It remains for us, taking our stand at the year in which the Monastery was dissolved, to survey the period that has elapsed since the death of Thomas de la Mare. It was a time of stagnation, followed by rapid decline. At the end of the fifteenth century the Abbey was financially more embarrassed and morally even more depraved than in the first years of our period. Without attempting a defence either of the motives of Henry VIII or the methods of the Dissolution, no other conclusion is possible but that the abolition of St. Albans was both just and necessary. The Abbey had long since outlived its useful functions.
The necessity for the dissolution rests on a twofold argument. There was first, the decay of religion, and even morality itself, within the cloister; and secondly, there was the decay of the manorial system, the economic basis of monasticism.
A great spiritual peer who as a mitred abbot took his place in Parliament among the magnates, the Abbot of St. Albans was a no less important personage in virtue of his huge landed possessions. Indeed, it has never been determined whether the right of such abbots to sit in the Upper House rested upon their spiritual dignity or their position as tenants-in-chief and great landlords. The Abbot of St. Albans exercised a wide seignorial jurisdiction over the Hundred of Cashio from early times, and later, over numerous manors in the eastern counties,47 monuments to the piety of wealthy donors through the centuries. At the commencement of the fourteenth century the relations existing between the Abbey and its tenants were solely those of the manorial system, now fast decaying on all but monastic estates. The symmetry of this arrangement had been broken at an early date by the growth of the town at the very gates of the Abbey. The townsmen were ruled with the same despotic power as the country tenants, from whom they differed only in being more concentrated. As in the closely parallel case of Bury St. Edmunds, St. Albans was governed by a bailiff chosen by the Abbot and holding office during his pleasure; the townsmen were tried in the Abbot’s court, and offenders incarcerated in the monastic prison. The Abbot secured the profits arising from his court—‘the court of St. Albans under the ash-tree every three weeks’—and from fairs, as also the heavy tolls imposed upon all merchandise passing through the town. This antiquated tyranny contrasted ill with the wide municipal independence enjoyed by other towns.
There were thus substantial reasons why the townsmen should free themselves at the first opportunity from the hated tutelage of the Abbey, though it must be confessed that their civic disabilities weighed less with them than the strict preservation of the Lord Abbot’s warrens and fish ponds, the close fencing in of his estates, and a host of galling and antiquated signs of subjection, the chief of which was the obligation to full their cloth and grind their corn at the Abbot’s mill.
It was typical of the monastery’s conservatism that each succeeding abbot refused all concession. Discontent culminated in revolt. In 1274, taking as their pretext the matter of the Abbot’s mill, the townsmen inaugurated a mild rebellion by setting up handmills in their own houses. Abbot Roger easily suppressed the rising, and an outbreak in 1314, provoked by the tactless, overbearing Hugh of Eversdon, collapsed even more ignominiously. A more serious disturbance, which broke out in 1327, was not finally crushed for seven years. Taking advantage of the death of Abbot Hugh, and the temporary anarchy which followed the death of Edward II, the townsmen rose again and blockaded the Abbey. The affair was rendered the more serious by the existence among the monks of a party in league with the malcontents. The internal danger was averted by sending away the disaffected monks to distant cells, but Abbot William was compelled to give verbal consent to the demands of the townsmen for a charter embodying the right of choosing their own members of Parliament, liberty to use handmills, to fish in the Abbey waters, and to hunt its preserves, the privilege of executing writs without the interference of the bailiff of the liberty, and finally, the title of free burgesses.48 By royal help the Abbot at length crushed the rising; the old subjection was once more firmly rivetted upon the townsmen, and the Abbey parlour was paved with their handmills as a token of their defeat and a warning for the future.49 It is significant of the cruelty and selfishness of the Abbey that no sort of concession was made to the defeated townsmen. At this time, as subsequently, the Abbot showed himself incapable of appreciating the real trend of events. For a moment the Abbey had triumphed and all was well. Under the firm rule of Thomas de la Mare there was no hope of success for an isolated rising, but the outbreak of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 gave the tenants their opportunity, and the Abbey reaped the fruit of its foolish and short-sighted policy.
