Page:Henry VIII and the English Monasteries.djvu/23

Rh were unknown to Dr. Gairdner when he made his Calendar of the documents of 1536. Luckily, however, the extant reports deal expressly with some of the very houses against which Layton and Legh had breathed forth their pestilential suggestions. Now that the suppression was resolved upon it mattered not to Henry or Crumwell that the inmates should be described as "evil livers," and so the new commissioners returned the inmates of these same houses as being "of good and virtuous conversation," and this not in the case of one house or district, but, as Dr. Gairdner remarks, in these reports "the characters given of the inmates are almost uniformly good."

Such is the briefest of outlines of the circumstances which led up to the first dissolutions of the English monasteries. I have set it out here in the Introduction in the hope that by so doing I may induce at least some of my readers to study the details which are given in the pages that follow. The words Comperta Monastica, and the story about the doings of Parliament in 1536 in regard to the monks, and, in fact, the very destruction decreed against them appears to present a black enough case against their reputation. My belief is that most men of unbiassed opinions who will read what I may call the evidence I have collected, rather than what I have written, will come in the end to my conclusions. That I may claim the greatest living authority on this period, Dr. James Gairdner, as one with me in this matter, is, I think, certain from the words he used on first reviewing this book. "The old scandals," he writes, "universally discredited at the time, and believed in by a later generation only through prejudice and ignorance, are now dispelled for ever, and no candid Protestant will ever think of reviving them."