SOME WORCESTERSHIRE PRELATES

With the departure of the visitors in the autumn and winter of 1535–6 there began, for such of the monasteries as were not liable to suppression under the Act of 1536, a short period of three to four years that may truly be called the last phase of their existence. Though their ultimate fate was still uncertain, they could have had few illusions as to the change in their condition. Any hopes that the inmates may have cherished of permanent survival became more and more forlorn with every new political event; domestic authority was impaired; sincere and sensitive spirits must have been assailed by every kind of doubt and despondency, while the discontented, the selfish, the neurotic and the malicious had every opportunity for restlessness and for intrigue. The visitation, coming as the climax of a series of harassing demands, had shown conclusively, even brutally, that the royal supremacy was not a matter of words alone. Their independence, their freedom of manœuvre, was gone for ever. They could not take any serious decision or make any notable change in their arrangements without coming into immediate contact with a master who, besides being powerful and efficient, was also entirely wanting in any appreciation of religious or spiritual values. His visitors had dismissed a whole section of the community, and thrown the machinery of recruitment out of gear; they had imposed a number of restraints which, if observed literally, would have brought the economic and social life of the monastery to a standstill, if not to an explosion; they had made it possible for any discontented subject to delate his superior's words or acts to Cromwell, or to obtain complete or partial dispensation from his monastic obligations.