So much for the townsmen. The bulk of the Abbot’s subjects, however, were country tenants, living on his various manors. Under the manorial system rural tenants lived in a state of political and economic subjection to their lord. Of such tenants a certain number were free labourers, but the large majority were bound to the lord by varying degrees of servile tenure. The serfs or villeins divided their time between cultivating their own patches of land and rendering labour services on that part of the manor which was cultivated by the lord or his bailiff for the supply of his own granaries. On many of the St. Albans manors a small money rent was also paid by the serf for his land.50 By long tradition, though scarcely by law, the villein could not be evicted; on the other hand, he was bound to the soil, owed many feudal dues to his lord, and so many days’ work per year on the lord’s domain. A series of regulations of the close of the thirteenth century51 discloses the harsh policy of St. Albans with regard to its villeins. Freemen were forbidden to buy villein lands; villeins were forbidden to sell to anyone either lands or produce;52 money payments and labour services were rigorously exacted, and the huge warrens in possession of the Abbey were strictly preserved. The effect of these regulations was to prevent the serf increasing his holding, and to maintain the distinction between free and unfree tenants. By this means alone could the Abbot combat the general tendency towards fusion of the two classes.53
While the Abbey was thus fighting to continue the old tyranny manumissions were becoming frequent on lay lands, and all over the country labour services were being given up in favour of money payments. Further, the practice of letting out lands in farms to rent-paying tenants was growing more general. By diminishing the population the Black Death (1349) hastened this process,54 for landlords were compelled to offer high wages to secure the cultivation of their demesnes, and they had perforce to bring in rent-paying tenants to till the lands of such of their villeins as had succumbed. Nor was the break-up of the old system retarded by the Statute of Labourers (1352). The Act, which provided that food prices as well as wages should remain fixed, was not so much a blow aimed at the poorer classes as an attempt to restore the state of affairs existing before 1349. The process of manumission continued; the numbers of freemen steadily increased, and, in spite of the Statute, wages and prices rose higher than ever before. This increase in the numbers of free labourers inspired those who were still in villeinage with the ambition to become themselves free and to cease rendering labour services which, as the token of their servile tenure, were regarded as degrading.
Such were the grievances of the peasants who in 1381 formed the backbone of the Revolt. The unwillingness to allow manumission which has been seen to exist towards the end of the thirteenth century at St. Albans, and the harsh provisions made to retain labour services, continued in full force.55 In the case of one manor,56 it is true, the two systems appear to have existed side by side about 1340, but the rest of the evidence points to the retention in full of the old system both on the St. Albans estates and on the estates of its cells. Thus in 1381 the rural tenants of St. Albans were ready to join in the general revolt. Simultaneously the townsmen made a final attempt to win from the Abbot privileges identical with those demanded in 1327.
There is little reason to linger over the details of the Revolt. The townsmen rose in a body and set themselves to destroy all visible tokens of their subjection. The fences of the Abbot’s woods were pulled down, his game was killed freely, and a show was made of dividing his domain into small individual holdings. Many houses were burnt, and the Abbey itself was mildly raided; but from first to last there was no wish to take life. The leader of the insurgents was William Grindcob, who appears to have been something of an enthusiast, and the most disinterested of all the leaders in this revolt. In compliance with his demands the Abbot was compelled to deliver up all the Abbey charters, and then to draw up a new charter granting to the townsmen (1) rights of pasturage on his common, (2) permission to use private handmills, (3) entire freedom to hunt and fish over the monastic estates, and (4) self-government by freely-elected officials. These were a repetition of the demands of 1327, except that in the interval the notion of self-government had become more clearly defined.
In spite of the townsmen’s boast that they were in alliance with the country tenants, the two bodies seem to have acted independently. Each had its own grievances to redress. Indeed, the country tenants were still further divided, but the Abbey was powerless to resist even such small bodies as the villeins of individual manors. The villeins on most of the Hertford manors—Tittenhanger, Northaw, Watford, Berkhamstead—marched to the Abbey and in a curiously restrained spirit secured charters satisfying their various local grievances. The tenants of the manor of Redburn, for example, extracted charters containing the abolition of serfdom, of villein services (in favour of money rents), and also, in common with the townsmen, the rights of the chase and of fishing. Those of Rickmansworth obtained all these privileges and the right besides of disposing freely of lands and movables; and so it was done by most other manors in the county.
But the privileges were secured only to be lost almost immediately. The King’s officers arrived at St. Albans, no attempt at resistance was made, and the trouble subsided as quickly as it had arisen. The fifteen executions that followed (Grindcob being the most notable victim and dying finely) were, for the age, mild enough retaliation on the part of a panic-stricken government. As a matter of course, the Abbey was restored in its privileges, and the town subjected to it until the Dissolution.
