s had been foreseen some years before it happened, the monks
had taken care to secrete most of their stock, furniture, and plate; so
that the spoils of the great monasteries bore not, in these respects,
any proportion to those of the lesser.

* Coke's 4th Inst. fol. 44.

** Dugdale's Warwickshire, p. 800.

*** Fuller.

Besides the lands possessed by the monasteries, the regular clergy
enjoyed a considerable part of the benefices of England, and of the
tithes annexed to them; and these were also at this time transferred to
the crown, and by that means passed into the hands of laymen; an abuse
which many zealous churchmen regarded as the most criminal sacrilege.
The monks were formerly much at their ease in England, and enjoyed
revenues which exceeded the regular and stated expense of the house. We
read of the abbey of Chertsey, in Surrey, which possessed seven hundred
and forty-four pounds a year, though it contained only fourteen monks:
that of Furnese, in the county of Lincoln, was valued at nine hundred
and sixty pounds a year, and contained but thirty.[*] In order to
dissipate their revenues, and support popularity, the monks lived in a
hospitable manner; and besides the poor maintained from their offals,
there were many decayed gentlemen who passed their lives in travelling
from convent to convent, and were entirely subsisted at the tables of
the friars. By this hospitality, as much as by their own inactivity,
did the convents prove nurseries of idleness; but the king, not to give
offence by too sudden an innovation, bound the new proprietors of
abbey lands to support the ancient hospitality. But this engagement was
fulfilled in very few places, and for a very short time.

* Burnet, vol. i p. 237.

It is easy to imagine the indignation with which the intelligence of
all these acts of violence was received at Rome; and how much the
ecclesiastics of that court, who had so long kept the world in
subjection by high-sounding epithets and by holy execrations, would now
vent their rhetoric against the character and conduct of Henry. The pope
was at last incited to publish the bull which had been passed against
that monarch; and in a public manner he delivered over his soul to the
devil, and his dominions to the first invader. Libels were dispersed, in
which he was anew compared to the most furious persecutors in antiquity;
and the preference was now given to their side: he had declared war with
t