Editing Dissolution of the monasteries (section)

===Social and economic===
[[File:Fountains Abbey.jpg|thumb|right|upright|Ruins of [[Fountains Abbey]], Yorkshire]]
The abbeys of England, Wales, and Ireland had been among the greatest landowners and the largest institutions in the kingdoms, although by the early 16th century, religious donors tended to favour parish churches, collegiate churches, university colleges and grammar schools, and these were now the predominant centres for learning and the arts. Nevertheless, particularly in rural areas, the abbeys, convents and priories were centres of hospitality and learning, and everywhere they remained a source of charity for the old and infirm. 

Monasteries had also supplied free food and alms for the poor and destitute. The removal of over eight hundred such institutions left great gaps in the social fabric. According to political historian Gregory Slysz "The dissolution of the monasteries [...] brought social catastrophe to England" for the next 50 or so years, due to the closure of the numerous associated urban almshouses for poor relief and hospitals, worsened by spiraling inflation and a doubling of the population.<ref name=slysz>{{cite journal |last1=Slysz |first1=Gregory |title=The impact of the dissolution of Westminster Abbey on the provision of social welfare, c. 1540-1600 |journal=American Benedictine Review |date=2018}}</ref>
{{quote|"But now that all the abbeys . . . be in temporal mennyes handes, I do not heare tell that one halpeny worth of alms or any other profight cometh vnto the peple of those parisshes."|source=[[Henry Brinklow]] writing as Roderyck Mors (c.1544)<ref name=slysz/>{{rp|274}} }}

Slysz details the example of [[Westminster Abbey]] which had dwindled to from 50 to 25 monks by the time of dissolution: 18 monks were given new positions, 7 were pensioned, the hundred or so servants were given no provision, and the Abbey's 1540 almsgiving of £400 that previously supported thousands of London poor, was replaced by a £100 annual grant for the new Westminister Cathedral to disburse, the almshouse itself going as low as £34.<ref name=slysz/>{{rp|250,276-277}}  The failure to replace the alms system under the Tudors lead to the introduction of the [[Poor_Relief_Act_1601|Elizabethan Poor Law]] of 1601 and the start of [[workhouses]].

Modern revisionist historical scholarship has disputed previous claims, derived from Victorian economic historian [[William Ashley (economic historian)|William Ashley]] that monastic poor relief was minimal, such as by author G. W. O. Woodward, who in 1974 summarised:
{{quote|text=No great host of beggars was suddenly thrown on the roads for monastic charity had had only marginal significance and, even had the abbeys been allowed to remain, could scarcely have coped with the problems of unemployment and poverty created by the population and inflationary pressures of the middle and latter parts of the sixteenth century.{{sfn|Woodward|1974|p=24}}}}
The revisionist scholarship sees a "confessional bias that came to dominate the historiography on monasticism", with historian [[Linda Colley]] writing of a "vast superstructure of prejudice." <ref name=slysz/>{{rp|252}}

About a quarter of net monastic wealth consisted of "spiritual" income arising where the religious house held the [[advowson]] (right to appoint) a benefice with the legal obligation to maintain the cure of souls in the parish, originally by nominating the [[Rector (ecclesiastical)|rector]] and taking an annual rental payment. Over the medieval period, monasteries and priories continually sought papal exemptions, so as to personally use the glebe and tithe income of rectoral benefices in their possession. From the 13th century onwards, English diocesan bishops successfully established the principle that only the glebe and 'greater tithes' of grain, hay and wood could be appropriated by monastic patrons in this manner; the 'lesser tithes' had to remain within the parochial benefice, the incumbent of which carried the title of 'vicar'.{{sfn|Knowles|1955|p=290}} By 1535, of 8,838 rectories, 3,307 had thus been appropriated with vicarages,{{sfn|Knowles|1955|p=291}} but at this late date, a small sub-set of vicarages in monastic ownership were not being served by beneficed clergy at all. These were parish churches owned by houses of [[Canons Regular|Augustinian]] or [[Premonstratensian]] canons, orders whose rules required them to provide parochial worship within their conventual churches. From the mid-fourteenth century onwards, the canons had been able to exploit their hybrid status to justify petitions for papal privileges of appropriation, allowing them to fill vicarages in their possession either from among their own number, or from secular priests removable at will.{{Sfn|Knowles|1955|p=292}}

On the dissolution these spiritual income streams were sold off on the same basis as landed endowments, creating a new class of lay [[impropriation|impropriators]], who became entitled to patronage, and the income from tithes and glebe lands. Though as lay [[Rector (ecclesiastical)|rectors]], they had to maintain the fabric of the parish chancel. The existing rectors and vicars serving parish churches (formerly monastic property) were unaffected. However, in unclaimed canons' parish churches and chapels, the lay rector (as patron) was obliged to establish a stipend for a [[perpetual curate]] effectively from their own income.{{ citation needed|date= October 2019}}

It is unlikely that the monastic system could have been broken simply by royal action, had there not been the overwhelming bait of enhanced status for [[gentry]], and the convictions of the small but determined Protestant faction. [[Anti-clericalism]] was a familiar feature of late medieval Europe, producing its own strain of satiric literature that was aimed at a literate middle class.<ref>For background on [[Chaucer]]'s Pardoner and other Chaucerian anticlerical satire, see {{cite book |first=John |last=Peter |title=Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature |location=Oxford |publisher=Clarendon Press |date=1956}}</ref>