inquiry which concerns anyone who
touches the vast economic revolution produced by the Dissolution of
the monasteries is the comparison of values (as measured in the
precious metals) between the early sixteenth century and the early
twentieth.
No sensible man needs to be told that such a comparison is one of the
very numerous parts of historical inquiry in which a better result is
arrived at in proportion as the matter is more generally and largely
observed. It is one in which detail is more fatal to a man even than
inaccuracy, and it is one in which hardly a single observer who has
been really soaked in his subject has avoided the most ludicrous
conclusions.
Again, no man of common sense need be told that a rigid multiple is
absolutely impossible of discovery. The search for such a multiple is
like a search for an index number which shall apply to all the varying
economic habits of the modern world. One cannot say: "Multiply prices
by 10" or "Multiply prices by 20," and thus afford the modern reader a
sound basis; but one can say, after some observation: "Multiply by
such-and-such a multiple" (wherever very large and varied expenditure
is concerned) and you will certainly have a minimum; though how much
_more_ such expenditure may have represented in those very different
and far simpler social circumstances cannot be precisely determined.
What, then, is the rough multiple that will give us our minimum?
The inquiry has been prosecuted by more than one authority upon the
basis of wheat. One may say that wheat in normal years in the early
sixteenth century stood at about an eighth of wheat in what I may call
the normal years of the nineteenth, before the influx of Colonial
produce began to be serious, and before the depreciation of silver
combined with other causes to disturb prices.
Those who have taken wheat for their basis, recognising, as even they
must do, that 8 is far too low a multiple, are willing to grant 10,
and sometimes even 12, and this way of calculating, largely because it
is a ready rule, has entered into many books upon the Reformation. The
early Tudor penny is turned into the modern shilling.
But this basis of calculation is false, because the eating of wheaten
bread was not then the universal thing it is to-day. The English
proletarian of to-day is, in comparison with the large well-to-do
class of his fellow-citizens, a far poorer man than his ancestry ever
were. Wheaten bread is, indeed, his necessity, but good fresh meat
(for example) is an exception for him.
Now the Englishmen of earlier times made beef a necessity, and yet we
find that beef will permit a higher multiple than wheat. Beef will
give you a multiple of 12, and just as wheat, giving you a multiple of
8, permits a somewhat higher general multiple, so beef, giving you a
multiple of 12, permits a higher one. So if we were to make beef our
staple instead of wheat we should get a multiple of 13 or 14 by which
to turn the money of the first third of the sixteenth century into the
money of our own time.
But beef, in its turn, is not a fair standard; during much of the year
pork had, under the circumstances of the time, to be eaten instead of
fresh meat. Pork is to-day almost the only meat all the year round of
many labourers on the land. Now pork gives a still higher multiple: it
gives 20. For the pound that you would now give in Chichester Market
for a breeding sow, you gave in the early years of the sixteenth
century a shilling. So here you have another article of common
consumption which gives you a multiple of 20.
Strong ale gives you a higher multiple still--one of nearly 24. You
could then get strong ale at a penny a gallon. You will hardly get it
at two shillings a gallon to-day; and yet it is made of the same
materials. The small ale of the hayfield will give you almost any
multiple you like; it is from eightpence to ninepence a gallon now: it
was often given away in the sixteenth century as water would be.
The consideration of but a few sets of prices such as those we have
quoted shows that the ordinary multiple might be anything between 8
and 24, with a prejudice in favour of the higher rather than the lower
figure. But there are other lines of proof which converge upon the
matter, and which permit a greater degree of certitude. For instance,
even after the rise in prices in the early part of Elizabeth's reign,
while sixpence a week is thought low for the board and lodging of a
working man, a shilling is thought very high, and is only given in the
case of first-rate artisans; and if we consider the pre-Reformation
period, when the position of the labourer was, of course, much better
than it was under Elizabeth, or ever has been since, we find something
of the same scale. A penny a day is thought a rather mean allowance,
but twopence a day is a first-rate extra board wage.
Again, in Henry VIII.'s first poll tax it is taken for granted that
many labourers have less than a pound a year in actual wages, and that
wages over this sum, up to two pounds, for instance, form a sort of
aristocracy of labour that can afford to pay taxation. Of course some
part of the wages so counted were paid in part board and lodging,
especially in the agricultural industries, but still, the reception of
240 pence for a year's work in money gives you a multiple of far more
than 20: you will not get a man about a house and garden for less than
thirty pounds though you feed and house him, and the unhoused outside
labourer gets, first and last, over fifty pounds at the least.
