Tudor Apocalypse

Monastic dissolution, the twilight of the saints, and the occult consequences

Dec 14, 2024

Between Easter 1536 and Easter 1540, the spiritual landscape of England and Wales was changed forever. On the orders of Henry VIII, every one of its 660 monasteries and 180 friaries were dissolved, or forcibly closed, their assets taken by the crown and their communities dispersed. And 14,000 monks, nuns and friars, as well as countless monastic servants and tenants, became largely surplus to needs.

It was a blitzkrieg of sorts, even though Cromwell’s commissioners were often unclear on the specifics of their task, and each religious house was dealt with on a case-by-case basis. But the process of dissolution remained complete and irreversible. In every region of the kingdom, from villages to towns large and small, and cities, monasteries and friaries were entrusted with the provision of hospitality, employment, education and charity. In practice, they dominated not just the spiritual life of a community, but also its society, economy and culture. When the realm’s religious houses were dissolved, communities lost their major employer, consumer and divine protector. Family tombs were destroyed; prayers for the dead went unsaid. The impact was, for many, apocalyptic.

The Saints: Semi-Divine Challengers to Henry’s Supremacy

At a pace that must have been dizzying for the average citizen, these great, grandiose embodiments of papal and ecclesiastical authority were brought to their knees and turned to ruin. The cult of saints – a phenomenon central to the status and function of religious houses – was also dismantled. The General Council of Nicea in 787CE first declared that every consecrated church should have a relic placed on its altar. Now, in Tudor England, these holy artefacts were stripped of their gems and precious metals and either ‘taken away’ or perhaps publicly destroyed, as evidence of the impotence of Catholic superstition. A few relics were spirited to the continent or passed into the hands of recusant families. But even though many saints were native to the place of their translation, and their cults highly localised, the power they exerted over the land surrounding their shrines was broken.

The cult of saints had been waning for some time, although the Holy Virgin Mary remained popular. And pilgrimage retained significant support in England. Even King Henry VIII himself had made pilgrimages to Boxley Abbey and Walsingham before commencing the dissolution. Ironically, he appealed to the HVM in his will, exclaiming:

We doe instantlie desire and require the blessed Virgine Marie his mother, with all the holy companie of Heaven, continually to pray for us while we live in this world, and in the passing out of the same.

But still Henry would not tolerate competition for control of his realm; not from the semi-divine, half-alive, charismatic saints, nor from their earthly clerical lieutenants. The problem of saints was real, so much so that a bill to tackle them was drafted, although it never reached the statute book.

The kingdom hitherto was a patchwork of provinces over which saints exerted real sovereignty. As discussed previously, the praesentia of a saint – their holy presence or incarnation in place – sacralised the land surrounding a shrine and cleansed it of undesirable spiritual influences. Proximity to the saint’s alive-in-death remains was a paramount concern, the corpse functioning as a conduit for divine power. Thus, a saint’s shrine became the centre of a sacralised landscape; a holy-of-holies – naturally, surrounded by the high walls of a church and its attendant abbey. Even by association, places could fall under the beneficence of a saint. For example, depictions of St Edmund in parish churches were thought to ward off the Black Death. And applying his name to an area of land conferred similar protective benefits. An endowment the size of half the modern-day county of Suffolk, bequeathed to the abbey by Edward the Confessor, became known as the Liberty of St Edmund, and was exempt from direct taxation by the king’s sheriff. Such use of a saint’s name on one hand defined the area within which a religious house held jurisdiction. But it also delineated a sacred geography, a mini empire over which the saint had dominion. As a whole, this was clearly a state of affairs Henry could not tolerate.

Henry VIII’s Acts, and their Enforcement

The 1534 Act of Supremacy declared the king the Supreme Head of the Church of England, separating it from papal authority. It gave the Crown the legal power to reform and reorganize religious institutions in the country. Those who refused to acknowledge Henry’s status, such as the Carthusians, were tortured and executed for treason.

