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Rh publicly excommunicated, and absolved after penance. One of his friends was dismissed with a warning.

What effect this course of procedure might have had if steadily continued for some years it is impossible to say ; for the king's death early in 1547 let loose upon the country reformers of a very different type. For the first important measure of the new reign, viz., the suppression of the chantries, Henry VIII. was however entirely responsible. It was not without good reason that fears had been expressed at the time of the dissolution of monasteries that the king would not stop there ; that his heavy hand would fall next upon the parish churches. The suppression of the chantries, colleges, gilds and hospitals was ostensibly a part of the effort to correct popular notions as to the state of the faithful departed, and to check superstitious practices connected with these ideas ; but it had really quite another effect. This may best be seen by a simple summary of the results of the Act in one county. In Buckinghamshire it disendowed and destroyed only three chapels which had clearly no other use except to perpetuate chantries in the later and narrower sense of the word : at Eythrope, Ditton and Buckingham. But with these it swept away four others which were strictly parochial, and served for the devotion of good-sized hamlets, where even the able-bodied inhabitants could seldom in winter get to the parish church ; and it also deprived eleven churches of an assistant priest whose services had cost the incumbent nothing, as well as of the plate and ornaments assigned to the use of the particular altar where the chantry was endowed ; while almost every parish in the county lost some small endowment for lamps and obits, bequeathed by those who could not afford to found a perpetual chantry. The commissioners who furnished materials for the first certificate