4. Visitations and Vice

 

The Act of Supremacy in 1534 gave Henry VIII extraordinary powers. As Supreme Head of the Church of England the king was entitled to reform it in any way he thought necessary "and from time to time correct errors and enormities in the Church, by visitations or otherwise".

His newly appointed Vicar-General, Thomas Cromwell, took this responsibility seriously. Cromwell charged a number of men as "royal visitors" and sent them out to survey and assess the moral health of all monasteries and nunneries throughout England and Wales.

Clergyman Richard Layton, lawyer Thomas Legh, and notary clerk William Blyth, conducted the Northern Visitation over two months in early 1536. Their work informed the last part of the damning Compendium Compertorum, which was published to Parliament in time to promote the passing of An Act for the Suppression of Lesser Monasteries.

The Visitors understood they had a reforming task at the institutions they inspected. Their benchmark for improper behaviour was the three main vows of the Benedictine Rule ― "poverty", "chastity", and "obedience".

For obedience, the commissioners directed the swearing of the Supremacy and Succession Oaths. This bound the religious to King Henry and his heirs as Head of the English Church and meant the end of the Pope's authority from Rome. For Orders like the Cistercians, this also meant an end to their exemption from episcopal examination (by English bishops) and no more appeals to their founding chapter houses in France.

For poverty, or standards of communal behaviour, the Visitors insisted on minimum regular attendance at religious services and a return to fraters (dining hall) and dormers (dormitories). Inbuilt in these original practices was emphasis on sanctity and prayer, a frugal vegetarian diet, and disincentive to accumulate personal possessions.

This left chastity. The Preamble to the Act for the Suppression of Lesser Monasteries included the political fiction that smaller religious houses were more sinful. It alleged that "manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living" was "daily used and committed amongst the little and small abbeys", whereas "religion is right well kept and observed" in the "great and honourable monasteries". The Compendium Compertorum shows that there was really no such distinction. Both were equally vice-ridden.

The Visitors examined 12 Cistercian priories in the north, containing 148 nuns. They found 13 cases of "Incontinence" and 12 nuns with children, totalling 25 sexual offenders, or 17% of the religious population. They assessed 14 Cistercian abbeys, with a combined complement of 309 monks. They reported 32 offences of "Sodomy", 28 of masturbation (per voluntarias pollutiones) and 28 of "Incontinence". These 88 breaches of chastity were committed by 49 individuals, or 16% of the religious population.

It is probable that many of these "crimes" were historical (for example, nuns with children). To modern minds, even the raw results do not appear particularly scandalous. The Cistercian figures broadly agree with the overall situation discovered among all 122 monasteries and nunneries examined in the Northern Visitation. From a population of 1,637 religious, there were 303 offenders, or 18.5%

Note that these results have been "corrected" by researcher Anthony Shaw (2003) to more accurately reflect the actual statistics collected by Leyton and Legh. This information was recorded in their "book of the Acts of the said Visitation" by Blytheman. The notary's copy of that journal ― "a clean book of the compertes" which "I have made" ― was delivered to Thomas Cromwell on 29 February 1536. It is from that "clean book" that Cromwell's clerk, Robert Warmington, produced an edited version for publishing to the King and Parliament. It is Warmington's edition that they, and we, know as the Compendium Compertorum. 

The Warmington revision foregrounded the sexual shortcomings for greater public impact. Other issues which may have been just as important to the Visitors were subsequently overlooked. 

First folio of the Compendium Compertorum, TNA SP 1/102, f 85, showing the exaggeration of sexual offences: Of the 4 names categorised as Sodomy and the 5 names listed as Sodomite, 7 are actually per voluntarias polluciones, or masturbation ('by willing emmission').

Doctors Leyton and Legh gave special scrutiny to the major abbeys and their personnel, even though the Preamble to the Suppression Act gives a contrary impression. Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire and Furness Abbey in Lancashire were the richest and most influential Cistercian monasteries and the Visitors were well aware of their importance.

