ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



might be considered worthy of the college library, and desired him to accept 

 them. 130 The fall of Wolsey made way for the more violent anti-papal 

 measures of the unscrupulous Cromwell, in whose wake our bishop followed 

 with clearly sorrowful loyalty. On Sunday 13 June, 1535, he preached in 

 his cathedral church at Chichester setting forth the union of the supreme 

 headship of the Church of England with the Imperial Crown, and the aboli- 

 tion of the pope's authority ; at the same time he sent his suffragan to 

 publish the same, and caused every abbot, prior, dean, parson, and other 

 minister to receive similar orders. 131 But beyond this point Sherborn would 

 not move, or at least not fast enough to suit the royal reformers, and accord- 

 ingly in May, 1536, tendered his resignation to Cromwell, who accepted it 

 and assigned to him a pension of 400, which he did not live long to enjoy, 

 dying in August of the same year. 



The campaign against the monasteries was opened in Sussex by the 

 visitation of Dr. Richard Layton in the autumn of 1535. The flippant tone 

 of this man's reports lss and the excessive profusion of his foul accusations 

 renders his evidence, when unfavourable, almost worthless ; though the 

 evidence of corruption at Shulbred, taken with the general tone of popular 

 opinion at the time so far as it is now recoverable, warns us against rushing 

 to the other extreme and denying that there was any foundation at all for the 

 charges thus recklessly brought. A letter from Richard Gwent of the 

 Court of Arches to Cromwell in August, 1535, appears to give a very fair 

 and sane view of the unhappy state of many of the lesser houses. He reports 

 after a visit to the diocese of Chichester that on the whole the king's orders 

 are being obeyed well, though there is some slackness in the razing (of the 

 names of the pope and St. Thomas of Canterbury) out of the service books. 

 Priests who are absent for a great part, and religious houses where there are 

 not more than three, six, or nine inmates, cannot execute the king's command 

 for preaching and declaring as commanded, much less their duty to God. 

 Such unlearned persons should not in future be admitted to holy orders, nor 

 bear rule in any house. It were better that such small houses should be 

 united and the master be bound to teach the others. ' It would pity your 

 heart to know, as I do, in some covent nother brother nor master that can 

 constre his rule, nor understand verba sacramentalia, yet being priests.' 1: Had 

 the dissolution of the lesser houses proceeded on these lines, the uniting of 

 their members and revenues, under scholarly and religious heads, a fresh lease 

 of life would no doubt have been given to the monastic system in England, but 

 such was not the king's intention, and in rapid succession the small houses and 

 the great fell, their buildings were cast down, their inmates scattered to 

 starve on scanty pensions, and their revenues diverted to the courtiers and the 

 king, through whose greedy fingers a few drops were let fall for the causes of 

 chanty and education in whose name the dissolution had been wrought. 



In Sussex the dissolution appears to have provoked no rioting or armed 

 opposition ; though when the abbey of Bayham was suppressed in 1525 the 

 local inhabitants had forcibly restored the canons for a brief period. Prece- 

 dents could be found for the dissolution, not only in the suppression of Bayham 

 and Pynham already noted, but in that of Sele at the end of the fifteenth 



130 L. and P. Hen. VIII, iv, No. 1 708. '" Ibid, viii, No. 941. 



'" See the accounts of particular monasteries below. m L. and P. Hen. Vlll, ix, No. 25. 



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