Chantries are only mentioned in connection with Burton-on-Trent and Rocester. At the former, £5 was paid annually to the Chaplain of the Chantry at Sallow, in Derbyshire, according to the ordinance of John Stafford, formerly Abbot, and 2s. annually was paid towards the maintenance of a lamp in the church of Allestree. At Rocester £4 6s. 8d. is stated as being paid for the maintenance of a chantry at Lichfield Cathedral, though no trace of it is to be found in the Cathedral returns.
Here again we cannot accept the evidence as complete, and cannot understand the motives which actuated the Commissioners and caused the instructions to be interpreted as they were. Why the incomes of chantries should be particularly apportioned at cathedrals and elsewhere, and not at the religious houses, is not evident. Certainly chantries existed in the religious houses. For instance, in 1517 Sir John Fitzherbert, of Norbury, had made bequests in his will to “the Chantries” at Rocester and Calwich.[69] The only payment for a lamp is the one already mentioned.
Fees in connection with Episcopal Visitations are found at Hulton (6s. 8d.), Trentham (£3 17s. 4d.), Stafford (£3 6s. 8d.), Stone (£3 6s. 8d.), Ronton (£3 6s. 8d.), and Burton (£3 6s. 7½d.). These amounts shown were paid triennially. The post-Dissolution valuation of Dudley Priory shows that 2s. a year was paid there also as Bishop’s Visitation Fees.
The Archdeacon also received annual Visitation Fees, and fees for procurations, etc. Fees for appropriations were paid in some cases to the Bishop and in others to the Dean and Chapter. The following shows the total annual payments, as given in Valor Ecclesiasticus, to the Bishop, the Dean and Chapter, and the Archdeacons.
| Bishop | Dean & Chapter | Archdeacon | |||||||
| £ | s. | d. | £ | s. | d. | £ | s. | d. | |
| Brewood Nunnery | |||||||||
| Burton Abbey | 3 | 9 | 4½ | 6 | 13 | 4 | 17 | 9 | |
| Croxden Abbey | 1 | 0 | 6 | ||||||
| Dieulacres Abbey | 1 | 2 | 0 | ||||||
| Dudley Priory | [2] | ||||||||
| Hulton Abbey | 2 | 1 | 10⅔ | 3 | 4 | 5 | 4 | ||
| Rocester Priory | 1 | 4 | 7 | ||||||
| Ronton Priory | 1 | 10 | 2⅔ | ||||||
| St. Thomas’s Priory | 3 | 6 | 9⅔ | 18 | 10 | 0 | 1 | 10 | 6 |
| Stone Priory | 1 | 8 | 6⅔ | 2 | 14 | 4 | 19 | 0 | |
| Trentham Priory | 1 | 6 | 5⅔ | 13 | 4 | ||||
| Tutbury Priory | 13 | 4 | 6 | 13 | 4 | 2 | 7 | 10 | |
| Total | £13 | 16 | 7⅚ | £34 | 14 | 4 | £10 | 0 | 10 |
It is interesting to notice that two of the three Cistercian Abbeys, although they had not adhered to the earlier rule of their Order to abstain from the appropriation of benefices, had nevertheless managed to avoid the payments to either Bishop or Dean and Chapter which such appropriations usually entailed; and also that they are the only houses for men which did not pay Visitation Fees to the Bishop. But Ronton alone could show no payments to the Archdeacon: his all-embracing activity was evidently not less in the sixteenth century than it had been in the days of John of Salisbury, who characteristically propounded the problem an possit archidiaconus salvus esse?
CHAPTER V
THE FINANCES OF BURTON ABBEY
Many causes had combined to undermine the stability of the religious houses. Their pecuniary usefulness to Pope and King tended to make them the shuttlecock of politics. Their extensive worldly possessions made them objects of jealousy to their neighbours, while the secular spirit with which they became infected when they were drawn into the “full stream of the world” weakened their spiritual influence and made them at once more susceptible to attacks and less capable of effective opposition. Events and tendencies beyond their power to control, like the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses, and the Revival of Learning, in turn exercised a disastrous influence upon them.
Seriously affected in wealth, numbers, and efficiency by the Black Death and its consequences; sharing in the lawlessness and demoralisation which accompanied the French War in its later stages, and the Wars of the Roses; lacking the supervision and guidance which active bishops had at any rate attempted, and not always ineffectually, to exercise; in the sixteenth century the religious houses were very different in character from what they had originally been. Even in material things they had changed. They had once been leaders in agricultural development, but their methods were now old-fashioned, ineffective, and out of date. Their wide domains were no longer the sources of wealth they formerly had been. New methods and new outlets for trade had left them behind. Unwise leases only gave temporary relief, and crippled instead of improving resources. All landowners were indeed feeling the effects of the economic changes, and a result was increased claims upon the monasteries by kings and patrons; and the religious houses were not in a condition to make effective opposition. They were not worse than their neighbours: their weakness lay in the fact that they were so little different from them. Up to the present there had been no definite charges of moral delinquency brought by authority against the monastic system. Good or bad, they were looked upon as part of the settled order of things by all except a few theorists and extremists.
There is no call, therefore, to consider as yet the question of their moral condition. In these earlier years of the “Reformation” the subject of interest to the government of the day was their financial value. With their finances only, therefore, we are as yet concerned.