NOTES:
[480] The English archbishops were embarrassed by the statutes of provisors in applying for plenary powers to Rome. If they accepted commissions they accepted them at their peril, and were compelled to caution in their manner of proceeding.
[481] 27 Hen. VIII. cap. 28. The statute says that many visitations had been made in the two hundred years preceding the Reformation, but had failed wholly of success.
[482] To enter "religion" was the technical expression for taking the vows.
[483] A summary of the condition of the Religious Houses, in the Cotton Library, Cleopatra, E 4; MS. Letters of the Visitors, in the same collection; three volumes of the correspondence of Richard Layton with Cromwell, in the State Paper Office; and the reports of the Visitations of 1489 and 1511, in the Registers of Archbishops Morton and Warham. For printed authorities, see Suppression of the Monasteries, published by the Camden Society; Strype's Memorials, Vol. I., Appendix; Fuller's Ecclesiastical History; and Wilkins's Concilia, Vol. III.
[484] At Tewkesbury, where there was an abbot and thirty-two monks, I find payment made to a hundred and forty-four servants in livery, who were wholly engaged in the service of the abbey.—Particulars relating to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, section 5: Burnet's Collectanea, p. 86.
[485] See the Directions to the Visitors: Burnet's Collectanea, p, 74.
[486] See, for instance, Suppression of the Monasteries, p. 86.
[487] "In a parliament held at Leicester, in 1414, the priories alien in England were given to the king; all their possessions to remain to the king and to his heirs for ever. And these priories were suppressed, to the number of more than a hundred houses."—Stow's Chronicle, p. 345.
[488] The commission is in Morton's Register, MS., Lambeth Library.