a century brought against the monasteries, which had led Wycliffe to denounce their existence as intolerable, the House of Commons to petition Henry IV. for the secularization of their property, and Henry V. to appease the outcry, by the suppression of more than a hundred, as an ineffectual warning to the rest.[1] At length, in the year 1489, at the instigation of Cardinal Morton, then Archbishop of Canterbury, a commission was issued by Innocent VIII. for a general investigation throughout England into the behaviour of the regular clergy. The Pope said that he had heard, from persons worthy of credit, that abbots and monks in many places were systematically faithless to their vows; he conferred on the Archbishop a special power of visitation, and directed him to admonish, to correct, to punish, as might seem to him to be desirable.[2] On the receipt of these instructions, Morton addressed the following letter to the superior of an abbey within a few miles of London—a peer of the realm, living in the full glare of notoriety—a person whose offences, such as they were, had been committed openly, palpably, and conspicuously in the face of the world:—
'John, by Divine permission, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England, Legate of the Apostolic See, to William, Abbot of the Monastery of St Alban's, greeting.
- ↑ 'In a Parliament held at Leicester, in 1414, the priories alien in England were given to the King; all their possessions to remain to the King and to his heirs for ever. And these priories were suppressed, to the numher of more than a hundred houses.'—Stow's Chronicle, p. 345.
- ↑ The commission is in Morton's Register, MS., Lambeth Library.