When the Reformation was in full swing the currency was debased almost
out of recognition, and before the death of Edward VI. prices are
rendered so fictitious by inflation that they are useless for our
purpose. It is only with the currency of Elizabeth that they became
true measures of value once more.
It is useless, therefore, to follow the inquiry after the Dissolution
of the monasteries, for not only was the currency at sixes and sevens,
but true prices were also rapidly rising with the influx of precious
metals from Spain and America.
I have said enough in this very elementary sketch to show that a
general multiple of 20, when one considers wages as well as staple
foods, is as high as can be fixed safely, while a general multiple of
12 is certainly too low.
But even to multiply by 20 is by no means enough if one is to
appreciate the social meaning of such-and-such a large income in the
first part of Henry VIII.'s reign.
A brief historical essay, such as is this, is no place in which to
discuss any general theory of economics; were there space to do so,
even in an elementary fashion, it would be possible to show how the
increase of wealth in a state is, on account of the increased
elasticity in circulation of the currency, almost independent of the
movement of prices. But without going into formulæ; of this
complexity, a couple of homely comparisons will suffice to show what a
much larger thing a given income was in the early sixteenth century,
than its corresponding amount in values is to-day.
Consider a man with some £2000 a year travelling through modern
Europe. Prices, in the competition of modern commerce and the ease of
modern travel, are levelled up very evenly throughout the area that he
traverses. Yet such a man, should he settle in a village of Spanish
peasants, would appear of almost illimitable wealth, because he would
have at his command an almost indefinite amount of those simple
necessities which form the whole category of their consumable values.
Or again, let such a man settle in a place where the variety of
consumable values is large, but where the distribution of wealth is
fairly equal, and the small income, therefore, a normal social
phenomenon--as, for instance, among the lower middle class of
Paris-there again his £2000 a year would be of much greater effect
than in a society where wealth was unequally divided, for it would
produce that effect in a medium where the satisfaction of nearly every
individual around him was easily reached upon perhaps a tenth of such
an income.
When all this is taken into consideration we can begin to see what the
great monasteries were at the time of their dissolution. It is hardly
an exaggeration to multiply the list of mere values by 20 to bring it
into the terms of modern currency. A place worth close on £2000 a year
(as was, for instance, Ramsey Abbey) meant an income of not far short
of £40,000 a year in our money, to go by prices alone. And that
£40,000 a year was spent in an England in which nine-tenths of the
luxury of our modern rich was unknown, in which the squire was usually
but three or four times richer than one of his farmers, in which great
wealth, where it existed, attached rather to an office than to a
person. In general, the multiple of 20 must be further multiplied by a
coefficient which is not arithmetically determinable, but which we see
I to be very large by a general comparison of the small, poor, and
equable society of the early sixteenth century with the complex, huge,
wealthy, and wholly iniquitous society of our own day.
Supposing, for instance, we take the high multiple of 20, and say that
the revenues of Westminster at its dissolution in the first days of
1540 were some £80,000 a year in our modern money, we are far
underestimating the economic position of Westminster in the State.
There are to-day many private men in London who dispose of as great an
income, and who, for all their ostentation, are not remarkable; but
the income of Westminster in the early sixteenth century, when wealth
was far more equally divided than it is now, and when the accumulation
of it was far less, was a very different matter to what we mean to-day
by £80,000 a year. It produced more of the effect which we might
to-day imagine would be produced by a million. The fortune of but very
few families could so much as compare with it, and the fortunes of
individual families, especially of wealthy families, were, during the
existence of a strong king, highly perilous, and often cut short;
nothing could pretend to equal such an economic power but the Crown,
which then was, and which remained until the victory of the
aristocracy in the Civil Wars, by far the richest legal personality in
Britain. The temptation to sack Westminster was something like the
temptation presented to our financial powers to-day to get at the
rubber of the Congo Basin or at the unexploited coal of Northern
China.
By a miracle that temptation was withstood. For the moment Henry
intended to construct a bishopric with its cathedral out of the old
corporation and abbey. He might have done so and yet have yielded
immediately after to his cupidity, as he did with the Cathedral of
Osney. It ended in the form which it at present maintains. The greater
part of its revenues were, of course, stolen, but the fabric was
spared and enough income was retained to permit the continuous life of
Westminster to our own time.
