deer with crossbow or hounds through green forest glade, and hawking on the down and breezy moor.

There was no need for havoc. The doors might have been set wide open for those who were wearied of their cloister, like the Abbot of Walden, who married a minoress of London. The images to which pilgrimages had been made and veneration given, indeed, all objects, statues, shrines, or relics which had become a scandal or been abused by shameless frauds and superstition, were publicly destroyed, or, if material figures, turned into dolls (as i-dols), for children's pastime, in 1538. This did not seem a sufficient cloak for wholesale spoil, and, in consequence, the credulous acceptance and exaggerations of local scandal, the desire to ingratiate themselves with unscrupulous employers, and to disarm popular disfavour of their acts, have fathered charges upon the guiltless heads of their own countrymen and associates in the same form of religion. Original records, and the judgment of thoughtful men of all shades of opinion, now conspire to reject these imputations as unworthy of credit. The stereotyped forms of forced surrender, couched in phrases of insult mingled with wrong, betray the influence of a single proficient of the art of menace. speedy halter for judicial murder vacated the priories of Hexham and Bridlington, and the abbacies of Glastonbury, Reading, Barlings, Colchester, Kirkstead, Fountains, Rievaulx, Jorvaulx, and elsewhere. A couple of cannon were employed to overawe the monks of St. Augustine's, Canterbury. The foul prison fever consumed the monks of Charterhouse, and their murderers profanely mocked. The instigators and their agents lie open to the fatal countercharge and challenge that some of them ended their days in prison or on the scaffold, by the orders of a master who set forth unctuous professions of piety in preambles of state documents, and in the exercise of his regal infallibility burned his co-religionists as traitors and the reformers as heretics. The popular traducer, following the evil example of the friar, will one day share a common reprobation with the destroyed, when some bold hand strips the glamour of prejudice off the fame of a class of authors, impatient of research,

The

whom a too fervid zeal has transported into a chartered libertinism in diction, statement, and taste.

Not even the national acknowledgment of the royal instead of Italian supremacy sufficed; it was necessary also, as the homily puts it, 'patiently to suffer all wrongs and injuries, referring the judgment of the cause only to God.' As straws show the rising of the storm, the pithy anecdote related by Fuller of the incautious Abbot of Reading who entertained Henry VIII. in the guise of a forester of the royal guard, betokens the character of his guest. In the freedom of the table he had complained of the loss or delicacy of his appetite, and was accordingly sent to recover it on the meagre fare of a prisoner in the Tower, where he remained until he purchased his release by payment of a large ransom.

It was not at Lincoln only that the treasurer might have cast down his keys upon the floor with the memorable words written in the register, 'The treasure house was spoiled, the treasurership ceased to be.' In vain reprieves were brought from a king who, with a single main of the dice, gambled away the Jesus peal and historic bell-tower of St. Paul's, whose name greybeards and children identified with the author of all evil. If necessary, an Act of Parliament assured church preferment to those nominees who could touch his hand with white ointment.' In a few cases, as at Tewkesbury, Malvern, Southwark, and Christchurch, parishioners purchased the churches. At Wymondham they paid the money demanded for the choir by the king, who broke faith and pulled it down. The commissioners offered the buildings of Bath to the citizens for less than five hundred marks; they refused to purchase so cheap, 'lest they should be thought to cozen the king under the compass of concealed lands.' In other places the beautiful gates, the carved work, 'memorials and things of fame,' and fabrics 'exceeding magnifical,' were pitilessly destroyed, and the lamp went out in the temple. The Act 33 Hen. VIII. c. 7 (1541) prohibited, too late, the conveyance of brass, latten, and bellmetal over seas. Lincolnshire, which amazed the commissioners by the number and splendour of its monasteries, is now barely

sprinkled with ruins effected by a spirit not yet exorcised or laid at rest. On a single Sunday the grantee of Repton pulled down that noble church with the aid of all the carpenters and masons whom he could muster in Derbyshire, saying that he would 'destroy the nest lest the birds should return and build again.'

All in vain Roland Lee pleaded for his glorious cathedral of Coventry, and Latimer boldly told Henry VIII. to his face that abbeys were not built to serve as royal stables, and besought the ruthless king' that 'two or three houses in every shire might be spared for preaching, prayer, and study.'