In this way the Abbey was officially confirmed in its retention of an economic system which had become both unjust and unprofitable. Yet economic change was inevitable, and received a grudging recognition. In 1424 the Abbot secured a papal bull57 allowing the Abbey complete freedom to let out its lands in farms to rent-paying tenants—the system long since in vogue on lay estates. Later in the century manumissions of bondmen become more and more frequent. At first manumission is regarded as a privilege by the serfs, and the price paid for it is commonly entered in the margin of the document; but gradually examples grow more common; no more money entries occur, and it seems that the Abbot was only too happy ‘to be rid of the presence of persons who had claims upon him as a landowner without any power on his part to exact a return to himself of commensurate advantage.’58 Thus the old agricultural system slowly broke up, despite the monks who to the last retarded the transition to the new order.
Towards the town the Abbey remained to the last unbending, though not on account of any diminution in the resentment with which it was regarded by the inhabitants. In 1424 a large crowd appeared at the gate of the Abbey, armed with swords, to demand concessions similar to those of the extorted charter of 1381; but they were still cowed by the recollection of their late rising, and the affair came to nothing.59 The last mention of open resistance occurs in 1455 when John Chertsey erected a private mill, and so withdrew corn from that of the Abbot. To such an act of daring he seems to have been inspired by his wife, a woman of spirit. Chertsey, however, was a timid creature; his heart failed him, and he was induced to make humble apology to the Abbot and to destroy the mill.
There can be little or no doubt that in the sixteenth century monastic lands were far behind lay estates in economic development. According to M. Savine, the agricultural revolution had scarcely affected the lands of the monks at the time of the Dissolution.60 ‘Arable land occupies ... a very considerable part of the area that the monks kept in their own hands; it was very little, if at all, less than the area of the several pastures. As agriculturists the monks carried on a large, or at any rate, a fair-sized business. Now if the conversion of arable land into pasture land had become general under the first two Tudors, then in these thriving monastery farms it ought to be in much greater evidence than in the small homesteads of the peasants, who tilled the land for their own subsistence, and were fettered on all sides by communal regulations.’ But that the revolution was in full swing on lay estates we know from More’s Utopia, which was written as early as 1516.61 Even at this date agriculture was being widely abandoned by lay farmers who were converting what was formerly arable into pasture land, the growing woollen industry being found more profitable.62
To the last St. Albans strove to check economic development. At what was perhaps the great crisis in its history—the revolt of 1381—it had definitely refused to adapt itself to altered conditions. By that refusal it ensured its economic decay, and finally its ruin. For while it was highly desirable that religion should flourish within the monastery, it was absolutely essential that such a huge establishment should rest on a sound economic basis if it was to continue. In the sixteenth century, or even earlier, this condition was no longer fulfilled. It is, however, scarcely a matter for which blame attaches to the House. The mediaeval ideal, which in one aspect was the monastic ideal, was stability, not progress. St. Albans was identical in its attitude with the other great monasteries; it was neither more nor less conservative. Its inability, rather than its refusal, to change or admit change was its condemnation. Such a splendid immobility has something of grandeur about it. At the same time the picture of a town deprived of its ‘natural right of self-government,’ and hindered accordingly in its prosperity, and of the mass of the Abbey’s country tenants living unprosperously under an antiquated agricultural system, constitutes a crushing argument for the necessity of its dissolution.
The task of interpreting the Abbey’s history during the fifteenth century is difficult in the extreme. The confusion, the aimlessness which characterised political history are reflected in the records of St. Albans. Although the material is at least as plentiful as before, the impression conveyed by the facts is blurred and uncertain. With the death of De la Mare the lines of development become obscured. The fourteenth century had witnessed a steady upward movement culminating in the Abbacy of De la Mare. There is a temptation to see in the fifteenth century a consistent, growing degeneracy: the more as it is beyond question that by the year 1490 the Convent had sunk into deeper degredation than ever before. In one sense such a theory is true. The tide of economic decline and growing material decrepitude, stemmed by De la Mare’s careful administration, proceeded unchecked after his death. Within the convent the decay of the monastic spirit was everywhere apparent. Living became inevitably more luxurious, and the religious life grew cold and formal.63 Yet the reputation of St. Albans was as great in 1460 as in the days of Abbot Thomas. Up to 1464 (the year in which Whethamstede died) no flagrant abuses appear to have invaded the cloister, nor was there any considerable slackening of the discipline. The problem, of which we can offer no adequate solution, is to account for the extraordinary rapid decay between 1464 and 1489, by which time the Abbey had become publicly scandalous. The history of these twenty-five years is quite obscure.