Henry rode on the coattails of Reformation fervour, exploiting its anti-Catholic zeal. The alleged corruption and immorality of Rome, skewered by Martin Luther in his 95 Theses, gave the king the pretext he needed to demonstrate his authority over England’s religious institutions, and freedom to marry whomever he liked. Under the guise of protestant reform, the First Suppression Act of 1535, also known as the Act for the Dissolution of the Smaller Monasteries, ordered the suppression of all monastic houses with an annual income of less than £200. This was justified on the basis that smaller monasteries in particular were centres of ‘manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living’, according to the Act’s preamble at least.

More significantly, monasteries were extraordinary wealthy, owning over a quarter of England's cultivated land, and Henry VIII needed money to fund his extravagant lifestyle (he owned 60 residences and a personal collection of up to 4,000 gems. He consumed an estimated 5,000 calories of fine food and wine daily.) Thus, the Second Suppression Act of 1539 brought about the closure of all remaining monasteries, regardless of their size or income. It provided the legal framework for the complete dissolution of the monastic system in England and the removal of any remaining Catholic influence. After all, even if monasteries represented the phenomena of evangelical counsel and consecrated life, they also served as a reminder of how far religious houses had fallen from those simple, lofty aspirations into luxury and worldly concerns.

The 1540 Act of Dissolution formalized and legitimized the process that had been ongoing since 1536. Cromwell, as the king's vicegerent in spirituals and a staunch supporter of reform, oversaw the process. His commissioners compiled the Valor Ecclesiasticus – a survey of monastic wealth, and enacted legal proceedings to transfer monastic properties to the Crown. Aside from its lands, Bury St Edmunds abbey was relieved of 5,000 marks of gold and jewels, and over 2,400 ounces (68kg) of precious metal.

Some monastic land was redistributed to Henry’s supporters or repurposed for other uses: private residences such as Titchfield Abbey; cathedrals or parish churches; or converted into hospitals and educational institutions such as Christ Church College at Oxford University, which was formerly a priory. But many abbeys were simply left to decay. Bury abbey, for example, was designated a quarry, and today abbey masonry can be found embedded into the fabric of secular buildings across the town.

The Folk-Response to Monastic Destruction

The reaction of local populations varied widely, from encouragement or indifference to concern or outright rebellion, which was most dramatically expressed in the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace. This large-scale uprising involved roughly 40,000 protesters and manoeuvred through much of northern England. Its objective was the prevention of any further dissolution, and in that objective it wholly failed. The rebellion was suppressed, and its leaders executed for treason.

In Bury St Edmunds, the attitude of the townsfolk was somewhat different. Relations between the laity and the abbey had been fraught for centuries. In 1327, because townsmen lacked any control over Bury’s affairs, they besieged the abbey, broke in and looted it. Once the rioters were finally subdued, allegedly thirty cartloads of prisoners were transported to Norwich; some were convicted of treason, and a punitive fine of £14,000 (more than £15,000,000 today) was levied on the town. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the abbey was once more a target. The prior was decapitated and his head exhibited on a pole next to that of the Lord Chief Justice of England, John de Cavendish.

Closer to the time of dissolution, one Sunday evening a certain Thomas Warner was walking through the streets of Bury when he was set upon by one John Barnysby. Warner was so badly beaten that he did not survive the night. His wife, Alice, sought out the porters and officers of the town to arrest Barnysby, but their response was a demand for the payment of a warrant, knowing it was well beyond Alice’s means. Thus, despite his crime, Barnysby remained a free man, the reason being that the town’s porters and officers were in the employ of Bury abbey, and Barnysby was an assistant to the abbey’s sacrist. In other words, the abbey looked after its own, even though Barnysby was a renowned thug and, over the previous decade, had frequently ‘broken the king’s peace.’ This one example sums up the resentments felt by townsfolk towards monastic houses: that they were a law unto themselves; immoral, insular, greedy, disparaging. Little wonder that, in the years following dissolution, the great Bury abbey was reduced to a pile of rubble.

There were certainly upsides to dissolution. For starters, it gave townsfolk and the growing gentry class an opportunity to forge for themselves a civic role free of ecclesiastical control; for the first time, they were able to shape a destiny for their communities befitting their own needs and wants. For monks and nuns however, the prospects were not so good. While some entered parish priesthood and others were granted a modest pension, many found themselves on the wrong side of the monastery walls, unemployed and homeless. A few would have liberated various items, with or without permission. Books were a popular choice. Robert Barker for example, Prior of Byland Abbey, secured for himself a personal library of 150 books.

