The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 279 



benefactions, and tlie traveller might miss their welcome board 

 and lodging ; but the family solicitor, the Fleming,^ the Poor 

 Law, and the wayside inn would soon supply these national 

 wants, and the shoulders of the secular clergy were only 

 itching to bear the remaining and more sacred duties of their 

 high profession. 



It was not so much the act of confiscation, whereby some 

 four or five hundred monasteries were despoiled of their 

 possessions, as the uses to which the proceeds were put that 

 damaged the landed interest. It lost more than half its re- 

 presentative strength in the Upper House, and the provisions 

 made for appointing substitutes were never adequately carried 

 out by the unreliable king. But that in itself was not suffi- 

 ciently grave to have stirred all the north country into open 

 and armed rebellion. The funds with which the monasteries 

 had been endowed were for masses and prayers on behalf of 

 the dead, their revenues from tithes for the relief of the 

 nation's poor and the entertainment of the nation's guests. 

 The appropriation of these religious offerings by the Crown 

 was an act of sacrilege. The national representatives, smart- 

 ing though they were under the despotic deeds of Wolsey and 

 other ecclesiastical extortion,- would have never given consti- 

 tutional consent to this gigantic State raid on corporate pro- 

 perty had they not hedged in its consequences with conditions 

 that would have scarcely, if at all, outraged the sixteenth- 

 century ideas of justice. The monks were to have been pen- 

 sioned off, eighteen fresh bishoprics endowed, public highways 

 repaired, and Channel ports fortified.^ So, later, in the case 

 of the endowed chantries, it was enacted that the funds should 

 be disposed of for purposes of education and poor relief.* But 

 Heury carried out these schemes just so far as to content his 



' The green crop and the four-course system were soon to be introduced 

 from Flemish sources. 



- For one example, the enormous fees charged by the clergy on probate 

 of wills. 



3 Hallam, Hist, of Engl., ch. ii. 



^ This was in accordance with the policy invariably observed on 

 former occasions in any State confiscation of Church property. Vide 

 A History of Tithes, Eev. H. Clarke, p. 178. 