The first half of the century was singularly barren of incident. The best known Abbot of the time was John Whethamstede (circa 1420–1440), a famous scholar and churchman. Significantly enough he was one of those chosen to represent the English nation at the Councils of Pavia and Basle. He was popular with the convent, perhaps on account of his ardent orthodoxy. The singularly bitter attitude adopted towards Lollards in de la Mare’s time was carefully maintained, and Whethamstede, by means of synods and commissions, extirpated heresy within the Liberty.64 The Abbot was regarded by the monks as having conferred notable benefits upon them; the chief of these were his acquisition of the Priory of Pembroke (1439), his generosity to the Abbey’s students at Oxford and certain financial innovations.65 To-day, as one digs him out of the very inferior chronicle of the time, he seems rather wanting in purpose, and somewhat vain and foolish; nevertheless, he certainly had the confidence of the convent, who, after his voluntary retirement for some years insisted upon re-electing him Abbot in 1452. The reason was probably that he was old, experienced, and cautious. At the time these qualities were invaluable; the Abbey was acquiring a political significance, and skilful guidance was necessary to avoid disaster amid the intrigues of Henry VI’s reign, which were threatening to culminate in Civil War. The second abbacy of Whethamstede, within which fell the Wars of the Roses, was therefore an anxious and, as it proved, disastrous time for the monks.
It was maintained by Hallam that the sympathies of Abbot Whethamstede were wholly Lancastrian during the Wars of the Roses. Riley, after a more careful study, affirmed that the reverse was the case,66 and without doubt he was nearer the mark than Hallam. The great affection consistently displayed for Humphrey Duke of Gloucester (a lavish patron of the Abbey), and the attempt in the chronicle to clear his memory, in themselves indicate with which party the Abbot’s sympathies lay. Further proof is supplied by florid verses, strongly Yorkist in tone, from the Abbot’s own hand; and finally, there is the fact that the Abbey was pillaged by the Lancastrian troops in 1461. But the question is of the slightest importance.67 As a matter of fact, the Abbey enjoyed the full favour of Henry VI. as much as of Edward IV; it was only in the actual fighting that its political proclivities affected its fortunes.
Henry VI was a frequent visitor at St. Albans, and bestowed, among many other marks of his favour, a notable extension of the franchise. The seignorial jurisdiction of the Abbot over the Hundred of Cashio, which was based on a charter of Henry II, had gradually been diminished by the encroachments of neighbouring Lords. In 1440 the King granted a new interpretation of the words of Henry II’s Charter, by which the Abbot’s authority was restored to its full limit, if not rendered greater than ever before.68 In order to obtain such a grant it is obvious that the Abbot must have been in high favour with Henry VI, who indeed is always mentioned in these chronicles in terms of respect.
Nevertheless, when in 1455 the Yorkist party triumphed at the first battle of St. Albans, only the fact that the direction of the Abbey’s sympathies was well known can have saved it from being plundered.69
The continual fighting in its neighbourhood reduced the Abbey to dire straits, and the next six years were among the darkest in its history. Its troubles culminated in the disaster of 1461, when, after a Lancastrian victory at the second battle of St. Albans, the Northern troops plundered the Abbey and horribly ravaged the surrounding country. The Queen even condescended to rob the Abbey of its most precious jewels and treasures.70 The result was sheer famine; the convent were dispersed, and the Abbot retired to his native town. Thus for the only time in its history the continuity of conventual life at St. Albans was broken. The final triumph of Edward IV in the same year ensured such amelioration of the Abbey’s fortunes as was possible. The battle had taken place in February, and by November the convent had re-assembled, to enter upon the last stage of its existence with a fresh grant of privileges. A complicated jurisdiction, which far exceeded the grant of 1440, was bestowed upon the Abbey.71
The unsoundness of the Abbey’s economic practice and the consequent increasing financial embarrassment were at the root of all its troubles in the fifteenth century. Its poverty weakened its independence, and was at once the cause of the decline of its hospitality and the reason for its growing obsequiousness toward the great. The bishops especially were quick to realise the weakness of the Abbey.72 Always jealous of exempt houses, they exhibited in the fifteenth century an unusually bitter hostility towards St. Albans. In 1399, Henry Bishop of Lincoln had formally notified the Abbot that he claimed no jurisdiction over the Abbey73; this was nothing more than an acknowledgment of an old and undoubted privilege pertaining to St. Albans as an exempt monastery. Only twenty years later, at the Council of Pavia, a new Bishop of Lincoln claimed full jurisdiction over St. Albans, and called for the reform of exempt houses. This was followed by the revival of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s claims to jurisdiction, but these the Abbot was still strong enough to resist. A few years later a dispute concerning the Bishop of Norwich’s jurisdiction over the Cell of Binham broadened out into an organised attack by the English bishops upon the privileges of St. Albans. This was evidently regarded as a test case. Exactly how the struggle ended is not recorded, but probably it left matters in the old uncertain condition. These attempts mark a fresh stage in the growing unpopularity of the Abbey, and it is worthy of notice that the increasing hatred towards exempt houses on the part of the bishops might well of itself have led to the fall of the monastic system in England. As it was, the support of the bishops made it more easy for Henry VIII to carry through the Dissolution.
