During the dissolution of the monastaries under Henry VIII, did he actually have them destroyed, or is their ruined state just the result of 5 centuries of exposure to the elements with no caretakers? I read the Wiki article on dissolution of the monasteries and it states they were looted for their silver and gold and such but I cant find any info on the fate of the structures themselves.
If he did destroy them in the 1500’s, why not just seize them on behalf of the Church of England? Why destroy? Was Westminister spared just due to proximity to London?
He claimed them as crown property and then he either sold them (to raise money), gave them away (to secure the support of the lucky recipients) or used them to endow the Church of England.
People who bought or were granted monastic property were mainly interested in the land rather than the buildings. Usable buildings they used. Less usable buildings, like Abbey churches, were sometimes demolished, sometimes disassembled to reuse the stone in other buildings, occassionally adapted and used for other purposes, and sometimes left to moulder.
St. Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury was destroyed piecemeal over the course of fifteen years, and parts of it eventually used to build a palace on the same site, so yes, it seems at least one of the monasteries was deliberately destroyed rather than simply left to be ruined.
Hampton Court is an interesting example. It was originally a landed estate attached to a priory of the Knights Hospitaller, and it had a manor house standing on it. They used it to generate income to support the priory, which they did by leasing it. In about 1517 the tenant was one Thomas Wolsey, who was of course also Archbishop of York and Henry VIII’s Chancellor. Wolsey suggested that the Priory might like to grant him the estate permanently, in return for enough cash to buy itself another estate somewhere else, but the Priory declined, reckoning that they had no right to alienate their endowed property.
As the dissolution of monasteries was getting under way, however, the pressure on the Knights grew and they reckoned it would be good to have a powerful friend at court, so they reconsidered their position and gave the manor of Hampton to Wolsey. Wolsey demolised the manor house and built a magnificent palace, which was occupied by 1525.
Wolsey in turn felt his position at court to be vulnerable a few years later, and in an attempt to maintain the king’s favour he made him a present of Hampton Court in 1528. Henry greatly extended the palace.
The English branch of the Knights Hospitaller wasn’t dissolved until 1540, by which time Hampton Court had been the King’s for over 10 years. Furthermore, the king didn’t get it from the Priory, but from Wolsey. Still, he definitely acquired it in the context of the dissoluton of the monasteries and the, ah, redeployment of their property.
As well as robbing the stone for other buildings (a process which went on for centuries) they also stripped the rooves of lead and timber, which would have accelerated the rate of decay.
The saint’s statues in the Lady Chapel in Ely cathedral were defaced, but the chapel itself wasn’t destroyed, so I’d say no, not so much with the destruction there.
In downtown Glastonbury, for example, you can find chunks of the abbey stones embedded in the buildings of the era. It was a convenient source of building material.
The lead especially is valuable. In the movie “Heavens Above”, Sellers gives a family a place to stay in the church and they repay him by stealing all the lead out of the roof - apparently a not-unheard of action even in the 1900’s; heck, leave lead or copper lying around today and it will disappear ASAP. The lead butterflies that held the drums of Greek columns together from the classical age have all been chipped out over the centuries. Considering how much effort is required to produce finished metal in a preindustrial society, no surprise; equally so for quarried stone. Over the years, the abandoned buildings were stripped of anything the original new owner had not taken immediately - with or without his consent.
Once the elements got into the buildings they fell apart and the ruins themselves were considered “pretty”, decorations for the manor grounds in many cases. Unless they were in the way for something else, no effort was made to move them.
Other former abbies in a ruinous state today include Jervaux, Rievaulx, Netley, and Fountains Abbey. Others, such as St. Albans, survive because the main worship building continued to be used as a church in a major population centre. The aforementioned, were mostly in rural areas that were relatively sparsely populated.
Location was the most important factor. Monasteries in remote locations were mostly of use for their estates and so the buildings were often just abandoned. Unless that is - and it’s an important exception - the new owners decided to convert the buildings into country houses. Notable examples of that would be Bisham, Lacock, Newstead, Syon, Welbeck, Wilton and Woburn. (Not that all the houses currently on those sites are the sixteenth-century conversions.) But the one bit of building that was difficult to convert to domestic use was the church, which therefore tended to be demolished or left to decay.
