is to be expected
from adversaries; and as it was known, that the king's intention in this
visitation was to find a pretence for abolishing monasteries, we may
naturally conclude, that the reports of the commissioners are very
little to be relied on. Friars were encouraged to bring in informations
against their brethren; the slightest evidence was credited; and even
the calumnies spread abroad by the friends of the reformation, were
regarded as grounds of proof. Monstrous disorders are therefore said to
have been found in many of the religious houses; whole convents of women
abandoned to lewdness; signs of abortions procured, of infants murdered,
of unnatural lusts between persons of the same sex. It is indeed
probable, that the blind submission of the people, during those ages,
would render the friars and nuns more unguarded and more dissolute
than they are in any Roman Catholic country at present; but still the
reproaches, which it is safest to credit, are such as point at vices
naturally connected with the very institution of convents, and with
the monastic life. The cruel and inveterate factions and quarrels,
therefore, which the commissioners mentioned, are very credible among
men, who, being confined together within the same walls, never can
forget their mutual animosities, and who, being cut off from all the
most endearing connections of nature, are commonly cursed with hearts
more selfish, and tempers more unrelenting, than fall to the share
of other men. The pious frauds practised to increase the devotion
and liberality of the people, may be regarded as certain, in an order
founded on illusions, lies, and superstition. The supine idleness also,
and its attendant, profound ignorance, with which the convents were
reproached, admit of no question; and though monks were the true
preservers, as well as inventors, of the dreaming and captious
philosophy of the schools, no manly or elegant knowledge could be
expected among men, whose lives, condemned to a tedious uniformity,
and deprived of all emulation, afforded nothing to raise the mind or
cultivate the genius.

Some few monasteries, terrified with this rigorous inquisition carried
on by Cromwell and his commissioners, surrendered their revenues into
the king's hands; and the monks received small pensions as the reward of
their obsequiousness. Orders were given to dismiss such nuns and
friars as were below four and twenty, whose vows were, on that account,
suppos