Part 8 (1/2)
The fate of this monastery has something about it particularly tragic, for the abbot and the monks of Chertsey when they surrendered did so in the full expectation of continuing their monastic life at Bisham, and if Bisham was treacherously destroyed immediately after the fault does not lie at their door.
With Abingdon it was otherwise. The last prior was perhaps the least steadfast of all the many bewildered or avaricious characters that meet us in the story of the Dissolution. He was one Thomas Rowland, who had watched every movement of Henry's mind, and had, if possible, gone before. He did not even wait until the demand was made to him, but suggested the abandonment of the trust which so many generations of Englishmen had left in his hands, and he had a reward in the gift not only of a very large pension but also of the Manor of c.u.mnor, which had been before the destruction of the religious orders the sanatorium or country house of the monks. He obtained it: and from his time on c.u.mnor has borne an air of desolation and of murder, nor does any part of his own palace remain.
When any organised economic system disappears, there is nothing more interesting in history than to watch the process of its replacement: for example, the gradual disappearance of pagan slavery, and its replacement by the self-governing peasantry of the Middle Ages, with all the consequence of that change, affords some of the best reading in Continental records. But the Dissolution of the English monasteries has this added interest, that it was an immediate, and therefore an overwhelming, change; there was hardly a warning, there was no delay.
Suddenly, not within the lifetime of a man, but within that of a Parliament, from one year to another, a good quarter of the whole economic power of the nation was utterly transformed. Nothing like it has been known in European history.
What filled the void so made? The answer to this question is, the Oligarchy: the landed cla.s.s which had been threatening for so long to a.s.sume the Government of England stepped into the shoes of the great houses, and by this addition to their already considerable power achieved the destruction of the monarchy and within 100 years proceeded to the ordering of the English people under a small group of wealthy men, a form of Government which to this day England alone of all Christian nations suffers or enjoys.
This general statement must not be taken to mean that the oligarchic system, whose basis lies in the owners.h.i.+p of land, was immediately created by the Dissolution of the great monasteries. The development of the territorial system of England, of which system the banks of the Thames afford as good a picture as any in England, can be traced certainly from Saxon, and conjecturally from Roman, times.
The Roman estate was, presumably, the direct ancestor of the manor, and the Saxon thegns were perhaps most of them in blood, and nearly all of them in social const.i.tution, descended from the owners of the Roman Villas which had seen the petty but recurrent pirate invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries.
But though the manorial arrangement, with its village lords and their dependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West, and could be found on the Rhine, in Gaul, and even in Italy, in Saxon England it had this peculiarity, that there was no systematic organisation by which the local land-owner definitely recognised a feudal superior, and through him the power of a Central Government. Or rather, though in theory such recognition had grown up towards the end of the Saxon period, in practice it hardly existed, and when William landed the whole system of tenure was in disorder, in the sense that the local lord of the village was not accustomed to the interference of a superior, and that no groups of lords had come into existence by which the territorial system could be bound in sheaves, as it were, and the whole of it attached to one central point at the royal Court.
Such a system of groups _had_ arisen in Gaul, and to that difference ultimately we owe the French territorial system of the present day, but William the Norman's new subjects had no comprehension of it.
It was upon this account that even those manors which he handed over to his French kindred and dependants were scattered, and that, though he framed a vigorous feudal rule centring in his own hands, the ancient customs of the populace, coupled with the lack of any bond between scattered and locally independent units, forbade that rule to endure.
William's order was not a century old when the recrudescence of the former manorial independence was felt in the reign of Henry II. Under the personal unpopularity of his son, John, it blazed out into successful revolt, and, in spite of the veil thrown over underlying and permanent customs by such strong feudal kings as the first and the third Edwards, the independence and power of the village landlord remained the chief and growing character of English life. It expressed itself in the quality of the local English Parliament, in the support of the usurping Lancastrian dynasty--in twenty ways that converge and mingle towards the close of the Middle Ages.
But after the Dissolution of the monasteries this power of the squires takes on quite a different complexion: the land-owning cla.s.s, from a foundation for the National Government, became, within two generations of the Dissolution, the master of that Government.
For many centuries previous to the sixteenth the old funded wealth of the Crown had been gradually wasting, at the expense of the Central National Government and to the profit of the squires. But the alienation was never complete. There are plenty of cases in which the Crown is found resuming the proprietors.h.i.+p of a manor to which it had never abandoned the theoretical t.i.tle. With the Tudors such cases become rarer and rarer, with the Stuarts they cease.
The cause of this rapid enfeeblement of the Crown lay largely in the changed proportion of wealth. The King, until the middle of the sixteenth century, had been far wealthier than any one of his subjects. By a deliberate act, the breaking up of ecclesiastical tenure, the Crown offered an opportunity to the wealthier of those subjects so enormously to increase their revenues as to overshadow itself; in a little more than a century after the throwing open of the monastic lands the King is an embarra.s.sed individual, with every issue of expenditure ear-marked, every source of it controlled, and his very person, as it were, mortgaged to a plutocracy. The squires had not only added to their revenues the actual amounts produced by the sites and estates of the old religious foundations, they had been able by this sudden accession of wealth to shoot ahead in their compet.i.tion with their fellow-citizens. The _counterweight_ to the power of the local landlord disappeared with the disappearance of the monastery.
