Dependant Priories and the Closure of Monasteries in the Late Medieval England, 1400-1535

Although historians have given considerable attention to the suppression of English monasteries in the 150 years before the Dissolution, the stability of the monastic order is in many ways a more remarkable feature of these years. Apart from the wholly exceptional closure of the alien priories, only a handful of religious houses were suppressed between 1300 and 1535. For many observers, this failure to rationalize monastic property contributed greatly to the weakness of the religious orders in late medieval England, but the reasons for this conservatism have rarely been examined. A discussion of the relatively few cases where monasteries were suppressed provides an opportunity to re-examine attitudes towards the closure of monasteries. It emerges that there was a marked reluctance, from a number of quarters, to tolerate the withdrawal of monks from traditionally cenobitic sites. Consequently, several struggling priories were converted into dependencies in the mid-fifteenth century in order to ensure the maintenance of a monastic presence there. Such considerations were even taken into account in a few cases during the dispersal of alien priory property; and monasteries displayed a strong commitment to preserve their daughter houses. Although attitudes were slowly beginning to change in the last decades of the fifteenth century, there are signs that this belief that it was important to preserve not only the prayers owed by the religious but also the monastic character of individual locations still held some influence into the 1530s

Alien · Ancient history · Character (mathematics · Closure (psychology · Conservatism · Fifteenth · Order (exchange · Political science · Property (philosophy · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Religious Tourism and Spaces

• The 'Little Dissolution' of the 1520s

  Deirdre O'Sullivan, Deirdre O’Sullivan•Post-Medieval Archaeology•2006

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