Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire (twelfth century).
The ruined twelfth-century Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx in North Yorkshire. The fifteen-year-old Jane Austen excused Henry VIII on the grounds that ‘his abolishing Religious Houses and leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general.’ Jane was being ironic; Posterity seems to think it in all seriousness, and has left them in picturesque collapse. By contrast, many churches and monasteries wantonly defaced or destroyed by the Communists in Russia have been restored to their former glory.
Part 1 of 3
WHEN the news of these two murders got to Rome, the Pope raged against the murderer more than ever Pope raged since the world began, and prepared a Bull, ordering his subjects to take arms against him and dethrone him. The King took all possible precautions to keep that document out of his dominions, and set to work in return to suppress a great number of the English monasteries and abbeys.*
There is no doubt that many of these religious establishments were religious in nothing but in name, and were crammed with lazy, indolent, and sensual monks. There is no doubt that they imposed upon the people in every possible way; that they had images moved by wires, which they pretended were miraculously moved by Heaven; that they had bits of coal which they said had fried Saint Lawrence,* and bits of toe-nails which they said belonged to other famous saints; penknives, and boots, and girdles, which they said belonged to others; and that all these bits of rubbish were called Relics, and adored by the ignorant people.*
Henry had some difficulty in getting the larger religious Houses shut down; we may let American historian D. H. Montgomery take up that tale. “Henry, it is reported, sent for a leading member of the House of Commons, and laying his hand on the head of the kneeling representative, said, ‘Get my bill passed by to-morrow, little man, or else to-morrow this head of yours will come off.’ The next day the bill passed, and the work of destruction began anew.”
St Lawrence (225-258) was one of seven Roman deacons martyred for refusing to pay homage to the gods of Rome, during the reign of Emperor Valerian. The Imperial edict called for beheading, but Lawrence so irritated the judge (told to bring forth the treasures of his church, he pushed forward some beggars) that he was thrown onto a red-hot gridiron, where he died. Pope Sixtus II died in the same purge, as did St Denis, Bishop of Paris, St Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage and St Eugenia, an abbess in Rome. St Lawrence’s feast day is August 10th.
Relics that are rifled from the Lost Property office or the barbecue are obviously of no intrinsic value. But what should you do when the relics are real, and moreover yours? See Fr Vitalis and the Familiar Face.
Part Two
Peterborough’s abbey church, now Peterborough Cathedral, escaped the worst of Henry VIII’s attentions because it was a favourite of his ex-wife Catherine of Aragon, who lies buried here. He felt he owed her that much. It did not escape the Reformation entirely, though; the brightly coloured frescos that once covered the bare stonework from ceiling to floor were scrubbed off by zealous reformers, convinced by the latest academic research from Universities on the Continent that all religious imagery was idolatrous. They were wrong, of course: see The Restoration of the Icons.
BUT, on the other hand, there is no doubt either, that the King’s officers and men punished the good monks with the bad; did great injustice; demolished many beautiful things and many valuable libraries; destroyed numbers of paintings, stained glass windows, fine pavements, and carvings; and that the whole court were ravenously greedy and rapacious for the division of this great spoil among them.
The King seems to have grown almost mad in the ardour of this pursuit; for he declared Thomas à Becket* a traitor, though he had been dead so many years, and had his body dug up out of his grave.* He must have been as miraculous as the monks pretended, if they had told the truth, for he was found with one head on his shoulders, and they had shown another as his undoubted and genuine head ever since his death. It had brought them vast sums of money, too. The gold and jewels on his shrine filled two great chests, and eight men tottered as they carried them away.*
Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 to 1170. Dickens adopts the form Thomas à Becket, which was not known in Thomas’s own lifetime; it appears to be a post-Reformation romance, possibly on the model of Thomas à Kempis (?1380-1471), Bishop of Utrecht, where à Kempis means ‘of Kempen’, his birthplace. Becket was born in Cheapside.
In 1538, Henry destroyed Becket’s shrine, the finest in England, and then held a macabre show trial in Westminster Abbey at which the saint’s remains were put in the dock, convicted of treason and sentenced to burning. Becket was assassinated in 1170 on the steps of the altar in Canterbury Cathedral, and as penance for his part in it King Henry II was required by the Pope to renounce all control over the English Church; that at any rate explains why Henry VIII chose to make an example of Becket. See The Assassination of Thomas Becket.
All over the country shrines were raided, the human remains burnt with dishonour and the valuables seized or auctioned off. Bureaucrats and progressive academics monitored the proceedings, and assured the King that it was in keeping with Modern Thought. Sometimes, however, the Government’s experts got more than they bargained for. See Cvthbertvs.
Part Three
The gatehouse of Kepier Hospital in Durham, which dates back to 1333-1345. The hospital was established in its current location in about 1180 by Bishop de Puiset, together with nearby Sherburn Hospital. Sherburn managed to survive, but Kepier was more prestigious — Edward I and Queen Isabella once stayed here — and its lands promised higher rents, so in 1539 Henry VIII’s men granted it to the Secretary of State, Sir William Paget. It ceased being a hospital, becoming a private residence and later a pub, the ‘White Bear’.
THESE things were not done without causing great discontent among the people. The monks had been good landlords and hospitable entertainers of all travellers, and had been accustomed to give away a great deal of corn, and fruit, and meat, and other things. In those days it was difficult to change goods into money, in consequence of the roads being very few and very bad, and the carts and waggons of the worst description; and they must either have given away some of the good things they possessed in enormous quantities, or have suffered them to spoil and moulder.
So, many of the people missed what it was more agreeable to get idly than to work for;* and the monks who were driven out of their homes and wandered about encouraged their discontent; and there were, consequently, great risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. These were put down by terrific executions, from which the monks themselves did not escape, and the King went on grunting and growling in his own fat way, like a Royal pig.
Desperate shortages and civil unrest led Elizabeth I to codify Poor Laws in 1597 and again in 1601, in an attempt to recreate the support once given by the monasteries. They were barely adequate to the task, and fresh reforms from 1834 introduced workhouses and ever more stringent criteria in the vain hope of helping the needy while weeding out what Alfred Doolittle called the ‘undeserving poor’. Dickens’s own damning judgment on the New Poor Laws in Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol is comment enough.
