London in the Time of the Tudors

by Walter Besant

QUEEN ELIZABETH AT PRAYER
Frontispiece to Christian Prayers, 1569. From a copy in the Lambeth Palace Library, which probably belonged to the Queen herself.

An irreparable loss to the world was the wholesale destruction of the libraries. Printing, an invention of no longer standing than fifty years, had as yet produced comparatively few books. When, for instance, the learned Anthony Brockby had written his book Ad Fratres against the King’s Supremacy, he did not get it printed, but had a duplicate copy made, which he presented to the Franciscans, his brothers. By far the greater part of theology, philosophy, science, and literature remained in MS., and these MSS. formed the Monastic Libraries. When the Houses were suppressed, those who obtained them as a gift from the King for the most part cared nothing about the books: they were dispersed without any consideration for their use or value; if they were well bound, the covers were pulled off and the books thrown away, or turned into waste paper. Thus John Bale writes (Antiq. English Franciscans):—

“Covetousness was at that time so busy about private interest, that public wealth was not anywhere regarded. A number of them which purchased those superstitious Mansions reserved of those Library Books some to serve their Jakes, some to scowr their candlesticks, and some to rub their Boots, and some they sold the Grocers and Soap sellers, and some they sent over sea to the Bookbinders: not in small number, but, at times, whole ships full. Yea, the Universities of this Realm are not all clear in this Fact; but cursed is the belly which seeks to be fed with so ungodly gains, and so deeply shameth his natural country. I know a Merchant man (which shall at this time be nameless) that bought the Contents of two noble Libraries for forty shillings price; a shame it is to be spoken. This stuff hath he occupied, instead of grey paper, by the space of more than these ten years, and yet he hath store enough for as many years to come. A prodigious example is this, and to be abhorred of all men which love their nation as they should do. Yea, what may bring our realm to more shame and rebuke than to have it noised abroad that we are despisers of learning? I judge this to be true, and utter it with heaviness, that neither the Britons under the Romans and Saxons, nor yet the English people under the Danes and Normans had ever such damage of their learned Monuments as we have seen in our time. Our posterity may well curse this wicked fact of our age, this unreasonable spoil of England’s most noble Antiquities.”... “How many admirable manuscripts of the Fathers, Schoolmen, and Commentators were destroyed by this means? What number of historians of all ages and Countries? The Holy Scriptures themselves, as much as these Gospellers pretended to regard them, underwent the fate of the rest. If a Book had a cross on it it was condemned for Popery, and those with lines and circles were interpreted the Black Art and destroyed for Conjuring. And thus, as Fuller goes on, Divinity was profaned, Mathematicks suffered for Corespondence with Evil Spirits, Physick was maimed, and a Riot committed on the Law itself.”

One change, one result, of the Suppression, everybody can understand. This was the closing of the Hospitals. London was full of Hospitals, but they were Religious Houses. St. Bartholomew’s, attached to the Priory; St. Thomas’, Southwark; St. Mary Spital; Elsing Spital for the blind; St. Mary of Bethlehem for the insane; the House on Tower Hill also for the insane; the House of St. Augustine Papey for old priests; the Infirmary in every Monastic House;—all these provided for the sick poor. I have no doubt, though on the subject I have no information, that the Companies, which certainly took care of their sick and their infirm, must have done so through the existing Hospitals. When the Houses were closed, what became of the sick? It is commonly believed that they were turned into the street, no one caring for them. This was certainly not the case. The Companies cared for their own; the City cared for its freemen and their families; would the City, which maintained a debtors’ prison for its freemen, so that they should not be confined with the general herd, suffer its sick and poor to starve? There was a residuum of those who were not free, namely, the vagabonds and masterless men and women. For them there was a time of great misery; when they were ill there was no one to visit them; no hospital where they might be taken; no hands to minister and alleviate; no voice to console and to fortify. And we know nothing, and cannot estimate the suffering because there were no journalists to publish the things they saw; and the sick and poor lay unheeded and starved, and died unknown and uncared for in the dirt and misery of the Tudor slum.

There is no doubt, also, that the open house kept by such a monastery as the Holy Trinity, where the poor received every day the broken meat and a great deal more, was greatly missed and deplored by the whole company of the masterless. What with daily open house at the greater monasteries, the broken meats of the smaller, the doles and charities of the parish, the “mind days” with their loaves and gifts to the poor, bequeathed by rich citizens, a family which objected to work might rub along in solid and well-fed comfort all the year round. And this resource, looked upon as certain and unfailing like a perennial spring, was suddenly stopped. Then all these people had to work, or to beg, or to rob. The streets became pestered with sturdy beggars: the by-places of Elizabethan Literature present most vivid pictures of the companies of beggars, impostors, rogues and vagabonds. They were the people whom the monks and nuns had fed without asking questions; the folk who would not work; the people turned out of the monasteries; ex-friars; ex-chantry priests; former makers of images, crucifixes, beads, candlesticks and the rest: these were the people who felt most bitterly the abolition of indiscriminate charity and the cruel choice offered them under the new order of work; mendicancy with the whip, or crime with the gallows.

Out of all these evils and sufferings was born, like a sweet flower on a heap of rubbish, the Spirit of modern Charity.

The Church had taken over to herself the whole of Mediæval charity. Did a citizen desire to help the poor, he gave money for the purpose to the Church. If a poor man wanted help, it was not to a merchant that he went, but to a monastery.

For charity, that is, for pity, for almsgiving, the world has always felt the most profound respect. The most popular of mediæval saints was the hard and austere Bishop of whom the world remembered that he had once divided his cloak with a beggar. There were six churches dedicated to St. Martin in the City of London alone.

And when the friars first came over, and men, wondering, saw that they did not lock themselves up in their cloister to pray for the world like the other Religious, but that they went about among the people ministering, comforting, preaching, consoling; that they found no den too revolting, no disease too loathsome, no criminal too base, for their ministrations; then, indeed, there was an outburst of gratitude, of joy, of respect, of awe for men so saintly. They were considered the veritable children of God.

But it was not to be thought that the poor sinners outside the monastery should imitate their example. Nay, St. Francis, their founder, had himself separated his Order from the world, they were called out from the rest of humanity, they were kept separate by vows of celibacy, poverty, obedience. Modern charity as yet did not exist, as we now understand it, only the respect for charity as an ecclesiastical institution.