The charges made by the visitors are of a kind notoriously difficult to prove, even with ample time, and with trained investigators. Cromwell’s examination was carried on by men of small worth, and in hot haste; no opportunity was given for more than a cursory inspection of the premises and the inmates:—
“This day we leave Bath for Kensam, where we shall make an end by Tuesday, and then go on toward Maiden Bradley, within two miles of which is a charterhouse called Wittame, and Bruton Abbey seven miles, and Glastonbury seven miles.... If you tarry with the king eight days we shall dispatch all the houses above named.”[252]
The visitation began in August, 1535, and ended in February, 1536. During these six months, four or five men, often travelling together, undertook to examine one hundred and fifty-five houses scattered all over England. “To judge by the proportion in Yorkshire,” says Mr. Gairdner, “the visitors examined only about four out of ten.”[253] So far as can be ascertained, the evidence upon which the reports were based was generally of the flimsiest kind; either the scandal of some discontented monk or nun, or the tattle of servants. There was a striking instance of this at a nunnery in Chicksand, where Layton accused two nuns of incontinence, although “the two prioresses would not confess this, neither the parties, nor any of the nuns, but one old beldame.”[254]
When nothing could be elicited, the accused were deemed in a conspiracy. At Newark the house seemed well ordered, and nothing questionable appeared on the surface, therefore Layton charged the monks with being “confederyde,” but he added that he would object various horrible crimes against them, “which I have learnt from others. What I shall find I cannot tell.”[255]
Where silence was taken as confession, the nuns especially fared ill. Very generally they were too frightened, or too disgusted, to answer. Even if such evidence were uncontradicted, no great weight could attach to it, but it happens that there is much on the other side. Not to speak of the episcopal visitations, which were carried on as part of the discipline of the Church, Henry’s own government subsequently appointed boards of commissioners composed of country gentlemen, and these boards, which made examinations at leisure in five counties, formed conclusions generally favourable to the ecclesiastics. Two examples will suffice to show the discrepancy between the views of the men whom Cromwell did, and did not control. At Geradon in Leicestershire, Cromwell’s board reported a convent of White Cistercians, which contained five monks addicted to sodomy with ten boys.[256] The second board described the same corporation as “of good conversation, and God’s service well maintained.”[257]
At Grace Dieu two nuns were charged with incontinence.[258] The country gentlemen found there only fifteen White Nuns of Saint Austin, “of good and virtuous conversation and living.”[259]
No one familiar with the development of police during the later Middle Ages, could have much doubt that, on the whole, the discipline of the convents would correspond pretty accurately with the prevailing tone of society, and that, although asceticism and enthusiasm might have declined since the twelfth century, subordination to authority would have increased with the advance of centralization. Rebellious monks, like those who tried to murder Abélard, would certainly have been rarer at the time of the Reformation than at the opening of the crusades.
The crime of the English monks, like the crime of the Templars, was defenceless wealth; and, like the Templars, they fared hardly in proportion to their devotion and their courage. The flexible and the corrupt, who betrayed their trust, received pensions or promotion; the Carthusians, against whose stern enthusiasm torments were powerless, perished as their predecessors had perished in the field of Saint Antoine.
The attack of Cromwell’s hirelings resembled the onslaught of an invading army. The convents fared like conquered towns; the shrines were stripped and the booty heaped on carts, as at the sack of Constantinople. Churches were desecrated, windows broken, the roofs stripped of lead, the bells melted, the walls sold for quarries. Europe overflowed with vestments and altar ornaments, while the libraries were destroyed. Toward the end of 1539 Legh reached Durham, and the purification of the sanctuary of Saint Cuthbert may be taken as an example of the universal spoliation:—
“After the spoil of his ornaments and jewels, coming nearer to his sacred body, thinking to have found nothing but dust and bones, and finding the chest that he did lie in, very strongly bound with iron, then the goldsmith did take a great forge-hammer of a smith, and did break the said chest open.