

DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES. 185 



ever tarnished their memories to all subsequent ages as the lay im- 

 propriators have done (would that the race were for ever extinct) by 

 "pulling down the houses on an estate, in order that there might be 

 no congregation, and then transforming the church into a straw 

 barn,* because there was none." Truly a more execrable or effec- 

 tual expedient for devising that the beams of divine light should 

 not penetrate within those churches, cannot well be imagined. The 

 advantages of competence unquestionably were not supplied by the 

 monks to their vicar ; " But now," remarks a writer of those times, 

 " there is no vicar at all, but the farmer is vicar and parson altoge- 

 ther ; and only an old cast-away monk or friar, which can scarcely 

 say his mattins, is hired for twenty or thirty shillings, meat and 

 drink, yea, in some places, for meat alone without any wages."t 



The lean kine devoured the fleshy ones, and yet looked nothing 

 the better for their meal. The spoilers of the church did themselves 

 very little good with their booty. It is a curious statement of Sir 

 Henry Spelman, about the year 1616, that on comparing the man- 

 sion houses of twenty- f ;ur families of gentlemen in Norfolk with 

 as many monasteries, all standing together at the dissolution, and 

 all lying within a ring of twelve miles the semi-diameter, he found 

 the former still possessed by the lineal descendants of their original 

 occupants in every instance, whilst the latter, with two exceptions 

 only, had flung out their owners again and again, some six times 

 over, none less than three, through sale, through default of issue, 

 and very often through great and grievous disasters. J This work 

 of pillage figures dreadfully also in the minds of other men who 

 were no more heated enthusiasts — no more under the influence of 

 fanatical infatuation — no more liable to the exaggerations and false 

 conclusions of an excited imagination — than the grave and learned 

 lawyer and antiquary just quoted. Archbishop Whitgift, in his 

 address to Queen Elizabeth on this subject, observes — " It is a 

 truth already become visible in many families that church land 

 added to an ancient and just inheritance hath proved like a moth 

 fretting a garment, and hath secretly consumed both.§ The firm- 

 nerved and not unscrupulous Burleigh, when his own personal 



* Strype, Cranmer, p. 412. See, also, the 8th chapter of Blunt's " Sketch 

 of the Reformation of England," for an account of the dissolution of the mo- 

 nasteries, which is given with much force and judgment, and is the result of 

 very considerable research. 



-j- Kennet, On Impropriations, p. 1G1. 



X Hist, and Fate of Sacrilege, p. 243. 



§ Eccle. Biog.., vol. iv., p. 280. 



VOL. V. NO. XVIII. A2 