Even during the fourteenth century there had been a natural and almost inevitable growth of luxury in the monastic life: in the course of the fifteenth it progressed by leaps and bounds. A host of insignificant facts illustrate the tendency. The food of the novices was rendered more sumptuous on the plea that the youths had not such strong constitutions as their fathers. Papal Bulls were secured remitting fasts, and the allowance of spices was doubled. As with the convent, so was it with the Abbots themselves. William Heyworth (1401–1420), who was considered so excellent a cleric as to be raised to episcopal dignity as Bishop of Lichfield, spent large sums of money on the completion of a splendid Abbot’s mansion at Tittenhanger, contrary, needless to say, to all Benedictine precedent. A parallel tendency was a perceptible decline of zeal and interest in the religious life. In 1428, for instance, owing (as the Abbot confessed) to its uselessness, the ancient cell of Beaulieu74 was abandoned, and twenty years later the Priory of Wymondham, as the result of a trifling dispute broke away from the mother house, and was erected into an Abbey. The tendency is further illustrated by the Constitutions published by Whethamstede after a formal visitation of the convent.75 No gross abuses were discovered, but a certain laziness and indifference towards religious services and observance was found to have pervaded the convent. It was much the same in the cells which the Abbot visited a little later. It appeared that the monks were lazy, and slept too long; just correction for offences had not always been inflicted; services were apt to be carried out indifferently, and sometimes to be omitted altogether. It was slothfulness, not positive vice, that had to be fought against. A subtle illustration of this is unconsciously supplied by the chronicler. The Abbot had promulgated a set of rigorous constitutions which went to the root of the trouble more than was usual; but the convent murmured, refused to accept them, and finally carried their will against the Abbot; as for the Constitutions they became a dead letter. When Whethamstede was re-elected in 145276 he was informed that three great defects existed in the Monastery. Scarcely one in the Abbey, it appeared, could be found competent to teach grammar; there were hardly any students from St. Albans at Gloucester Hall; and it was only with difficulty that persons could be found prepared to undertake the burden of preaching.
These facts point to a rapid raising of the standard of comfort, to growing indifference, and a sad decay of the monastic spirit. But in view of the dreadful condition of the convent in 1490 it is important to observe that they give us no reason to suppose the existence of immorality in the cloister or even of any serious relaxation of the discipline.
Abbot Whethamstede’s successor was a certain William Albon (1464–1476), ‘who,’ says the chronicler, ‘followed diligently in the footsteps of his predecessor. During all the time he was Abbot he strove after the good of his Church in things temporal and spiritual.’77 His reign and that of William Wallingford (1476-?1490) carry us to the year 1490, when a letter of Cardinal Morton reveals the monastery in a state of utter degradation. The decay must be placed entirely between the years 1476 and 1490, and it is impossible to account for its rapidity. Perhaps it was due to the bad influence of William Wallingford, but the whole matter is not a little mysterious. In 1451 Wallingford is found holding the joint offices of Archdeacon, Cellarer, Bursar, Forester and Sub-Cellarer of the Abbey, and in some of these offices he was continued during Whethamstede’s second abbacy (1452–1464). During this same period he was to all intents and purposes convicted of having laid hands upon the moneys of the previous Abbot. The matter is dealt with at length in the chronicle, and in most violent terms Wallingford is accused again and again of habitual perjury.78 Yet on the death of Whethamstede he was elected prior, and in 1476 Abbot.79 Finally, in an account of The Lives and Benefactions of the Later Abbots80 he is spoken of in terms of the most extravagant praise. On the whole the general impression of this difficult character derived from the Chronicle is that of a bad man but a vigorous Abbot, who, however evil his influence upon the convent, nevertheless rendered it important services. The monks, perhaps, forgot his vices in their admiration of what was to them the first of virtues—his strenuous efforts to preserve the independence of the house. For it was during his rule that the most determined, and, as it proved, successful attacks were made upon the Abbey’s highly-prized exemption from archiepiscopal visitation.