But the pattern was rather different in towns and cities. Often the churches there were taken over as parish churches. That was the case with my local CoE church. In a few cases, such as St Augustine’s, Bristol, they became cathedrals. (Some of those that became parish churches, such as at St Albans, Coventry and Southwark, later became cathedrals in the nineteenth century.)
The process of reuse was most obvious in London. Some monastic churches became parish churches, but the rest of their buildings, as at Holy Trinity Aldgate, the Charterhouse, St Bartholomew the Great and St James’s Clerkenwell, became private houses. Or they were converted to other secular uses - one wing of St Helen’s Bishopgate became Leathersellers’ Hall. Or, as with St Katherine’s by the Tower, they survived as lay institutions.
The great oddity about the church in medieval England was that many of the cathedrals were also monasteries. It was therefore a relatively simple matter to dissolve them as monasteries but continue them as cathedrals administered instead by chapters. In the case of Ely, that meant that the cathedral itself survived intact but that significant sections of the monastic precincts were allowed to fall into ruin.
Wolsey only ever leased the manor of Hampton from the Knights Hospitaller, so it was only that lease that he transferred to Henry. However, in 1531 Henry was able to acquire the manor outright by agreeing a swap with the Knights Hospitaller by which they got the lands of Stansgate Priority, which had been suppressed not as part of the Dissolution of the Monasteries (which had not yet begun) but to endow Wolsey’s Cardinal College (i.e. Christ Church) in Oxford.
As Western Europeans abandon organized religion, what happens to the churches? I understand that thaere are parishes in England where almost nobody attnds services-who pays for the upkeep?
Will we see abandoned churches faling into rins?
In many ways the dissolution of the monasteries was the logical conclusion of a process that had been going on for quite some time before Henry’s formal breach with Rome. There was a sustained effort to survey the religious houses of England and identify those that had outlived their purpose, and then “reorganise” them, which often involved suppression, and the diversion of their assets to other, usually public, purposes. So, for example, monasteries with plenty of land but not a lot of monks were suppressed, and their property used to endow schools or colleges or almshouses or the like. The monks were pensioned off (using part of the monastic property for the purpose) or transferred to other monasteries. This was done under delegated authority from Rome, but the initiative came from England. Part of Wolsey’s role in Henry’s court was to get papal sanction for these projects.
There was no clear church/state distinction of the kind that we have. While there was always some religious or public benefit involved or claimed, there was frequently private benefit also. Wolsey’s purpose in suppressing monasteries in order to endow Cardinal College, for example, embraced both the public benefit (provision of education) and the benefit of the church (religious education, a better educated clergy) and also his own personal benefit (enhancing his reputation and influence).
Something similar happened with the dissolution except that, without the need to keep the pope onside, Henry was free to increase the public/state benefit element of his projects. So, for example, when Henry suppressed the (extremely wealthy) Abbey of Osney in 1539, he simultaneously erected the Diocese of Oxford, carving territory out of the existing Diocese of Lincoln. Osney Abbey became the diocesan Cathedral, and the last Abbot of Osney, one Robert King, became the first Bishop of Oxford. Some of the revenues of Osney Abbey became revenues of the new diocese. Most of the other monks were pensioned off, though some of them were given clerical appointments in the new Diocese. This was of great advantage to Robert King because, as a Bishop, he had much more control over revenues, and much less accountability to his fellow-monks, than he had had as Abbot. This naturally made him grateful to Henry, and so Henry benefited from this as well. Other revenues, and some monks, were transferred to Cardinal College, now Christ Church, which a few years later became the seat of the Bishop and his Cathedral, after which the Abbey church fell into ruin. The king got no wealth directly from the dissolution, but he got a bishop in Oxford who was dependent on him and who could keep an eye on the university (and its theologians) for him, and he got a great deal of patronage that he could spread around.
In the film Anne of the Thousand Days, Wolsey’s generosity on this matter is shown as being the result of manipulative pressure from Anne Boleyn. Does that have any basis in real history, or is it just some artistic license?
Not surprisingly I’ve seen quite a few architects offices in old churches.
Some are listed buildings (therefore they cannot be demolished but there are significant restrictions on how much they can be altered). Some buildings of great intrinsic value such as this one (the Non Conformist Chapel in Sheffield General Cemetery) present quite a few obstacles for repurposing such as location (slap bang in the middle of an also listed Victorian cemetery) and current state of repair.