Men are slow to conceive what might have been--nay, what almost
_was_--in their national history; it seems difficult to our generation
to imagine Westminster Abbey absent only from the national life; yet
Abingdon is gone, all but a gateway, Reading all but a few ruined
walls, Chertsey has utterly disappeared, so has Osney, so has
Sheen--to mention the great river houses alone: Westminster alone
survives, and the only reason it survives is that it had about it at
the time of the destruction of the monasteries a royal flavour, and
that its existence helped to bolster up the Tudors. But for that it
would have been sold like the rest, the lead would have been stripped
from its roof, the glass broken and thrown aside, and a Cecil or a
Howard would have built himself a palace with the stones. It is but a
chance that the words "Westminster Abbey" mean more to us to-day than
"Woburn Abbey," "Bewley Abbey" or any one of the scores of "Abbeys,"
"Priories," and the rest, which are the names of our country houses.
Chertsey and Abingdon were less fortunate than Westminster.
Chertsey, indeed, has so thoroughly disappeared that it might be taken
as a symbol of all that England had been for the thirty generations
since Christianity had come to her, and then, in two generations of
men, ceased suddenly to be. There is, perhaps, not one in a thousand
of the vague Colonials who regard Westminster Abbey as a sort of
inevitable centre for Britishers and Anglo-Saxons, who has so much as
heard of Chertsey. There is perhaps but one in a hundred of historical
students who could attach a definite connection to the name, and yet
Chertsey came next in the list of the great Benedictine Abbeys;
Chertsey also was coeval with England.
Chertsey went the way of them all. The last abbot, John Cordery,
surrendered it in the July of 1537, but he and his community were not
immediately dispersed, they were taken off to fill that strange new
foundation of Bisham, of which we shall hear later in connection with
the river, and which in its turn immediately disappeared. Not a year
had passed, the June of 1538 was not over, when the new community at
Bisham was scattered as the old one at Chertsey had been.
Of the abbey itself nothing is left but a broken piece of gateway, and
the few stones of a wall. But a relic of it remains in Black Cherry
Fair, a market granted to the abbey in the fifteenth century and
formerly held upon St. Anne's Hill and upon St. Anne's Day.
The fate of this monastery has something about it particularly tragic,
for the abbot and the monks of Chertsey when they surrendered did so
in the full expectation of continuing their monastic life at Bisham,
and if Bisham was treacherously destroyed immediately after the fault
does not lie at their door.
With Abingdon it was otherwise. The last prior was perhaps the least
steadfast of all the many bewildered or avaricious characters that
meet us in the story of the Dissolution. He was one Thomas Rowland,
who had watched every movement of Henry's mind, and had, if possible,
gone before. He did not even wait until the demand was made to him,
but suggested the abandonment of the trust which so many generations
of Englishmen had left in his hands, and he had a reward in the gift
not only of a very large pension but also of the Manor of Cumnor,
which had been before the destruction of the religious orders the
sanatorium or country house of the monks. He obtained it: and from his
time on Cumnor has borne an air of desolation and of murder, nor does
any part of his own palace remain.
When any organised economic system disappears, there is nothing more
interesting in history than to watch the process of its replacement:
for example, the gradual disappearance of pagan slavery, and its
replacement by the self-governing peasantry of the Middle Ages, with
all the consequence of that change, affords some of the best reading
in Continental records. But the Dissolution of the English monasteries
has this added interest, that it was an immediate, and therefore an
overwhelming, change; there was hardly a warning, there was no delay.
Suddenly, not within the lifetime of a man, but within that of a
Parliament, from one year to another, a good quarter of the whole
economic power of the nation was utterly transformed. Nothing like it
has been known in European history.
What filled the void so made? The answer to this question is, the
Oligarchy: the landed class which had been threatening for so long to
assume the Government of England stepped into the shoes of the great
houses, and by this addition to their already considerable power
achieved the destruction of the monarchy and within 100 years
proceeded to the ordering of the English people under a small group of
wealthy men, a form of Government which to this day England alone of
all Christian nations suffers or enjoys.
This general statement must not be taken to mean that the oligarchic
system, whose basis lies in the ownership of land, was immediately
created by the Dissolution of the great monasteries. The development
of the territorial system of England, of which system the banks of the
Thames afford as good a picture as any in England, can be traced
certainly from Saxon, and conjecturally from Roman, times.
The Roman estate was, presumably, the direct ancestor of the manor,
and the Saxon thegns were perhaps most of them in blood, and nearly
all of them in social constitution, descended from the owners of the
Roman Villas which had seen the petty but recurrent pirate invasions
of the fifth and sixth centuries.
