King comes of age he will redress us, "giving example by letting down his own lands first, and then enjoin his subjects to follow him. The second hope I have is, I believe that the general accounting day is at hand, the dreadful day of judgment, I mean, which shall make an end of all these calamities and miseries."
I pass over the accusations against the monasteries. I will only repeat that the Act for dissolving the small houses expressly says that the "great solemn" monasteries are well managed. The great houses were discovered to be sinks of iniquity only when they were to be robbed. The opinion the robber has of his victim must always be suspect—an ancient fable says that the wolf has a very bad opinion of the lamb. My object here is to show how the change affected the English peasantry and landholding in general.
Spoliation did not stop at the religious houses. Every kind of charitable foundation was confiscated, under pretence of "superstitious uses"—the burning of a lamp was enough.[1] The Act for the Dissolution of Colleges (last year of Henry VIII.) was amplified by the first Parliament of Edward VI., and made to include all moneys devoted by "any manner of corporations, gilds, fraternities, companies, or fellowships, or mysteries or crafts," to any religious use now forbidden by law.
The English Gilds were more ancient than the kings of England. They are referred to as institutions by the laws of Ina, King of Mercia, of Alfred and Athelstan, Kings of All England, of Henry I., after the Conquest. They were of two kinds—"Religious" or "Social," and "Craft" or "Mystery" gilds. But of whichever kind they were, they were all lay societies, existing for lay purposes. If a priest belonged to one of them, it was in his private capacity as a man. Woraen as well as men belonged to the gilds. We can see what sort of persons composed them—Chaucer's
- ↑ "There were nunneries, where the nuns were nurses and midwives; and even now the ruins of these houses contain living record of the ancient practices of their inmates in the rare medicinal herbs which are still found within their precincts. In the universal destruction of these establishments, the hardest instruments of Henry's purposes interceded for the retention of some amongst the most meritorious, useful, and unblemished of them.—"Six Centuries of Work and Wages," II. 17.
