Spoils
March 27, 2008 by Amy
I won’t have a chance to listen to it right now, but I point you to this week’s In Our Time, centered on Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Available for download for the next week, still accessible on the Web, just not for download, after that.
When he was an old man, Michael Sherbrook remembered in writing the momentous events of his youth: “All things of price were either spoiled, plucked away or defaced to the uttermost…it seemed that every person bent himself to filch and spoil what he could. Nothing was spared but the ox-houses and swincotes…”
He was talking about the destruction of Roche Abbey, but it could have been Lewes or Fountains, Glastonbury, Tintern or Walsingham, names that haunt the religious past as their ruins haunt the landscape.
These were the monasteries, suddenly and for many shockingly, destroyed during the reign of Henry VIII. But was the destruction of monastic culture in this country an overdue religious reform or the grandest of larcenies?
Contributors
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University
Diane Purkiss, Fellow and Tutor at Keble College, Oxford
George Bernard, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton
9 Responses to “Spoils”
Many high-born Catholics of the time turned a blind eye to the taking of “spoils,” some even assuming the office of Escheator (a locality’s official land confiscator for the Crown) or served as Royal commissioners of taking of church plate, but their Recusant families hid the real treasures: the molds used to press the hosts to be consecrated at Mass; clerical vestments and episcopal staffs; missals and antiphonals and the precious saint’s relics entombed in altars used to offer the Holy Sacrifice.
“Fr Rugg was a prebendary of Chichester Cathedral said to have hidden the alleged hand of St Anastasius when Reading Abbey’s considerable collection of religious relics was seized. (St Anastasius, who died about the year 700, was abbot of a monastery on Mount Sinai.)
Certainly a human hand was hidden. It was placed in an iron chest and concealed in the base of a wall at the east end of the abbey church. There it lay, black, leathery and shrunken, for nearly two and a half centuries. It was found by workmen building Reading Gaol in 1786 and put on display in a small private museum.
In the nineteenth century the museum closed down and the hand was bought by a Catholic convert, Charles Robert Scott-Murray of Danesfield, Medmenham. He had been Member of Parliament for Buckinghamshire and later became High Sheriff of the county. Scott-Murray and many others believed that the hand was Reading Abbey’s principal focus of pilgrimage, the hand of St James the Apostle. This was a much more important relic than the hand of St Anastasius, and Fr Rugg may have been involved in a cunning switch to fool Henry VIII’s agents.
From Charles Scott-Murray the hand passed to the Catholic church of St Peter in Marlow, where it is kept out of sight and under lock and key. The Church makes no claim whatsoever concerning its authenticity. However, it is of great interest, not least as one of the very few medieval religious relics to have survived the English Reformation. It also contributed to Fr Rugg’s downfall. ”
excerpted from “Thames Valley Papists” an online self-published history of certain Catholics families of that period.
This was an excellent programme and surpassed many of the previous “In Our Time” broadcasts !
Thanks for this link, Amy. A great novel about this very theme is Robert Hugh Benson’s The King’s Achievement. (Benson, a convert to Catholicism, was the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury).
http://www.benson-unabridged.com/kingsachievement.html
On a trip to the UK a few years ago, I was heartbroken to see the ruins of one religious house in particular, St. Mary’s in the city of York. St. Mary’s was a frequent stopover for Richard III, who as Duke of Gloucester and governor of the North for his brother Edward IV, lived at Middleham Castle, some distance from the city. York Minster, which of course used to be Catholic, is still beautiful, but also sad to see in a different way. Henry VIII did so much damage, economically, spiritually, politically, to England, that I’ve heard his reign referred to as England’s “Stalinist” period. Of course, with a Dad like Henry VII, what could one expect? Seriously, though, it’s a mystery to me why some consider Henry Tudor Jr. a great monarch. IMO, the only positive thing about the successors of the “victor” of Bosworth was their support of music and the arts. Makes one wonder what things would have been like had RIII been the winner in 1485….
This looks really interesting, thank you. I always come back to a good Tudor history book over almost anything else.
Despite all the qualifications and equivocations historians can muster, the dissolution of the Catholic monasteries was an act of cultural genocide. While so many secularlists convulse in a need for apologies for past misdeeds and historical atrocities, few voices are raised demanding such a courtesy from the current successor of Henry VIII. Perhaps that apology might be a good way of renewing the Church’s conversation with whatever remains of the Henry’s Anglican church. I won’t hold my breath. The ghost of Henry and Cromwell lingers in the broadly held opinion that the Catholics of England somehow deserved the violence perpetrated against them or brought it upon themselves.
Debasement of the currency in England gave rise to the axiom
“Bad money drives out good”
aka Gresham’s Law that we see being played out before our very eyes in the monetarist policy’s at the Fed.
The “rationalist” hegemons under Cromwell et al spread their anti-mystical propaganda against natural law ethics right into the present day - see Amy’s critique of journalists branding B16 as “mysterious.”
Literature in the English language has suffered this bias ever since, consider Jane Austen’s pillorying of the Gothic grotesque in “Northanger Abbey,” and Charles Dickens locating Little Nell’s safe haven in rural Tong, a Tudor demene made familiar to him by his Grandmother’s storytelling from her youthful employment there. Henry followed in his predeceased brother’s footsteps by “marrying up” when he took El Aragonesa as his spouse. He enjoyed her dowry to finance all manner of military folly on the Continent and then dumped her in order to finance a comfortable retirement at home…
My predilection for all thing “dissolution” stems from the name of my high school alma mater “Priory Grammar School for Girls” a 20th century local education authority offshoot of the Priory Grammar School (which had been for boys only) built on land that had formerly been home of the Franciscan Priory lost at the dissolution - haunting the locality in the current name for that bank of the River Severn “Greyfriars” and in the stained glass windows of a magnificent Jesse Tree motif reinstalled in a nearby (Anglican) church:
excerpt from http://www.ihbc.org.uk/context_archive/64/cct/cct.html
Church interior
Jesse window
Yes, the ruins haunt the landscape and much more. I am an Anglican priest who lives not that far from Tintern and not a day goes by when I pass the shattered remains that I do not both regret the appalling excessses of the “reformation” and also long for the day when the Church will be reunited once more under the successor of Peter.