Chapter Seven

THE DISSOLUTION

The story of the last years of Dieulacres Abbey is closely interwoven with the series of national events which marked the beginning of the Reformation in England. For several years before the attack on the monasteries began, there were rumours that the English Church was likely to undergo some kind of change, and Henry VIII’s “Great Matter” and the subsequent break with the Church of Rome were thought by many to be merely a foretaste of things to come. On the Continent, Martin Luther had launched his attack on monasticism in 1521, and eight years later the word “Protestant” was coined at the Diet of Speyer. By the 1530s many new ideas were being eagerly absorbed in England by clerics and laymen alike. The dissolution of the monasteries, which on the Continent accompanied or followed the religious revolution, preceded the doctrinal reformation in England by some eleven years.

The extermination of monastic life was the least revolutionary, but perhaps the most far-reaching, part of the English Reformation. Attacks had been made on church property many times before, but the Act of Supremacy of 1534 conferred upon Henry VIII powers far greater than those which had been exercised by previous sovreigns. The legislation which culminated in the Act of Supremacy substituted the King for the Pope in the English Church. And over this question of Supremacy the Religious Orders were in a somewhat different position from the parish clergy. The monks and nuns were part of international organisations, and certain Orders, like the Cistercians, owed a special allegiance to the Pope. This state of affairs was completely at variance with the concept of the Royal Supremacy which was the essential ingredient of the Tudor religious revolution. Henry suspected, rightly or wrongly, that the monks, or at least some of them, might put their allegiance to the Pope before their allegiance to the King, and that the monasteries might become rallying­ points for opposition to his ecclesiastical policies. By making them "render unto Caesar” all that they had, regardless of whether it was rightfully “Caesar’s” or not, he removed this suspicion from his mind, drastically but effectively. To help him in his Work, he had a number of very willing assistants, chief of Whom was Thomas Cromwell, the King’s Vicar­General.

Thomas Cromwell had entertained the idea of dissolving the monasteries for some time, and he had Cardinal Wolsey’s precedents to guide him. A pretext had to be found, and the corruption which undoubtedly existed in some of the monasteries was as good an excuse as any. In 1535, a Commission was appointed to visit all the religious foundations and to ascertain the amount and value of their property. It was said that the King was propising to levy a tenth upon the monasteries. Since the last survey to be made for such purposes had been the TAXATIO of Edward I’s reign, there were legitimate grounds for a re­assessment, but in addition to the tax-book known as the VALOR ECCLESIASTICUS, reports were made on the spiritual and moral state of the abbeys. On the whole, these vísitations were hostile, biased and hypocritical, for the Visitors knew that they were expected to concentrate on the less commendable aspects of sixteenth­century monastic life.

The visitation of Staffordshire revealed that, next to Burton, Dieulacres had the largest annual net income £227. [1] It is interesting to compare this assessment with that of 1291, when the total value of the Dieulacres estates was just under £165 PER ANNUM. Over the years, the value of the Staffordshire ternporalities had risen from £37 13s. Sd. to £93 1s. 4d., and the spiritualities from £36 to £44. In Cheshire, the temporal possessions of the abbey were valued at £45 1s. 6d. PER ANNUM, as opposed to £29 15s. in 1291, and the spiritual revenues amounted to £24 10s. 8d. The assessment for Rossall, however, shewed an extraordinary decrease from £61 10s. in 1291 to a mere £13 7s. in 1535; and if we add the assessments of the other Lancashire properties it brings the total to only £21 10s. 8d. The only explanation which can be put forward for this remarkable devaluation is that Rossall had been the centre of the abbey’s sheeprearing activities, which had declined considerably by the sixteenth century. Added together, the assessments of the various estates and sources of revenue produced the gross figure of £243 3s. 6d., from which certain fees and stipends were deducted to arrive at the net valuation of £227 Ss.

In 1536 the smaller monasteries of England and Wales were suppressed on the grounds that “manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living” were rampant in those houses which had an income of less than £200 PER ANNUM. [2] It strains credence to believe that an income of £200 divided vice from virtue so precisely, but it is arguable that economically this was the approximate annual income required to maintain a community of twelve monks. Twelve had for centuries been regarded as the traditional number of the perfect community, with the abbot as thirteenth.

Because of its income, rather than its virtue, Dieulacres survived the first wave of dissolutions. The neighbouring Cistercian houses of Croxden and Hulton also escaped suppression, even though their incomes, of £90 and £76 respectively, were well below the margin. Although the Act of Suppression made provision for the transfer of monks from the doomed houses to the larger monasteries, the dissolution was carried out so swiftly that it was found more expedient to ailow a large number of the smaller abbeys to remain in being for a time, on payment of fine which uxually amounted to a year’s net income. These “Continuance Fines” were a crushing burden, and they ensured that the re~ prieved houses would stay in existence no longer than was absolutely necessary.