At Fountains the usual amount of problems with celibacy were uncovered. Five of the 32 resident monks were guilty of sexual incontinence with women. Two committed sodomy, one with five boys, the other with one boy, plus per voluntarias pollutiones. The real prize, however, was Abbot William Thirsk, who galloped into first position with accusations of "notoriously keeping 6 whores, defamed here a toto popula. [Letters & Papers, X 137]

Thirsk's poor reputation began with an earlier complaint by the Earl of Northumberland to Cardinal Wolsey. Informed by some of the "convent brethren", the earl had complained "the abbot there doth not endeavour himself like a discreet father towards the said convent and the profit of the house, but hath against the same as well sold and wasted the great part of all their store in cattle, as also their woods". [L & P, X 131]

As his successor said, "he ruled naughtily". By the time the Compendium Compertorum was drawn up in its final form, Thirsk's carnality had grown to "guilty of incontinence with seven married women". It took the Visitors two days to get his resignation, with the abbot "one day denying these articles with many more, the next day following the same, confessing thus manifestly incurring perjury". Finally, the errant abbot admitted he had "committed theft and sacrilege" by selling jewels and plate to "Warren the Goldsmith".  [L & P, X 137]

Thirske's resignation letter was a rushed job, noting the promise of a £100 annuity, then "tightly folded" and sent south to Cromwell for endorsement. This was a satisfactory outcome for Cromwell's men. Layton wrote that "the first fruits to the king is £1,000". (First Fruits were the payment of one years income payable on promotion of a new abbot). Another incentive was the 600 marks (£400) promised to Cromwell by Marmaduke Bradley to become the new abbot. Candidate Bradley was duly "elected" on 11 February 1536 in a ceremony "witnessed" by Dr Leyton.

Thirsk retired to Jervaulx Abbey, where he was heard to offer a captain of the Pilgrimage of Grace the sum of 20 nobles (about £6 12s. 6d.) if he was restored to Fountains ― "saying he was unjustly put out by the visitors". Strangely, only the abbot's sexual failings had made it into Compendium Compertorum.

Furness Abbey also furnished the expected list of moral lapses. Three monks were revealed as guilty of incontinence with women, one with five women, and one monk committed sodomy  per (by) voluntarias polluciones. Abbot Roger Pele was not left out, being found guilty of incontinence with two single women.

The real concern for this abbot was not immorality but sedition. There were deep murmurings among his monks against accepting King Henry's Supremacy. Pele warned the brothers that Leyton and Legh "would ask diverse things of them strictly". He "commanded them, by virtue of their obedience, before they [the Visitors] come to the abbey, that they [the monks] should tell them nothing at all". The conspiracy was effective, with no treason for refusing the Oath being reported.

Meanwhile, a serious breach of monastic ethics did come to the surface. This was the case of "One Hugh Browne, late monk of Furness", who had falsely applied the convent seal to blank parchments. At first Browne only admitted to "procuring Stephen Fisher, smith" to break a lock on the chest "wherein the common seal of the house remained". He said "he was privy and knew of four blanks".

In prosecution, "the said abbot did maintain, before the said Hugh Browne, in presence of the said visitor, that there were 7 blanks sealed by him [the prisoner] and his followers...whereupon diverse leases and patents were written whereunto the whole convent never consented nor knew thereof, which the said Hugh Brown did not greatly deny or confess".

Despite evidence that "one Akers, clerk to Dr Legh...wrote the first detectum against Hugh Brown in the Book of the Acts of the said Visitation" (and therefore that the matter became part of Blytheman's "clean book of the compertes" sent on to Cromwell) there is no mention of Brown's fraud in the official edition of Compendium Compertorum.

As already noted, the published Compendium was sifted and altered in London by Cromwell's staff. It deliberately amplified the sensational and shocking aspects of sexual misbehaviour. This distortion served the interests of passing the Suppression of Lesser Monasteries Act, but this was at the expense of unmasking serious economic crime like theft and fraud. 

                                                                                                                                                      

REFERENCES:

Anthony N Shaw, 2003, 'The Compendium Compertorum and the Making of the Suppression Act of 1536', PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, <http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/12627>

'Fountains Abbey', Victoria County History: Yorkshire, Vol 3, pp 134-138

'The Abbey of Furness', Victoria County History: Lancashire, Vol 2, pp 114-138

Letters and Papers: Foreign and Domestic in the Reign of Henry VIII, Volume X