in evil living, applied to better
purpose.]

"Forasmuch," says the preamble of the Act of Dissolution, "as manifest
sin, vicious, carnal, and abominable living, is daily used and committed
among the little and small abbeys, priories, and other religious houses
of monks, canons, and nuns, where the congregation or such religious
persons is under the number of twelve, whereby the governors of such
religious houses and their convents, spoil, consume, destroy, and
utterly waste their churches, monasteries, principal houses, farms, and
granges, to the high displeasure pleasure of Almighty God, the slander
of true religion, and to the great infamy of the King's Highness and of
the realm, if redress should not be had thereof; and albeit that many
continual visitations hath been heretofore had by the space of two
hundred years and more, for an honest and charitable reformation of such
unthrifty, carnal, and abominable living; yet nevertheless, little or
none amendment is hitherto had, but their vicious living shamelessly
increaseth and augmenteth, and by a cursed custom is so rooted and
infested, that a great multitude of the religious persons in such small
houses do rather choose to rove abroad in apostacy than to conform them
to the observation of true religion; so that without such small houses
be utterly suppressed, and the religious persons therein committed to
great and honourable monasteries of religion in this realm, where they
may be compelled to live religiously for the reformation of their lives,
there can be no reformation in this behalf: in consideration hereof the
King's most royal Majesty, being supreme head on earth, under God, of
the Church of England, daily finding and devising the increase,
advancement, and exaltation, of true doctrine and virtue in the said
Church, to the only glory of God, and the total extirping and
destruction of vice and sin; having knowledge that the premises be true,
as well by accounts of his late visitation as by sundry credible
informations; considering also that divers great monasteries of this
realm, wherein, thanks be to God, religion is right well kept and
observed, be destitute of such full number of religious persons as they
ought and may keep; hath thought good that a plain declaration should be
made of the premises, as well to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal as to
other his loving subjects the Commons in this present parliament
assembled. Whereupon, the said Lords and Comm