ACT FOR THE DISSOLUTION OF THE LESSER MONASTERIES (1536).
Source.—27 Henry VII. cap. 28. (Statutes of the Realm, III. 575.)
Forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed among the little and small abbeys, priories, and other religious houses of monks, canons, and nuns, where the congregation of such religious persons is under the number of twelve persons, whereby the governors of such religious houses, and their convent, spoil, destroy, consume, and utterly waste, as well their churches, monasteries, priories, principal houses, farms, granges, lands, tenements, and hereditaments, as the ornaments of their churches, and their goods and chattels, to the high displeasure of Almighty God, slander of good religion, and to the great infamy of the King's highness and the realm, if redress should not be had thereof. And albeit that many continual visitations hath been heretofore had, by the space of two hundred years and more, for an honest and charitable reformation of such unthrifty carnal and abominable living, yet nevertheless little or none amendment hath been hitherto had, but their vicious living shamelessly increases and augments, and by a cursed custom so rooted and infested, that a great multitude of the religious persons in such small houses do rather choose to rove abroad in apostasy, than to conform themselves to the observation of good religion, so that without such small houses be utterly suppressed, and the religious persons therein committed to great and honourable monasteries of religion in this realm, where they may be compelled to live religiously for reformation of their lives, there cannot else be no reformation in this behalf:
In consideration whereof the king's most royal majesty, being supreme head on earth, under God, of the Church of England, daily finding and devising the increase, advancement and exaltation of true doctrine and virtue in the said Church, to the glory and honour of God, and the total extirping and destruction of vice and sin, having knowledge that the premises be true, as well by the accounts of his late visitations, as by sundry credible informations, considering also that divers and great solemn monasteries of this realm, wherein (thanks be to God) religion is right well kept and observed, be destitute of such full numbers of religious persons, as they ought and may keep—has thought good that a plain declaration should be made of the premises, as well to the Lords spiritual and temporal, as to other his loving subjects, the Commons, in this present Parliament assembled: whereupon the said Lords and Commons, by a great deliberation, finally be resolved, that it is, and shall be much more to the pleasure of Almighty God, and for the honour of this his realm, that the possessions of such small religious houses; now being spent, spoiled and wasted for increase and maintenance of sin, should be used and converted to better uses, and the unthrifty religious persons, so spending the same, to be compelled to reform their lives: and thereupon most humbly desire the king's highness, that it may be enacted by authority of this present Parliament, that his majesty shall have and enjoy to him and his heirs for ever, all and singular such monasteries, priories, and other religious houses of monks, canons and nuns, of what kinds of diversities of habits, rules, or orders soever they be called or named, which have not in lands, tenements, rents, tithes, portions, and other hereditaments above the clear yearly value of two hundred pounds.