Our English Towns and Villages

by H. R. Wilton Hall

Photo. Valentine
FOUNTAINS ABBEY, YORKSHIRE, ONE OF THE MONASTERIES RUINED BY HENRY VIII (page 154)

4. Nowadays, if a factory which has employed a number of people is suddenly closed, it means suffering for those who have been employed there and for their families. Now, though the monasteries did not employ people in the way in which a factory does, it did affect in many ways those who lived and worked and depended on them.

5. In these days, if people are thrown out of employment in one place they are free to go and seek it in another; but that was not the case in the reign of King Henry VIII. If they wandered from their native towns and villages they were treated as vagabonds. It is true that the new persons, to whom the monastery lands were granted, were supposed to do for the people on the land—the poor and the sick—what the monasteries had done for them. But what they were supposed to do and what they did do were very different things.

Old Timbered House, at Presleigh, Radnorshire, dated 1616

6. It is pretty easy to see how things worked. A wealthy man managed to get a grant of the property of several monasteries at a very cheap rate. He did not want these places to live in; he wanted to make money out of them. The first thing that he did was to strip the buildings of everything which would fetch any money. The lead was usually the most valuable part of what the king had left. The roofs would be stripped, the graves broken open to get at the leaden coffins, and the windows smashed for the sake of the lead. Then the building was left standing a ruin. The poor people of the district had been used to receive food daily at the monastery gate, and no doubt had grumbled at the quality and quantity of the food often enough. But now it was no use going to the monastery gate, for the place was a ruin. They could not go to the new lord's house, for that might be miles away. Even if they did find him, he might be the owner of three or four such ruined monasteries. How could he be quite sure that they were the poor he was bound to relieve? And so the poor folk lost the daily food on which they had depended.

7. Then as regards the land. The new landlord, perhaps, might farm his fields; in which case the rents, instead of going to the monastery, went to him. But he was not always on the spot, and very frequently the land was let out to tenants; an agent or steward collected the rents, and the tenants never saw the landlord. But many of these new owners found that the management of the estates caused them a lot of trouble; and, naturally enough, they wanted to get as much money out of the property as they could at the least cost to themselves.

8. Now there was in this sixteenth century still a great demand for wool, and many of these landlords found it would save trouble to turn these monastery lands into sheep-runs. A very few men could look after a great many sheep, and there would be no bother about keeping up buildings and barns. If the people were got off the land, there would be no poor to bother about relieving. So it came to pass that much land, which had been cultivated for many centuries, went out of cultivation, and the people were turned adrift. It was a hard state of affairs. The rights which they had had to relief from the religious houses were taken from them, and the means of getting their living also taken away; they were robbed of their employment, and punished for wandering, for not working, and for begging.

9. There were, of course, many instances in which the new landlord came and lived near the old monastery. In some cases the old buildings were altered and turned into a dwelling-house; in others the building material was used for building a brand-new house close by. Where this was the case the old custom of relieving the poor who came to the gate did not quickly die out.