To show how the religious houses had furnished a powerful counterweight by which the Central Government and the populace could continue to oppose the growing power of the landed oligarchy, we may take all the southern bank of the Thames from Buscot to Windsor. We find at the time of the Conquest twelve royal manors and fifteen religious; only the nine remaining were under private lords. Four and a half centuries later, at the time of the Dissolution, the royal manors have pa.s.sed for the most part into private hands, but the manors in the hands of the religious houses have actually increased in number.
At this point it is important to note an economic phenomenon which appears at first sight accidental, but which, on examination, is found to spring from calculable political causes. At the moment of the Dissolution it was apparently in the power of the Crown to have concentrated the revenues of all these monastic manors into its own hands, and this typical stretch of country, the Berks.h.i.+re sh.o.r.e, shows how economically powerful the Central Government of England might have become had the property surrendered to the Crown been kept in the hands of the King.
The modern reader will be tempted to inquire why it was not so kept.
Most certainly Henry intended to keep, if not the whole of it (for he must reward his servants, and he was accustomed to do things largely), yet at least the bulk of it in the Royal Treasury, and had he been able to do so the Central Government of England would have become by far the strongest thing in Europe. It is conceivable, though in consideration of the national character doubtful, that with so powerful an instrument of government, England, instead of standing aside from the rapid bureaucratic recasting of European civilisation which was the work of the French Crown, might have led the way in that chief of modern experiments. One can imagine the Stuarts, had they possessed revenue, doing what the Bourbons did: one can imagine the modern State developing under an English Crown wealthier than any other European Government, and the re-birth of Europe happening just to the north, instead of just to the south, of the Channel.
But the speculation is vain. As a fact, the whole of the new wealth slipped rapidly from between the fingers of the English King.
When of three forces which still form an equilibrium two are stationary and one is pressing upon these two, then, if either of the stationary forces be removed, that which was pressing upon both overwhelms the stationary force that remains. The monastic system had been marking time for over 100 years, and in certain political aspects of its power had perhaps slightly dwindled. The monarchy, for all its splendour, was in actual resources no more than it had been for some generations. Pressing upon either of these two inst.i.tutions was the rising and still rising force of the squires. It is not wonderful that under such conditions the spoil fell to the younger and advancing power.
Consider, for example, the extraordinary anxiety of so apparently powerful a king as Henry for the formal consent of the Commons to his acts. It has been represented as part of the Tudor national policy and what not, but those who write thus have not perhaps smiled, as has the present writer, over the names of those who sat for the English s.h.i.+res in the Parliament which a.s.sented to the Dissolution of the great monastic houses. Here is a Ratcliffe from Northumberland, and a Collingwood; here is a Dacre, a Musgrave, a Blenkinsop; the Constables are there, and the Nevilles from Yorks.h.i.+re; the Tailboys of Lincoln, a Schaverell, a Throgmorton, a Ferrers, a Gascoyne; and of course, inevitably, sitting for Bedfords.h.i.+re, a hungry Russell.
Here is a Townshend, a Wingfield, a Wentworth, an Audley--all from East Anglia--a Butler; from Surrey a Carew, and that FitzWilliam whose appet.i.te for the religious spoils proved so insatiable; here is a Blount out of Shrops.h.i.+re; a Lyttleton, a Talbot (and yet _another_ Russell!), a Darrell, a Paulet, a Courtney, (to see what could be picked up in his native county of Devon), and after him a Grenfell.
These are a few names taken at random to show what humble sort of ”Commons” it was that Henry had to consider. They are significant names; and the ”Const.i.tution” had little to do then, and has little to do now, with their domination. Wealth was and is their instrument of power.
That such men could ultimately force the Government is evident, but what is remarkable, perhaps, is the extraordinary rapidity with which the Crown was stripped of its new wealth by the gentry, and this can only be explained in two ways:
First, there was the rapid change in prices which rose from the Spanish importation of precious metals from America, the effect of which was now reaching England; and, secondly, the Tudor character.
As to the first, it put the National Government, dependent as it still largely was upon the customary and fixed payments, into a perpetual embarra.s.sment. Where it still received nothing but the customary s.h.i.+lling, it had to pay out three for material and wages, whose price had risen and was rising. In this embarra.s.sment, in spite of every subterfuge and s.h.i.+ft, the Crown was in perpetual, urgent, and increasing need. Rigid and novel taxes were imposed, loans were raised and not repaid, but something far more was needed to save the situation, with prices still rising as the years advanced. Ready money from those already in possession of perhaps half the arable land of England was an obvious source, and into their pockets flowed, as by the force of gravitation, the funded wealth which had once supported the old religion. Hardly ever at more than ten years' purchase, sometimes at far less, the Crown turned its new rentals into ready money, and spent that capital as though it had been income.
The Tudor character was a second cause.