A HISTORY OF SURREY 



resuscitation by Mary. Bermondsey went to Sir Robert Southwell, 

 Master of the Rolls. For good or for evil a great effect was wrought 

 upon the life of the county by these confiscations or forced surrenders. 

 An aggregate income of over 3,800 for the six larger houses alone, or 

 something like the income of a duke, was withdrawn from uses which 

 were partly at least religious, charitable and educational, and appropriated 

 by the Crown or put into the hands of ordinary lay proprietors. The 

 dissolution of religious guilds touched the poor still more nearly, and, 

 with the confiscations of chantries and chapels, in some cases affected 

 the parochial organization. Okewood Chapel in Wotton parish was in 

 practice a parish church, and on the petition of the neighbourhood was 

 preserved as such on a sorely diminished income. Other chapels, like 

 St. Catherine's at Arlington, Hallibourne and Watenden near Sutton, 

 Stamford Chapel near Epsom, Brookwood, a chapel near Chobham, and 

 others, disappeared altogether or went to ruin. Cuddington Church, as 

 we have seen, was demolished. The dissolution of the religious houses 

 had affected parishes too. Capel had belonged to Reigate Priory, and 

 the dissolution left it at the caprice of a lay impropriator of the tithes 

 to put in the cheapest priest he could get to perform the services. 

 St. Martha's-on-the-Hill, the chapel that is in reality Sancti Martyris, 

 St. Thomas of Canterbury, had been served by canons of Newark, and 

 was left to decay. One South wark parish was suppressed when St. Mary 

 Overie fell, and that church was made a parish church for St. Mary 

 Magdalen's and St. Margaret's combined. The Bishop of Winchester 

 throughout these changes was Stephen Gardiner, ruling from 1531 to 

 1551, when he was deprived. Gardiner the statesman, as opposed to 

 Gardiner the ecclesiastic, was a supporter of the royal supremacy and of 

 the party of Catholic reform. Whether he approved in his heart of the 

 dissolution as it was carried out is of course very doubtful. But he could 

 not preserve even his episcopal estates from the greed of the king, and 

 probably thought it safer to concur in what he could not prevent. But 

 Surrey under Henry VIII. was not the scene of any violent resistance to 

 ecclesiastical changes. 1 It furnished of course some victims to Henry's 

 policy. One gentleman of Surrey, Sir Nicholas Carew of Beddington, 

 was involved in the ruin which overtook the relatives of Cardinal Pole, 

 the relics of the Yorkist party, in 1538. They were pretty certainly 

 plotting, or at least looking out for a revolution to stay the violent 

 courses of the king, and paid the penalty of losers in the game. The 

 principal charge however against Carew was that he had talked with the 

 Marquis of Exeter about a change in the times. He suffered in 1539. 

 No one was too great or too small for Henry's resentment to touch him. 

 John Griffiths, vicar of Wandsworth, his servant, and a Franciscan named 

 Waire were hanged in 1539 for denying the royal supremacy. In 1541 

 Sir David Genson, a knight hospitaller, was hanged at St. Thomas's 

 Waterings, on the Kent road, near the boundaries of Newington and 



1 The great agent of change, Thomas Cromwell, is said to have been a Surrey man by birth, son 

 of a Putney blacksmith, 



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