Although the greater abbeys were untouched by the suppressions of 1536, it was apparent to all concerned that this state of affairs could not last. The King’s eyes had been opened to the enormous wealth of the monasteries, and the failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 had showed him that it could all be his for the taking. In 1537 the attack on the greater monasteries began. Fresh visitations were made in order to induce abbots to make voluntary surrenders; the Friars were suppressed, and there was a systematic pillage of the greater Shrines such as Hailes, St. Edmundsbury and Walsingham. Seme of the voluntary confessions which were made to the Visitors reveal that, contrary to what might have been expected, the monks were generally no more papally ­minded than the secular clergy. The Cistercian monks of Bittlesden, for example, were ready to put their names to an ardent refutation of “popery”, declaring that “the manner and trade of living which we and others of our pretensed religion have practised and used many days doth most principally consist in dumb ceremonies and in certain constitutions of Rome and other forinsìcal potentates". [3]

If the Visitors were unable to extort a confession from the brethren of a monastery, they usually tackled the abbot alone, sometimes with letters from Thomas Cromwell himself, plainly demanding surrender. It seems that in April 1538, Abbot Whitney of Dieulacres was approached in this way, for he wrote a very plaintive letter to Cromwell:

“ . . . . We have no more churches but one adjoining our monastery, to which belongs no (tithes of) corn, but oats; and no granges or demesne lands in our own hands: only a few closes to keep our horses and cattle. 'We beg therefore that such small things as we have may remain in our possession, for divers gentlemen make great labour to the King to have them from us”. [4]

Thomas Whitney's pleadings were all in vain, for in October 1538 the Royal Commissioners were on their way from Stafford to take possession of Dieulaeres. The fate of the abbey had already been sealed. The Bishop of Lichfield, Dr. Rowland Lee, wanted the site and buildings for his friend, Edward Earl of Derby, who already held the office of Steward of Dieulacres as a sinecure. The Bishop petitioned the King through Cromwell, and his request was granted. On the 20th October, Dr. Thomas Legh, an arrogant young man with a satrap­-like countenance and his auditor, William Cavendish,  arrived at the gates of Dieulacres.
 

Little is known about the careers of the monks of Díeulacres after the suppression. Some ot those who were ordaned may have entered the ranks or the parochial clergy, and others may have lett the Church altogether. It is known that two ot them, Henry Bennett and Ralph Maddershead, continued to live in the neighoourhood. At some date berore 1547, Henry Bennett died, and a dispute arose between his brothers and Thomas Whitney over the terms ot his will. The Bennett brothers claimed that Henry had bequeathed all his goods and chattels to them, but that since his death his possessions and his will had come into the hands of Thomas Whitney, John Whitney, and Ralph Maddershead, who had retused to hand them over to the rightfull legatees. The Whitneys denied that they had taken any of the dead man’s goods apart from ten shillings which Henry had given them personally to pay for Masses to be said for his soul, and they said that Henry had torn up the will before he died. [17]

Atter he had been ejected from Dieulacres, Thomas Whitney retired to a house in Mill Street, Leek, and there he lived out the rest of his life, except perhaps for occasional visits to London, for he was a friend of Oliver Lyngard, Curate of St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. The death of Edward VI and the accession of the Catholic Mary Tudor in 1553 aroused in him certain hopes that there would be a general revival of monasticism, and that he might once again be Abbot of Dieulacres. In his will, dated the 3rd August 1558, he bequeathed his silver-gilt chalice to his nephew Nicholas, with the proviso that “if the monastery of Delencres be hereinafter re­edified, the said chalice to be restored to the said monastery”. [18]  He also expressed the wish to be buried in Westminster Abbey, which was once again occupied by Benedictine monks. Thomas Whitney breathed his last only a few days after making his will, and so he was spared the disappointment of seeing Abbot Feckenham and his monks ejected from Westminster and the final extinction under Elizabeth I of the Religious Orders of Medieval England. What happened to his chalice is uncertain. It would be pleasant to think that, as local tradition has it, the fourteenth-century silver­gilt chalice at St. Edward’s Church, Leek, really did come from Dieulacres, even though this particular chalice was made in North Germany.

The detailed history of the abbey site after the monks left it is another story, and a very brief account must here suffice. The Earl of Derby did not possess it for very long, for in 1552 the site was granted by the Crown to Sir Ralph Bagnall, son of a former Mayor of Newcastle ­under­ Lyme, together with 12,000 acres of land in North Staffordshire. Bagnall was an ardent protestant who sat in Queen Mary’s Parliament of 1554-5 and drew attention to himself by refusing to kneel for the Pope’s blessing. He subsequently fled to France, after handing over his estates to his brother, Sir Nicholas Bagnall, who, being in financial difficulties, sold Dieulacres in 1556 to Valentine Brown. After the accession of Elizabeth I, Ralph Bagnall returned to England and bougnt back the abbey site tot £2,111. For the rest ot his life he was plagued with money troubles, and he was obliged to sell his estates, piece by piece. The abbey site passed into the hands of the Rudyard family, and it was probably they who built the present Abbey Farm early in the seventeenth century. Since then, Dieulacres has passed through the hands of many families, none of whom settled there for very long. It is said that at one time it was used to pay off a heavy debt incurred at the gaming tabìes, and its history since 1538 seems to have been a troubled and unhappy one.

After the dissolution, many of the conventual buildings were pulled down; and, in common with most others, the fine church was sufficiently mutilated to prevent it from ever being used again for religious purposes. A good deal of the dressed stone was sold and oarted away for use in other buildings in the vicinity, and some may have gone even further afield. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the site of the abbey church was covered by a great mound of earth and débris, but when this mound was removed in 1818, a number of large clustered columns, parts of the exterior walls, and many fragments of sculptured stone, were uncovered. The excavation was not carried out with any archaeological purpose, and it was only by sheer good fortune that an interested antiquarian visited the site and made a brief report, in which he said that the remains of seven clustered columns, one of them nine feet high, had been unearthed. The foundations of some of the conventual buildings were still discernible on the south side, and amongst the interesting finds made by the workmen were a human skeleton, some floor tiles, and many pieces of stained glass. [19] Much of the stone that was unearthed was used by the occupants of Abbey Farm to build a range of barns and outbuildings, over the doors and windows of which were inserted fragments of window-tracery, roof­bosses, and other Sculptured stones. A few of the piers of the church, and parts of the foundations of the walls, still remain IN SITU, but at the present time they are not open to inspection by the public.


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