ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



to the see between 1323 and i486 was lord chancellor during his tenure 

 of it. The great secular position of the bishop did not diminish in the 

 sixteenth century, when the see was held by Fox, Wolsey and Gardiner. 



During Henry the Eighth's reign great changes were made eccle- 

 siastically in Surrey, as happened then everywhere. On the suppression 

 of the six larger religious houses alone, estimated revenues of nearly 

 j^4,ooo a year went from ecclesiastical into lay hands. 



This did not of course represent all the change of property. The 

 bishop, Gardiner, had to surrender his house at Esher to the king. 

 The revenues of the bishopric fell from ^^4,095 i6s. ^fd. in 1529 

 to jr2,38o 2s. 4|^. in 1568.* Two parishes, Cuddington and one in 

 Southwark, were suppressed, the latter by the amalgamation of SS. 

 Margaret and Mary Magdalene. Where the monasteries had put vicars 

 into their appropriated churches, with an endowment, these survived ; 

 where the service had merely been done by one of the brethren it ceased, 

 or was carried on by an underpaid curate. The chapels of Artington, 

 Hallibourne, Watenden, Stamford, Brookwood, Wallington" (probably), 

 and one at Chobham fell into ruin. The fabric of Okewood was barely 

 saved, but its revenues went ; St. Thomas' Hospital was suppressed, but 

 the building remained to be bought back later by the city. Parochial 

 revenues which had been in monastic hands of course disappeared from 

 all religious use, and probably rather more than these. The people who 

 immediately profited by the plunder approved of the changes. The 

 important point and the difficult question for an ecclesiastical historian is 

 to trace how far religious opinion went hand in hand with ecclesiastical 

 policy, lagged behind or outran it. It is notoriously hard to gauge the 

 state of religious opinion at any time or anywhere, and the difficulty is 

 not least at the time of the Reformation in England. In that age it was 

 possible to procure what were supposed to be representative Houses of 

 Commons, who in the course of about thirty years passed Henry's Acts 

 for the abolition of papal supremacy and for the setting up of a royal 

 supremacy, which was in fact a spiritual despotism of the Crown ; who 

 passed the Six Articles strongly enforcing what we call Romanist doctrines ; 

 who repealed that Act and passed Edward's Act of Uniformity ; who 

 repealed that Act and restored papal supremacy ; who passed Elizabeth's 

 Act for a more guardedly expressed royal supremacy and her Act of 

 Uniformity. The House of Commons could be packed and manipulated, 

 but the House of Lords concurred in all these Acts, and though extensive 

 alterations were made in the personnel of the lords, especially among the 

 spiritual peers, yet the lay lords were nearly the same body from year to 

 year and always gave the government of the day a majority. Moreover 

 there is nothing to show that the greater number of the people at large 

 did not go to church, whether they found there the Mass, the Com- 

 munion service, the restored Mass or the restored Communion service. 



* Loseley MSS. 22 Hen. VIII. (undated), and 28 Nov. 1568. 



" Wallington chapel was ruinous in 1725, and part used as a barn. No service was held in it in the 

 memory of man {JVilli^ Visitation). 



II 17 3 