But though the manorial arrangement, with its village lords and their
dependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West, and could be
found on the Rhine, in Gaul, and even in Italy, in Saxon England it
had this peculiarity, that there was no systematic organisation by
which the local land-owner definitely recognised a feudal superior,
and through him the power of a Central Government. Or rather, though
in theory such recognition had grown up towards the end of the Saxon
period, in practice it hardly existed, and when William landed the
whole system of tenure was in disorder, in the sense that the local
lord of the village was not accustomed to the interference of a
superior, and that no groups of lords had come into existence by which
the territorial system could be bound in sheaves, as it were, and the
whole of it attached to one central point at the royal Court.
Such a system of groups _had_ arisen in Gaul, and to that difference
ultimately we owe the French territorial system of the present day,
but William the Norman's new subjects had no comprehension of it.
It was upon this account that even those manors which he handed over
to his French kindred and dependants were scattered, and that, though
he framed a vigorous feudal rule centring in his own hands, the
ancient customs of the populace, coupled with the lack of any bond
between scattered and locally independent units, forbade that rule to
endure.
William's order was not a century old when the recrudescence of the
former manorial independence was felt in the reign of Henry II. Under
the personal unpopularity of his son, John, it blazed out into
successful revolt, and, in spite of the veil thrown over underlying
and permanent customs by such strong feudal kings as the first and the
third Edwards, the independence and power of the village landlord
remained the chief and growing character of English life. It expressed
itself in the quality of the local English Parliament, in the support
of the usurping Lancastrian dynasty--in twenty ways that converge and
mingle towards the close of the Middle Ages.
But after the Dissolution of the monasteries this power of the squires
takes on quite a different complexion: the land-owning class, from a
foundation for the National Government, became, within two generations
of the Dissolution, the master of that Government.
For many centuries previous to the sixteenth the old funded wealth of
the Crown had been gradually wasting, at the expense of the Central
National Government and to the profit of the squires. But the
alienation was never complete. There are plenty of cases in which the
Crown is found resuming the proprietorship of a manor to which it had
never abandoned the theoretical title. With the Tudors such cases
become rarer and rarer, with the Stuarts they cease.
The cause of this rapid enfeeblement of the Crown lay largely in the
changed proportion of wealth. The King, until the middle of the
sixteenth century, had been far wealthier than any one of his
subjects. By a deliberate act, the breaking up of ecclesiastical
tenure, the Crown offered an opportunity to the wealthier of those
subjects so enormously to increase their revenues as to overshadow
itself; in a little more than a century after the throwing open of the
monastic lands the King is an embarrassed individual, with every issue
of expenditure ear-marked, every source of it controlled, and his very
person, as it were, mortgaged to a plutocracy. The squires had not
only added to their revenues the actual amounts produced by the sites
and estates of the old religious foundations, they had been able by
this sudden accession of wealth to shoot ahead in their competition
with their fellow-citizens. The _counterweight_ to the power of the
local landlord disappeared with the disappearance of the monastery.
To show how the religious houses had furnished a powerful
counterweight by which the Central Government and the populace could
continue to oppose the growing power of the landed oligarchy, we may
take all the southern bank of the Thames from Buscot to Windsor. We
find at the time of the Conquest twelve royal manors and fifteen
religious; only the nine remaining were under private lords. Four and
a half centuries later, at the time of the Dissolution, the royal
manors have passed for the most part into private hands, but the
manors in the hands of the religious houses have actually increased in
number.
At this point it is important to note an economic phenomenon which
appears at first sight accidental, but which, on examination, is found
to spring from calculable political causes. At the moment of the
Dissolution it was apparently in the power of the Crown to have
concentrated the revenues of all these monastic manors into its own
hands, and this typical stretch of country, the Berkshire shore, shows
how economically powerful the Central Government of England might have
become had the property surrendered to the Crown been kept in the
hands of the King.
The modern reader will be tempted to inquire why it was not so kept.
Most certainly Henry intended to keep, if not the whole of it (for he
must reward his servants, and he was accustomed to do things largely),
yet at least the bulk of it in the Royal Treasury, and had he been
able to do so the Central Government of England would have become by
far the strongest thing in Europe. It is conceivable, though in
consideration of the national character doubtful, that with so
powerful an instrument of government, England, instead of standing
aside from the rapid bureaucratic recasting of European civilisation
which was the work of the French Crown, might have led the way in that
chief of modern experiments. One can imagine the Stuarts, had they
possessed revenue, doing what the Bourbons did: one can imagine the
modern State developing under an English Crown wealthier than any
other European Government, and the re-birth of Europe happening just
to the north, instead of just to the south, of the Channel.