The Occult Consequences of Dissolution

There are two interesting consequences of dissolution not frequently discussed, but worthy of consideration. The first is the spiritual vacuum created by the literal and metaphorical dismantling of the cult of saints. Much had changed since its golden age in the seventh and eighth centuries, when grass-roots veneration of obscure martyrs tied to a specific locality was prevalent. Still, by the dissolution, 120 cults persisted, and the domains they presided over as immortal landlords were extensive. The saints’ divine praesentia, radiating from their shrines in a model akin to geomantic notions of sacred sites as axes mundi, protected and fructified the earth. But following dissolution, that process of hallowing, and of sustaining the health of the saint via ritual and ceremony during the saint’s festival, swiftly ended. With the apparatus of the saints’ cult dismantled, the lands were returned to a profane state. What then? What, if anything, seeped into the realm thereafter?

The other consequence of dissolution concerns the thousands of clerics made unemployed or homeless. Certainly, some of those unable to find gainful employment elsewhere would have considered the option of so-called ‘service magician’ or cunning man. After all, saints were originally quite consciously produced, in part at least, to address the needs of a populace who regularly consulted non-Christian magicians to find lost objects, interpret past and future events, conjure, heal, protect and curse. In the wake of saints’ sudden exclusion from the fabric of society, it would not be unreasonable to wonder whether the folk who had once sought out sorceresses, seers, witches and cunning folk, would do so once again. If so, the demand for cunning folk would be evident to any wandering clergyman. Furthermore, the impact of Reformation zeal essentially downgraded the role of the supernatural in liturgical formularies: clergy had become mere counsellors; the communion was now mere remembrance; the miraculous had been extirpated from religious life, to the consternation of many.

Abbeys contained some of the largest libraries of occult texts in Europe. And while demonic magick was outlawed (not that it prevented monks and clergy consulting the grimoires in their possession), natural magick was not. In fact, demonic magick remained a grey area on the basis that practitioners were able to coerce demons only because they had first supplicated God and obtained divine authority.

Hugh of St Victor identified the following types of magick: divination, astrology, sortilegia, maleficia, praestigia. Yet divination and astrology were widely practiced, along with alchemy and herbalism. For example, the Eadwine Psalter from Canterbury included two divinatory texts: one concerning chiromancy or palmistry; the other onomancy, or using names as divinatory tools. Books of Fate were also in demand in monasteries and cathedral schools. These were tabulated forms of divination providing ready-made answers to questions, which could be interrogated once dice or coins were cast to obtain a number.

So, unemployed monks and friars with knowledge of liturgy and potentially with hands-on practical magickal experience, who were literate, fluent in Latin, and had access to the relevant texts, were well-positioned to assume the mantle of service magician. In fact, there is some evidence of it: Richard Bayfield, a monk from Bury abbey, was charged with conjuring demons in 1546. His contemporary, William Blomfild, left the abbey before its dissolution but was renowned as an alchemist and sorcerer. One hundred years later the notorious John Lowes, vicar of Brandeston, was convicted and executed as a witch.

It is interesting that, at exactly the time the cult of saints in England was dismantled, witchcraft was made a crime (via the 1542 Witchcraft Act.) This was, in part at least, a consequence of the tide of Puritanism sweeping the kingdom. By the 1560s ecclesiastical courts were hearing cases of full-blown maleficium although, as discussed elsewhere, a good deal of evidence exists to suggest that witches were cunning folk diabolised by elite interrogators, and their infernal familiars were in fact faerie folk. Perhaps then, the dominion of the saints was a form of tyranny and, in their dismantling, the ancient godlings of England: the fey, the wodewose, the land deities, the ancestral dead and elemental spirits, were granted an opportunity to return to their places in the land from where they had been exorcised by the saints’ power. For a few short years an opportunity presented itself to form working partnerships with a new breed of cunning folk; a new generation of service magicians who, it seems, emerged from a monastic setting and who, ironically, would be responsible for the witchcraft legacy in the decades to come.