Page:The Church of England, its catholicity and continuity.djvu/93

 heaviness, that neither the Britons under the Romans and Saxons, nor yet the English people under the Danes and Normans, had ever such damage of their learned monuments as we have seen in our times. Our posterity may well curse this wicked fact of our age, this unreasonable spoil of England's noble antiquities." And Bale, we should call to mind, really hated the Monasteries. Fuller also speaks upon this subject. "As brokers in Long Lane," he says, do when they buy an old suit, buy the linings together with the outside, so it was conceived meet that such as purchased the buildings of Monasteries should in the same grant have the libraries (the stuffing thereof) conveyed unto them; and these ignorant owners, so long as they might keep a Liegerbook or Terrier, by direction thereof to find such straggling acres as belonged to them, they cared not to preserve any other monuments." Southey, in his history of the Church, likewise laments this wholesale destruction. The books, he said "were sold to grocers and chandlers. Whole shiploads were sent abroad to the bookbinders, that the vellum or parchment might be cut up in their trade. Covers were torn off for their brass bosses and clasps, and their contents served the ignorant and careless for waste paper. In this manner English history suffered irreparable losses, and it is more than probable that some of the works of the ancients perished in this indiscriminate and extensive destruction."

We must pass away from this phase of the Reformation with only this remark, that such violent vengeance was not needed.

To continue the history of Henry's time, we find that in