EVILS AND BENEFITS OF MONASTERIES. 141 worth till it is dry, so was it found after the dissolution, that with all their faults, the monasteries had been the refuge for the destitute, who were now driven to frightful extremities throughout the country, the effect of the suppression being with respect to them the same as would now follow from the sudden abolition of the poor laws; that they had been the alms-houses, where the aged dependants of more opulent families, the decrepid servant, the decayed artificer, retired as to a home neither uncomfortable nor humiliating; that they had been the county infirmaries and dispensaries, a knowledge of medicine and of the virtues of herbs being a department of monkish learning (as passages in the old dramatic writers sometimes indicate), and a hospital, and, perhaps, a laboratory, being component parts of a monkish establishment; that they had been foundling asylums, relieving the state of many orphan and outcast children, and ministering to their necessities, God's ravens in the wilderness (neither so black as they had been represented), bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening1; that they had been inns for the way-faring man, who heard from afar the sound of the vesper-bell, at once inviting him to repose and devotion, and who might sing his matins with the morning star, and go on his way rejoicing; that they filled up the gap in which the public libraries have since stood, and if their inmates were not very desirous to eat of the tree of knowledge themselves, they had at least the merit of 1 See Sir H. Spelman's History and Fate of Sacrilege, P. 229. cherishing and preserving it alive for others. Thus do we find in the monastic system a provision made for many of those wants of society which public institutions are now designed to meet perhaps more effectually; and it is not uninteresting to remark, how the great wants of nature still make themselves known, whatever convulsions a nation may undergo, and still conduct it to something like the same course as before, though not, perhaps, under the same name; and when the flood subsides that has covered the earth, to see how Ararat rears his head as he did at the first, and Pihon returns into his wonted channel to water the garden. Well would it be for the peace of the world if this consideration had its due influence, not an influence that should paralyse but that should moderate; if men would not subject society to needless confusion, whilst they attempt to expel nature by a fork, sure as it is to recoil and recover itself; if they would spare themselves and others the inconvenience of a struggle, where they fight as one beating the air. The convulsion felt throughout the country on this memorable occasion was probably more violent than any which it has experienced either before or since. The joints of society were thoroughly loosed; a vast proportion of the population was turned adrift upon the wide world, their employment gone, their relief gone too. Seventy-two thousand persons are said to have perished by the hand of the executioner in the reign of King Henry, some made desperate by want, and some made bold by the lawless licence of the times. Cromwell, who was IMPROPRIATORS. 143 the King's political adviser throughout this great measure, felt the state rocking under him, and suggested the sale of the abbey lands and tithes at easy prices to the nobles and gentry, that by this means the leading persons in every county might be pledged to support the new order of things, and be tied by the tooth. Thus popish lands, as it was said, made protestant landlords, and thus the lay impropriator, a character hitherto almost or altogether unknown, took his beginning. How far the country was a gainer by the exchange of ecclesiastical for other landlords may be questioned. The monks were accused of covetous. ness; yet it is singular that no legal provision for the poor was wanted so long as the property was in their hands, and that it had scarcely left their hands before it was found necessary to make such a provision; the statute of the 5th of Elizabeth being the first direct one of the kind. The monks were said to deal very thriftily with the incumbents of their livings; yet it is remarkable that no law for preventing the dilapidation of parsonages was called for till the 13th of the same reign. The monks lavished decorations upon their own chapels to the comparative neglect of their country churches, but they never pulled down all the houses on an estate in order that there might be no congregation, and then converted the church into a straw barn, because there was none. 2 The monks gave a miserable stipend to their vicar, "but now," says one Henry Brinklow, in a curious address to the 1 Kennett on Impropriations, p. 165. 2 Strype, Cranmer, p. 412. members of both houses shortly after the dissolution," there is no vicar at all, but the farmer is vicar and parson altogether; and only an old castaway monk or friar, which can scarcely say his matins, is hired for twenty or thirty shillings, meat and drink; yea, in some places, for meat and drink alone, without any wages. I know," he continues, “and not I alone, but twenty thousand men know, more than five hundred vicarages and parsonages thus well and gospelly served after the new gospel of England." And so crying was this evil, for even great parishes and market towns were utterly destitute of the word of God 2, that there was nothing for it but to ordain the lowest mechanics to these worthless benefices, no man of education being willing to accept such a pittance; for the endowments, it must be observed, had been seized precisely at the time when the wages of superstition in the shape of fees, which before the Reformation supplied no small part of the vicar's income, were extinguished also, and holy toys were no longer vendible. The cause of religion, however, being found at length to suffer seriously, both from the ignorance and the lives of these preachers, Archbishop Parker enjoined his suffragans to refuse such candidates holy orders, and then pluralities became a bad, but it was the best, or rather the only, alternative.3 Queen Anne lamented and endeavoured to remedy the evil. She discharged all livings under fifty pounds a year, according to an improved valuation which she directed the 1 Kennett on Impropriations, p. 131. 2 Dedicat. of Latimer's Sermons, vol. ii. p. ix. LAY IMPROPRIATORS. 145 bishops and others to make, from the payment of tenths to the exchequer, a tax which had caused many benefices to remain altogether without incumbents; and by another and still more munificent act, she made over the first-fruits and tenths of such as were undischarged, to the augmentation of small livings; a fund which, it may be here observed, had been seized by Henry, the successor of the pope in his fees as he was in his supremacy; hereby doing what in her lay to heal the laceration which the system of lay-impropriations had inflicted on the church, and purchasing for herself, beyond most other sovereigns that have sat upon the throne of England, a good renown. But, in general, this ill-gotten and illapplied wealth served only to verify the adage, "that the devil's corn goes all to bran." The receivers of the plunder rarely prospered; and it is observed by Sir H. Spelman, about the year 1616, that on comparing the mansion-houses of twentyfour families of gentlemen in Norfolk, with as many monasteries, all standing together at the dissolution, and all lying within a ring of twelve miles the semi-diameter, he found the former still possessed by the lineal descendants of their original occupants in every instance; whilst the latter, with two exceptions only, had flung out their owners again and again, some six times over, none less than three, through sale, through default of issue, and very often through great and grievous disasters. Nor was this the opinion of an individual, or of a visionary; on the contrary, it was very generally entertained by men the 1 History and Fate of Sacrilege, p. 243. L |