In the register of Wallingford’s abbacy there is only one indication of the bad turn conventual life was taking. This is the record of an enormous traffic in patronage, a new and bad feature at St. Albans, confined for the most part to Wallingford’s abbacy.81 Economically bankrupt, the Monastery was reduced at last to bartering the livings in its gift, and even to trafficking in the monastic offices.82 In the register of William Wallingford there is a long list of entries noting the gift by the Abbot to all sorts of important persons of the right to present to the next vacancy in many of the Abbey’s livings. These transactions, whether accompanied by a money consideration or simply to gain the support and protection of persons of high rank, indicate a willingness on the part of the Abbot to trifle with some of his most sacred responsibilities. More sinister still are the frequent changes of the vicars in the various livings. At Elstree, for example, there were as many as nine rectors in sixteen years; at Shephale five occur in six years.83
The case of St. Albans may have been exceptional. In the general decay of English monasticism the Abbey incurred an unenviable notoriety, which indeed still clings to it. But that the English monasteries as a body were in a depraved condition was fully realised by the heads of Church and State. In 1490 Archbishop Morton applied for and received from Innocent VIII the special powers necessary for a visitation of Cluniac, Cistercian and Premonstratension Houses with foreign heads.84 Armed with the Papal commission Morton wrote letters to the heads of the various monasteries, in which he imperatively called upon them to reform.
In a letter which he addressed to the Abbot, Morton wrote85: ‘It has come to our ears, being at once publicly notorious and brought before us on the testimony of many witnesses worthy of credit, that you the Abbot aforementioned have been of long time noted and diffamed, and do yet continue so noted, of simony, of usury, of dilapidation and waste of goods, revenues and possessions of the said monastery and of certain other enormous crimes and excesses hereafter written.... You and certain of your fellow monks and brethren ... have relaxed the measure and form of religious life; you have laid aside the pleasant yoke of contemplation and all regular observances, hospitality, alms86 ... and the ancient rule of your order is deserted ... you have dilapidated the common property; you have made away with the jewels and the woods to the value of 8,000 marks or more.’ The letter goes on to specify ‘the enormous crimes and excesses’ in a most complete manner; names and details are given in every case, and the Abbot and Thomas Sudbury, a monk, are accused of the most disgusting offences. The nunneries of Prez and Sopwell—cells of the Abbey—are stated to be little better than brothels. ‘The brethren of the Abbey, some of whom, as it is reported, are given over to all the evil things of the world, neglect the service of God altogether. They live with harlots and mistresses publicly and continuously within the precincts of the monastery and without.’
The Archbishop adds that he had warned the Abbot to cure these abuses before securing the papal commission. The Abbot and the Prioresses of Prez and Sopwell are strictly enjoined to correct these enormities within thirty days, and the Priors of the more distant cells within sixty days. Unless they comply the Archbishop himself will be compelled to make a personal visitation and to carry out the necessary reforms.
The Abbot, making no attempt to answer the charges, instantly appealed to the Pope against the authority of the Archbishop to hold a visitation.87 The Pope consented to prohibit any action on Morton’s part pending the hearing of the appeal by two papal chaplains. Abbot Wallingford must now have won his case but for the intervention of Henry VII. The combined pleadings of King and Archbishop prevailed with the Pope. On July 30th, 1490, Innocent VIII, without pronouncing on the question of exemption, granted special faculties to the Archbishop for this particular visitation notwithstanding all rights and privileges. And there can be little doubt but that the visitation was in due course carried out.88 Whether all these charges were substantiated we do not know; but it is impossible to doubt that the bulk of them was true. St. Albans was too large, too famous a house, and too near London, for Morton to have been misled by idle rumour. The outcome of Morton’s letter is unrecorded; probably the reforms were effected, though the Abbot, it would appear, was not deposed. It is in the Abbey’s favour that no further trace of immorality is to be found in the history of the fifty years of life which lay before it.
