by Robert Weaver
Robert Weaver taught Religion and Philosophy at Dulwich College London for some 30 years; he is now the Keeper of the Fellows’ Library there, promoting the antiquarian books therein. A practising Anglican, he has interests in monastic history and mediaeval liturgical manuscript fragments. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
James, G Clark, The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History, Yale University Press, 2021) hb, 704 pp, ISBN: 978-0300115727, £18.52.
Our current generation has a fascination for things Tudor—witness the fiction of Hilary Mantel, J C Samson and non-fiction steady sellers Diarmaid MacCulloch and Eamon Duffy. At a five hundred year gap, there is not the supposed remoteness of the mediaeval world nor the almost tangibility of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and perhaps next century it will be the first Elizabethans with all the drama of the Armada years which will intrigue.
Given the plethora of publications, yet another heavyweight volume on Henrician machinations would seem to need justification, but James Clark, not widely known outside academic circles, has produced the definitive analysis to date of the mechanics of dismantling the English monastic landscape 1536-40, as prelude to royal religious reforming principles. Clark has form, masterminding a little-heralded but superb exhibition at St Albans Town Museum last year on the monastic life of the local abbey, assembling a stunning select range of mediaeval manuscripts from Bodley, British Library, and Oxbridge libraries—a singular achievement for a provincial museum.
The book under review is one for dipping into as reference rather than extended read, for the prose is analytical and fulsome in detail within its 700-plus pages, with a worthy section devoted to notes. A single page might cite something like 20 references to monastic houses, so that there is a danger of sometimes losing sight of the main thread of the argument. What is not in doubt is the magisterial sweep of coverage of the physical process whereby something near a thousand years of monastic presence in the English landscape was expunged in one of the largest land-grabs in the nation, reallocation not only to furnish Royal coffers but compliant aristocrats. What comes across is the lack of objection from the inmates by and large.
The dissolution was certainly a major cause of the biggest rebellion in Tudor times, the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536). It is with some wistfulness that progressive Catholics will note the paucity of pension awards assigned to women monastics, bar the exceptions at the very top, notably to the Abbess of Shaftesbury, with her estates rivalling those of the extraordinary feudal reign of her counterpart at Las Huelgas near Burgos, where this aristocratic monastic dynasty had powers of life and death across a vast swathe of mediaeval northern Spain.
In some cases, pace Baskerville’s 19th century lament for lost bare ruined choirs of wantonly destroyed abbeys, and the quiet sadness of Dom David Knowles’ third volume of his seminal Religious Orders of England, some religious houses had either dwindled or lost contact with their supporting local lay communities—witness Roche Abbey’s physical pillaging of stone immediately upon dissolution by locals, one desperate inmate pathetically trying to sell off the door to his now redundant cell. Attendance at major shrines in the care of monks also had fallen off by the late 15th century, e.g. at St Thomas’ at Canterbury, while the initial spurt of 12th century Cistercian foundations in the northern wilds of England had lost their impetus and austerity, witness Abbot Huby’s colossal tower at Fountains (forbidden for Cistercians in former times).
To furnish a fuller picture it is worth noting that dissolution was not an entirely new 1530s reform; earlier closures had included failing small houses sacrificed for major educational projects (Wolsey at Christchurch and Ipswich colleges) or those with unfashionable links viz. the alien houses with links abroad (e.g. those closed under Henry V during the Hundred Years’ War), although Clark is at pains to insist that the 1530s dissolution was significantly different in scale to anything that had happened before.
To balance this, many major establishments were still recruiting novices right up through the 1530s and were in respectable order, as in Durham Priory where the King’s Commissioners arrived to close it down during vespers. The fate of monastic libraries can be charted in specialist publications elsewhere, but perhaps a fuller picture than is given in this volume would have guided the lay reader.
Monastic cathedrals sometimes preserved their capitular book collections surprisingly intact, as at Durham, for it was the texts for study stored in cloister armarius cupboards and spendiment chambers that were more easily dispersed, whether taken by their last readers for their retirement or pilfered, eventually landing up in the London book trade of Paternoster by St Paul’s for later antiquarian-minded Elizabethan collectors (N.B. we curate at Dulwich College one such 14th century survival from the mediaeval spendiment collection from Durham Priory, with accompanying anathema curse).
Canterbury’s two foundations, St Augustine’s Abbey and Christchurch, saw their libraries dispersed, as part of the picture of scattering and destruction. With Henry’s religious reforms, the first casualties in books were the newly redundant Latin liturgical texts and canon law, based as they were on obedience to Rome.
Of what concern should all this, at a 500-year distance, be to the current Catholic faithful? Once again, English monasticism is enduring a more muted seismic change, this time from within, which threatens its continued existence, after being steadily built up and restored over the last 200 years. The spate of abuse scandals which have brought about severance of monastic communities, primarily Benedictine, from their teaching roles, have scarred the Catholic landscape. Flagship communities such as Downside, beacons of scholarship and culture, have seen their numbers dwindle to force leaving their Grade 1 listed Abbey and Library for a period of discernment within Buckfast this last year.
James Clark’s volume is a timely, thorough analysis of the dismantling of what was a ‘given’ right up to 1540, affecting a wide variety of laypeople and religious right across the country; it is not an easy text to work through and its cool tone may strike the reader wishing for a more passionate view as rather clinical, but it is still the last word on the material aspects of a fascinating story and within the mass of detail are messages relevant for our own era of change and decay.