Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/213

1545.] to exercise jurisdiction in the ecclesiastical courts.

The dissolution of the monasteries had shaken the stability of all other religious or semi-religious corporations. Grants for religious uses, of whatever description, were no longer supposed to be permanent; and the founders, or the representatives of the founders, of colleges, hospitals, fraternities, brotherhoods, and guilds, had shown a disposition to resume their gifts. In some places the wardens or the occupiers had been expelled; in others sales had been effected by fraudulent collusion; in others the lands belonging to the foundations had been granted away in leases upon lives, the incumbents securing their personal interests by fines. Irregularities so considerable required interference, and, by a sweeping Act, all such properties were at once vested in the Crown, that the institutions to which they had belonged might be refounded on a fresh basis, if their continued existence was desirable. A momentary panic was created at Oxford and Cambridge, where the colleges expected the fate of the religious houses; and Doctor Coxe, the prince's tutor, who was Dean of Christ Church, wrote, in some agitation, to Sir William Paget: 'Not,' he said, 'that I distrust the King's goodness, but because there are such a number of importunate wolves as are able to devour chauntries, cathedral churches, universities, and a thousand times as much.' The alarm was