It seems strange that the Abbey should have gone on after this shock without a suspicion of coming destruction. Such, however, was the case; and even Henry VII is found to endow the monastery in return for certain prayers for his soul to be rendered ‘for ever and ever.’ As late as 1530, indeed, there is mention of a grant to the Abbey of an annual fair. Of these last years a wealth of detail has survived, albeit in unlikely places. In 1511 the House had fallen into the King’s debt; in 1515 Abbot Ramrygge, Wallingford’s successor, refused to pay Peter Pence,89 and in 1519 the Prior of Rochester was appointed coadjutor to the old Abbot.90 Monastic affairs, it appears, were in complete disorder, and a large debt (4,000 marks) had been accumulated. In the same year the Prior of Tynemouth was freed from the jurisdiction of St. Albans,91 a measure which illustrates the enfeebled condition of the Abbey.
The first hint of the final catastrophe occurred upon the death of Ramrygge in 1521. By a dispensation of Adrian VI, Wolsey was commended to the vacant abbacy,92 the convent apparently allowing this infringement of its rights without protest. Perhaps, as Abbot Gasquet has said, the motive for this action was in part a desire to reward the cardinal for secular services. If so, it was a poor compliment to Wolsey to receive an abbey so loaded with debt as to be unable to pay its contribution to Convocation.93 It is far more likely that he secured it, knowing that the House was bankrupt, and that strong measures were required to save it.94
The death of Wolsey necessitated a fresh election. No interference was attempted by Henry VIII, who confirmed the convent’s choice in the person of Robert Catton. It was during his abbacy the Visitation of the monasteries was carried out.
Owing to the disappearance of the Hertfordshire surveys, St. Albans can furnish no certain evidence upon the numerous questions arising out of the Dissolution.95 Such facts as we have tend to confirm the conclusions of M. Savine.96 There is no doubt, for example, that the social sympathies of the Abbey were pre-eminently aristocratic. Most of the monks do not themselves appear to have come from the lower strata of society. The Abbey bestowed its corrodies for the most part upon persons of the well-to-do classes. Moreover, a close connection existed between the Abbey and the neighbouring gentry, whose sons it had long been wont to board and educate. On members of the same class many of the lay offices of the monastery were conferred.97 Even the apparently democratic practice of alms-giving was a perfunctory duty, a mere compliance with the wishes of donors who had in times past liberally endowed the Abbey. At a wealthy House like St. Albans, which relied so completely on the patronage of the great, it could scarcely have been otherwise.
In fact, evidence compels us to reduce the generally accepted estimates of the Abbey’s social and economic importance. Such social services as it did render were chiefly on the side of hospitality and education. Of these, hospitality98—which had always been at least as aristocratic as otherwise—had seriously diminished by the sixteenth century.99 Nevertheless, after the Dissolution this common shelter for rich and poor must have been deeply regretted.100
The Abbey perhaps did its best work in the sphere of education; from first to last during our period particular care was expended upon the education of the monks, within the monastery and at the University. The Abbey deserves still greater credit for creating and maintaining St. Albans Grammar School. The first mention of the School occurs in 1100, when it was ruled by a secular head master and received fees from scholars. In the thirteenth century arose the practice of boarding within the monastery and teaching the sons of neighbouring lords; for the future no fees were to be received from the sixteen poorest scholars; the master was given the rare privilege of excommunicating the disobedient, and allowed, after an examination, to confer degrees upon the scholars after the manner of the Universities. All illicit or adulterine schools were to be rooted out of the Liberty. Towards the end of the century the Abbey began to board and educate a number of poor scholars; this custom, as a charity, fell to the Almoner, who soon devolved his duties upon a serjeant, who, like the schoolmaster, was not a monk. The school was thus in no sense ‘an avenue to the monastery’; on the contrary, there was an entire separation of the school from the Abbey. It was, perhaps, for this reason that the institution flourished when the Abbey itself was in decay101 till, by a wide interpretation of terms, it was dissolved in 1539 as a part of the Abbey. This continuous interest in secular education for four centuries was perhaps the best word that could be said for the Abbey at the Dissolution.102
