Book Review of The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History, by James Clark
As Professor of History at the University of Exeter, author James G. Clark has spent his professional career uncovering the role of English monasteries in the medieval and reformation eras. His work titled The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History, attempts to demonstrate the various ways in which monastic life became unraveled in the early 16th century during the Tudor Reign. The central thesis of his work argues against the long standing belief among scholars that this dissolution was swift, uniform, and absolute in its lasting effects.
The book is divided into three main sections; the first of which sets up key context for the role of monasteries in England and their complicated relationship with the secular public. Clark argues that monasteries were not simply features of the landscape that the public had grown accustomed to seeing from town, but in many ways contained the very essence of those landscapes themselves. He provides evidence to show how their influence extended far beyond the walls of those looming structures, intermingling with everyday activities such as travel and commerce. Their ancient existence served as key markers on maps, and their longstanding presence provided a sort of repository for myth and symbolism for medieval England as a whole. (55)
Clark takes this section beyond their geographical and commercial role however, extending his research into areas of familial, gender, and class relationships in order to demonstrate the ways in which they acted as sources of power in the time of Henrician era. His use of ordination records as primary sources provides key insight into who decided to take sacred vows, their reasonings behind that decision, and the rising and falling of those statistics over time. Through this research, Clark reaches the conclusion that individuals, both men and women, who joined monasteries rarely did so as a result of coercion but were instead influenced by factors such as opportunity, education, and propriety. (58) Despite this, he believes that public criticism had already begun to pave the way for the dissolution arguing that the very entice that had drawn so many towards monastic life, acted as symbols of exclusion and confinement to many others. (100)
In section two of this work, Clark seeks to uncover the shift from monasteries as an example of generally private religiosity and spirituality over their territory, towards a much more public, personal, and even subservient relationship with the crown and their patrons. This primarily happened in the year 1535 following the act of supremacy, and consisted of sworn testimonies by monastic leaders regarding information of their salaries and property holdings. He makes particularly good use of royal commission records which were intended to annex Church leaders from their monastic positions into ones closer to the sphere of influence of King Henry VIII, showing that such encounters contradict typical narratives of an all out “assault on the religious houses.” (207)
Although the inclusion of primary sources accounts throughout the book certainly lends more credibility to his arguments, the decision to keep their old English spelling proves at times decidedly more difficult for the reader to decipher their ultimate meanings. Clark also admits to the shortcomings of these commission reports acknowledging that evidence of their effects have not survived nearly as well as the more widely cited parliamentary statutes which initiated them. (208) Overall, he claims that this reorganization was not in and of itself a cause of the dissolution and warns against interpreting this event as the “first warning cracks of an inevitable collapse.” (263) Furthermore, he encourages readers not to be misled to notions of swiftness or uniformity by the pace of this transformation, demonstrating that tensions between the church and the crown varied widely from year to year and from location to location.
The final section of Clark’s work addresses the aftermath of the dissolution, and by extending his scope beyond those of other traditional narratives he aims to refute the idea that monastic existence and influence was abruptly halted. He points to scenes such as the destruction of the Cluniac priory of St Pancras at Lewes whose violent removal would later influence the perception of the dissolution in the minds of Elizabethan writers. Clark points out that the reality of most of this period did not match the extraordinary examples such as the Lewes Priory, and the narrative of their swift and decisive obliteration is a result of writers referencing sources which did not chronicle events as they happened, but rather, were books filled with patchy and conflicting accounts.
Ultimately, Clark states that the dissolution was not a concise, nor a uniform event across the country, but rather one that heavily depended on the Church leaderships’ willingness to cooperate with the crown’s commissaries, as well as the public’s perception of their role and influence upon everyday life. He relies on a variety of evidence to prove this point such as ordination records, commission reports, first and second-hand accounts of monastic rule post-1535, and archaeological evidence which demonstrates that monasteries were dismantled over a long period of time rather than being subject to an extreme and swift destruction like that of Lewe.
This is not an introductory reading, but a book for those who are already well versed and familiar with the subject of the Henrician era and the dissolution of English monasteries. It is a dense read, full of early English primary source accounts which will take quite some time for the average reader to decipher. That being said, Clark’s narrative is worth the time, and provides an account whose argument distinguishes it from most other works on the subject. It separates itself from other works on the subject by not falling victim to popular sources, and instead examines accounts from those such as church officials and commision reports who provide a better understanding of the transition from an English society as a primarily monastic one, to a society which was ruled almost entirely by the crown and its cohorts.