Page:Henry VIII and the English Monasteries.djvu/15

Rh the judgment we might perhaps be inclined to pass, if we were to look only at the sordid details of modern life as revealed to us in the columns of the daily press.

It is now time to turn to the Visitation of Monasteries commanded by Henry VIII prior to the attack upon the smaller religious houses in the Parliament of 1536, and when some measure of dissolution had been already determined upon between Thomas Crumwell and his master, the King. Here I give the barest outline; the details will all be found in the pages of this volume. The Visitation opened in the summer of 1535, although the visitatorial powers of the bishops were not suspended till the 18th of September following, and preachers were commissioned to go over the country to educate public opinion against the monks. These were of three sorts apparently : (1)"railers" who orated against them as "hypocrites, sorcerers, and idle drones, etc."; (2) preachers who said the monks "made the land unprofitable"; and (3) those who told the people that, "if the abbeys went down, the King would never want any taxes again." This last was a favourite argument of Cranmer at Paul's Cross.

The men employed by Crumwell—the instruments for getting up the required evidence—were chiefly four: Layton, Legh, Ap Rice and London. They were well fitted for their work, and the charges brought against the good name of some at least of the monasteries by these chosen emissaries of Crumwell are, it must be confessed, sufficiently dreadful, although, be it always remembered, even they do not bear out the modern popular notion of wholesale corruption.

The Visitation seems to have passed through three pretty clearly defined stages. During the summer the houses in the West of England were subjected to examina-