The Visitation of the monasteries was carried out by Cromwell, as Vicar-General, in 1535.103 John ap Rice, the commissioner at St. Albans, wrote to his master: ‘At St. Albans we found little although there was much to be found.’104 The commissioner spoke the simple truth if it was disorder and faction to which he referred. In the same year the prior and about half of the monks petitioned Sir Francis Brian105 to save them from their own Abbot, who had contracted large debts, had sold the woods belonging to the convent, and had compelled the convent to affix their seal to transactions of which they disapproved, threatening to expel anyone who should inform against him. Within a year there was civil war within the Abbey, and the same section of the convent wrote a second desperate appeal to Sir Brian, saying that the Abbot would surely take vengeance upon them unless Sir Brian secured the appointment of a coadjutor.106 ‘Our monastery is in much decay and misery,’ they confess sadly, and their words obtain confirmation from another extraordinary incident of that year, the trial of the third Prior for making various treasonable remarks, as for example, that the King intended to leave only four churches in England. Other monks of the Abbey had informed against him to ‘avoid guilty participation.’ The result was indecisive, but the whole matter is an indication of the complete demoralisation of the convent.107
By this time it was becoming known to the world that St. Albans must fall.108 Robert Catton was deprived of the Abbacy in the early days of 1538. The convent was induced to renounce its right to elect a successor in favour of Thomas Cromwell, who appointed a certain Richard Boreman (or Stevynache) to the vacancy. According to Abbot Gasquet, Boreman was chosen simply to effect a voluntary surrender of the Abbey, and it certainly is true that in December, 1537, Cromwell’s commissioners had tried in vain to induce Catton to resign the Abbey into their hands. He had declared himself ready, they wrote to Cromwell, ‘to beg his bread all the days of his life rather than surrender, although by the confession of the Abbot himself there is just cause of deprivation, not only for breaking the King’s injunctions, but also for the manifest dilapidation, making of shifts, negligent administration, and sundry other causes.’109 It seems plain, in fact, that Catton’s deprivation was in large part due to his own misdeeds,110 a conclusion which is supported by the fact that Boreman himself was soon involved in difficulties with the Government which appointed him. He was sent for a time to gaol, which is difficult of explanation on the assumption that he was a Government tool appointed only to effect a quiet surrender. Eventually the Act of Surrender was signed on December 5th, 1539. Some forty signatures were appended, indicating a decrease of one-third in the normal numbers of the convent.111 The net monastic income was estimated at £2,102, the fourth highest in the Kingdom.112 It only remained to divide the spoils, which was done with astonishing quickness. By the year 1544 every acre of the St. Albans estates was disposed of. The Abbey buildings were acquired by the townsmen (and so saved from destruction) at a cost of £400.
The history of St. Albans is sufficient proof that the time is past when we can rest content with generalisations about monasticism in the later Middle Ages. During the fourteenth century the trend of events in the Abbey was entirely contrary to that in most English Houses. While they decayed, St. Albans revived. A century later it is probable that the monasteries as a whole were in a far less degraded condition than St. Albans. Perhaps similarly startling differences will be revealed when the history of other abbeys has been worked out in detail. Many loose generalisations on the subject of the monasteries are due to the assumption that decay or reform proceeded at an equal pace in different abbeys. Froude, for example, sought to trace a growing corruption of monasticism from Norman times. His view was founded simply on his study of St. Albans records, and even here his account was worthless. The decadence, the immorality of which he spoke was largely confined to the early years of the fourteenth century, and the Abbacy of William Wallingford (1476–1490). To see in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a consistent, uniform process of decay is largely to misunderstand St. Albans’ history.
It is true, nevertheless, that the best days of the Abbey were already past at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The evolution of modern from mediaeval society, which was effected during our period, was fatal to monasticism. The country grew more and more out of sympathy with the monasteries; amid uncongenial surroundings, St. Albans, in common with other abbeys, became increasingly unpopular. By its unintelligent conservatism St. Albans alienated the sympathies of section after section of the community, until at the Dissolution it stood well-nigh in isolation. Recent defence of the monastic system has failed as completely as Froude’s indictment. In the Dissolution of St. Albans we may not, like Froude, ‘see the workings of the ineffable Being,’ but we are no less unable to regret it, to look upon it as a great social calamity.