He continues to point out in forcible language that the portion due by God’s ordinance to poor impotent folk, the lame, blind, lazar and sore members of Christ—who once had been lodged in hospitals and almshouses—is now given by the king and his nobles to “reward those gnatonical elbowhangers, your chaplaines.” In spite of the vehement abuse of parasitical clergy in which the above writer indulges, it was in the main lay-people rather than churchmen who divided the spoils. Fuller—who quaintly p232 writes that “this king made three meals, or (if you will) one meal of three courses, on Abbey-lands, besides what Cardinal Wolsey (the king’s taster herein) had eaten beforehand”—goes on to say “yet surely more tendernesse was used to hospitalls,” and finds “very few of them finally suppressed.” But hospital endowments did certainly form a substantial dish at Henry’s feast, to which many royal favourites were bidden. Some fell with the smaller priories (1536), a few with the greater houses (1539), and others were extinguished under the Act for dissolving chantries, free chapels, hospitals, and guilds (1545); a further Act of confiscation marked the first year of Edward VI’s reign (1547). In some places charities were indiscriminately swept away. A manuscript history of Gorleston records, for example, that “Henry VIII ordered that all the premises of . . . the Hospitals of St. James, St. John, St. Bartholomew, St. Luke, and the church and hospital of St. Nicholas . . . should be sold.” No consistent plan was followed, but—whether under ecclesiastical or lay control—charities were destroyed or spared at will. Speaking generally, institutions in private hands were suppressed, those in the possession of corporate bodies, retained.
[♦] PLATE XXV. ST. LEONARD’S, YORK
Few houses of Crown patronage escaped. The Commissioners, announcing to Cromwell (1537) the dissolution of certain northern monasteries, add:—“We have also altered the howse of Sancte Leonerdes in Yourke, after suche ordre and fassion as we trust shall appeir to your lordship to be to the kinges honour and contentacion.”[150] In truth the alteration meant annihilation for St. Leonard’s; and St. Nicholas’ hospital in the same city also p233 disappeared. In London, the Savoy, fresh from the hand of the builder, was dissolved. The sisters of St. James’, Westminster, surrendered (receiving life-pensions), whereupon “the king builded there a goodly Mannor, annexing thereunto a Parke.”[151] The Maison Dieu, Dover, a rich foundation with good buildings near the quay, was declared suitable for a victualling yard (1544) which it eventually became.
Hospitals attached to a cathedral or see were usually, but not always, spared. In the bishopric of Durham, for example, the houses of Sherburn and Greatham survived, but neither Kepier nor the bishop’s hospital at Northallerton. God’s House, Portsmouth, was surrendered and became an armoury; in the Library of the Society of Antiquaries is a document of 1547 concerning “Munycions within the Churche at Goddeshouse.”[152] St. John’s, Ely, was spared, yet only for a while. The episcopal hospitals at Bath and Norwich remained in use, but under the municipality.
If directly dependent upon a monastic house, the fate of a hospital was practically sealed. Take, for instance, the case of St. James’, near the gate of Lewes Priory. From the monastery now demolished thirteen men and one woman had had all their living; wherefore Peter Thompson and the bedefolk begged relief (1538).[153] Hospitals of lay-foundation which had been subsequently placed under monastic supervision, but with distinct endowments, fell as forming part of the sequestrated property. In some cases the Crown kept up charities for a time. The p234 return of pensions in 1552 shows that sums were paid out of the tenements of Nostell Priory to inmates of St. Nicholas’, Pontefract. The poor dwelling in the so-called “Kings Majesty’s almshouses” at Glastonbury (formerly abbey-pensioners) were also granted weekly allowances. This was generous, for although Henry VIII and Edward VI were fond of giving their names to charitable institutions, they too often gave little else.
The two Statutes authorizing the dissolution of Chantries, etc. (1545–1547) extinguished or reduced in means, some houses of charity. When an almshouse was spared, the Crown sometimes demanded an acknowledgment; at Beverley the rents in 1545 include a new item of £4 paid by the town to the king and queen for the Trinity Maison Dieu. “Hospitals” were not rightfully within the scope of the second Act. Thus Foster’s almshouse in Bristol being, as the certificate states:—
“for the helpynge relief and comforte of a certeyn nomber of poore people there to contynue and haue their liuinge from tyme to tyme for euer, is without the compasse of the statute and the King’s Majestie not entitled thereunto by force of the same.”
In the preface to the Yorkshire Chantry Surveys, it is stated that most, if not all, of the hospitals which were returned on the certificates there printed were left undissolved, save that in a few cases funds were transferred to educational purposes. Testimony is borne in 1552 to the usefulness of one of the Pontefract almshouses, where fourteen bedemen were supported:—
