Chapter XXXIX: 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.

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.

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.