“The hospital . . . is like to go to utter decay. . . . For my own part I think often, that those men which seek spoil of hospitals . . . did never read the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew; for if they did, and believed the same, how durst they give such adventure?”
(Archbishop Grindal, letter to Burleigh, 1575.)
WHEN the Primate wrote thus to the Lord Treasurer, he added:—“that if any hospitals be abused (as I think some are) it were a more Christian suit to seek reformation than destruction.” Although the decline of some hospitals led to the dissolution of many, it by no means follows that such a course was justifiable.
Speaking generally, charities which had outlived their usefulness had already been suppressed before the general Dissolution and their property transferred to other purposes. The leper-houses of Windsor and Huntingdon, for example, were evidently deserted and ruinous when they were annexed to Colleges at Cambridge (1462); and the hospitals of Romney, Aynho and Brackley had been appropriated to Magdalen College, Oxford (1481–5) because they were no longer carrying out the founder’s intentions. St. John’s, Reading, and St. Bartholomew’s, Bristol, had already been converted into schools, the latter as recently as 1532.
[♦] PLATE XXIV. AMBULATORY OF ST. LEONARD’S, YORK
In most of the existing hospitals good work was being p227 done; the Valor Ecclesiasticus and Chantry Surveys show that money was expended upon useful charities. Layton’s report of St. Mary’s, Leicester, that it was “well kept and honest men therein” was true of many almshouses throughout the land. Where evils are complained of, they were not so much breaches of morality on the part of the household, as neglect and wastefulness in administration. A carefully-regulated commission to inquire into matters of finance could well have rectified abuses in ill-managed institutions. Had justice and magnanimity held sway instead of rapacity and selfishness, the old houses of mercy would have been refreshed and their utility doubled just when a far wider charity was needful on account of the annihilation of benevolent monasteries. This was done in some foreign countries. Through the protection of Gustavus Vasa, Swedish lazar-houses survived the Reformation. In Denmark, Dominican and Franciscan friaries were transformed into hospitals, and the leper-houses subsequently became places of isolation for contagious diseases. In France, where there was no ecclesiastical upheaval, decayed hospitals were reformed (1545) and put under the control of the bourgeois class (1561).
The various Acts of Henry VIII’s reign show that the oppression of the poor was not at first intended. The Statute for the suppression of vagrancy (1530–1) approved the charitable work of hospitals. One clause in that of 1535–6 required that those who entered into possession of the lands of religious houses should provide hospitality and service for the poor as of old. In the draft for the bill of 1539 the Commons proposed that the greater monasteries not dissolved should build bede-houses in which p228 to maintain for life ten poor men over sixty years of age.
Here, indeed, was a golden opportunity to increase the benevolent institutions of the country. Much that was becoming useless might have been transformed into a great and permanent benefit. Charitable relief might have been placed under public control upon a sound religious and financial basis. But reformation too often proved to be mere destruction, as “Mors” shrewdly remarks:—
“Your pretence of putting downe abbeys, was, to amend that was amisse in them. . . . It is amended euen as the deuell amended his dames legge (as it is in the prouerbe) whan he shuld haue set it ryght, he bracke it quyte in peces.”[147]
It is evident that the monastic system had been gradually losing its hold on the nation. The idea of partial disendowment had also been working in men’s minds, no one foreseeing that the plunder of rich foundations would ultimately lead to the robbery of poor people. In 1410 the Commons petitioned in the Parliament of Westminster that the surplus wealth of ecclesiastics might be transferred to other uses, and that destitute persons might benefit by the provision of new hospitals. Henry IV replied that he would deliberate upon the matter, and although no revised appropriation of funds then took place, he did afterwards suppress certain alien priories, a policy which was followed by Henry V. In 1414 the above proposal was renewed in the Parliament of Leicester, but the astute Chichele undertook that the clergy should supply money for the wars:—“a thrust was made at all p229 Abbies,” says Fuller, “which this Archbishop, as a skilful Fencer, fairly put by.” In the following century Wolsey, not anticipating the wholesale destruction which was to follow, sought to dissolve certain small priories in order to assist educational institutions (1523). A contemporary writer observes that by this precedent “he did make loose in others the conscience towardes those houses.”