9. Scheme of New Cathedrals lately Monastic.

The first scheme of Henry VIII. and Bishop Gardiner, in pursuance of the Act 31 Hen. VIII. c. ix. (1539–40), mitigated the wholesale rapine by the proposal to found new sees, or united cathedrals-St. Alban's for Herts, Bury St. Edmund's for Suffolk, Colchester and Waltham for Essex; Dunstable, Newenham, and Elnestow for Beds and Bucks; Oxford, Osney, and Thame for Oxon and Berks; Leicester for Rutland and Leicestershire; Fountains for Lancashire and the archdeaconry of Richmond; Shrewsbury and Wenlock for Staffordshire and Salop; Welbeck, Thurgarton, and Worksop for Notts and Derbyshire; Launceston, Bodmin, and St. German's for Cornwall; Durham was to be linked with Finchale, Ledes with Rochester, Roche with Carlisle. The endowment was fixed at 1,1407. a year for Dunstable, at 1,0037. for Colchester, and at 3331. for Southwell and Bodmin; their bishops, as the Abbot of Leicester at Shrewsbury, being actually designate. Thornton, Guisborough, and Burton-on-Trent were also to be retained as collegiate churches. By stat. 34, 35 Hen. VIII. c. xvii. s. 3, five cathedrals, exclusive of Westminster, are mentioned as already founded by letters patent. The internal alteration, however, was not made, even in the cathedrals which were refounded, without some very suggestive and gradual changes: (1) the appointment of preachers at Canterbury and of grammar schools

attached to the cathedrals generally; (2) the first constitution of Norwich on the precise lines of churches of the old foundation, and the prescription of the use of St. Paul's at Carlisle and Peterborough; and (3) the appointment of stipendiary prebendaries (without fixed titles, as at Exeter) forming a 'corporation for the pure worship of God and preaching of the Gospel, the education of children, and the maintenance of the poor.'

10. The Scheme abandoned. The Consequences.

The king's necessities overruled the Church's wants. Historic Battle and the magnificence of Bury, the royal tombs in the Grey Friars, the goodly abbeys, were levelled in the dust as if a follower of Mahound had been commissioned for the work. There are wrecks, there are ruins, there are sites, there are fragments embedded in noble houses. The State now prints the chronicles which were spared from the bonfire, the baker's oven, or the stranger, whole libraries being shipped over seas to the amazement of foreign nations. But how much has perished! How much lost to the history of the Church! How many memorials of the past have been utterly swallowed up by time, like snow-flakes falling into a rapid stream or melting among waves. Not a single volume of Lincoln use has been preserved. A solitary breviary of St. Alban's remains in a nobleman's library. We have only a tradition of the Durham monks preferring the Sarum rite to the use of their great rival at York; and the fact that the use of Bangor remained in force at Royston until the sixteenth century. Curious customs and local forms occur only in fragmentary and incidental notices.

The number of all monasteries destroyed was 645, with 90 colleges, 2,374 chantries and free chapels, and 110 hospitals, which once renowned our cities, towns, and quiet country nooks. Their yearly value is variously estimated at 161,100%., 152,5177., and 142,9147. The lesser houses (those under 2001. annual revenues) were 380 with 32,000l. a-year in the aggregate, and 100,000l. in money, plate, and jewels. These were suppressed by Act 27 Hen. VIII. c. 28 (1536), and colleges

by 37 Hen. VIII. c. 4, preceded by the Hospitallers' endowments 32 Hen. VIII. c. 24. The population of the country was 5,000,000, and there were 9,407 parishes. Over and above the value of the lands given by Act 32 Hen. VIII. c. 20, no estimate has been made of the sums produced by the sale of churches, buildings, sites, books, ornaments, shrines, goods, lead, and bells. Bury alone produced 5,000 marks in gold and silver from its treasury. Large sums had been previously paid to the Crown for a temporary respite. Although so much came into 'the augmentation' of the Crown, it is quite certain that the inmates, foreseeing the approach of the spoiler, dispersed or otherwise disposed of a considerable portion of the movable goods. The spoil soon leaked out of the royal coffers, but the heavy burdens laid upon the people were not abated one finger-weight.

During the lives of the survivors, those who were not provided with stalls or new homes received pensions; but even previous to this temporary deduction from the gross receipts, the convivial habits of the commissioners, their numerous retinue, tavern bills, and payments for amusements on their journeys (records of which remain), the employment of local juries as appraisers in every case, and the forced sale of the ornaments not reserved to the royal treasury, must have caused an appreciable drawback on the proceeds of the confiscation of institutions which from learned calm and holy cloisters had breathed an air of civilisation in an iron age far beyond the bounds of their immediate neighbourhood.

The question has been asked, What was the secret whereby in ages of violence, strife, and rude force without, from these homes of holy peace within emanated results so widely beneficial? The answer is, that as cathedrals were the hearts of dioceses, these were the strong places of the Church, her spiritual fortresses, and safe in their seclusion the inmates were enabled to achieve undertakings begun in love to God and man, continued with patient faith, and brought to an end through many trials and much self-sacrifice.

No arrangement was made for the supply of (1) popular education; (2) relief of the poor; (3) colleges and retreats for