he realm. In reality the total revenue of the spirituality
amounted to only L320,000; that of the monasteries to only L140,000.
There had been few endowments in the fifteenth century; only eight new
ones, in fact, in the whole period 1399-1509. Colleges, schools, and
hospitals now attracted the money that had previously gone to the monks.

Moreover, the monastic life had fallen on evil days. The abbeys no
longer were centers of learning and of the manufacture of books. The
functions of hospitality and of charity that they still exercised were
not sufficient to redeem them in the eyes of the people for the "gross,
carnal, and vicious living" with which they were commonly and quite
rightly charged. Visitations undertaken not by hostile governments but
by bishops in the fifteenth century prove that much immorality obtained
within the cloister walls. By 1528 {297} they had become so
intolerable that a popular pamphleteer, Simon Fish, in his
_Supplication of Beggars_, proposed that the mendicant friars be
entirely suppressed.

[Sidenote: January 21, 1535]

A commission was now issued to Thomas Cromwell, empowering him to hold
a general visitation of all churches, monasteries, and collegiate
bodies. The evidence gathered of the shocking disorders obtaining in
the cloisters of both sexes is on the whole credible and well
substantiated. Nevertheless these disorders furnished rather the
pretext than the real reason for the dissolutions that followed.
Cromwell boasted that he would make his king the richest in
Christendom, and this was the shortest and most popular way to do it.

[Sidenote: 1536]

Accordingly an act was passed for the dissolution of all small
religious houses with an income of less than L200 a year. The rights
of the founders were safe-guarded, and pensions guaranteed to those
inmates who did not find shelter in one of the larger establishments.
By this act 376 houses were dissolved with an aggregate revenue of
L32,000, not counting plate and jewels confiscated. Two thousand monks
or nuns were affected in addition to about eight thousand retainers or
servants. The immediate effect was a large amount of misery, but the
result in the long run was good. Perhaps the principal political
importance of this and the subsequent spoliations of the church was to
make the Reformation profitable and therefore popular with an
enterprising class. For the lion's share of the prey did not go to the
lion, but to