The Destruction of the Monasteries

New Zealand Tablet, 13 October 1921, Page 11

The Destruction of the Monasteries

In an article on the decay and probable extinction of the English country-house, published in-'the Manchester Guardian Weekly, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, the eminent English novelist, writes of the destruction of the monasteries and its social effects: ' "I need not go back to the castle-razing of the twelfth century, blessing undisguised as that must have been; but I will invite the reader to reflect upon the destruction of the monasteries, and what that must have meant. A transformation of the whole countryside, no less. Not a county in England but must have felt its treading wellnigh slipped. Wipe out three times as many cathedral churches as we have now, four times the number of great houses, and you will have a notion of what happened. Glastonbury, the greatest church in England, clean gone; Walsingham, _St._Edmundsbury, Malmesbury, Shaftesbury, Reading, Fountains, Jervaulx, Whitby—but why go on? The names remain in every county, and a few piled stones stand witness to a bygone civilisation. And-the great houses to which those churches gave reason meant much more to the people than our present Belvoirs, Welbecks, and Hatfields have evef meant; for there was the church, a centre of worship and a beacon to the eyes for leagues about it; there was the convent, not impVcked, and remote, but with door and buttery-hatch open to all-comers. There was no Poor Law while the monasteries stood, and it wasn't long before the peasantry felt the lack of them. As far as they were concerned it was blank loss. ■''lmagine England covered with vast accessible, friendly, open houses, and churches annexed to them. Imagine those cast down, stripped of their lead, robbed of their ornaments, sold, then walled in and profaned; or unsold and left derelict, as the case might be. The,ro exists in some collection of those things a lament over Walsingham, the great pilgrimage-place of the east, which I have seen but cannot now find, one of the most touching I have ever read. It is a pure elegy of the c How are the mighty fallen ' kind; not the outraged cry of a devotee for the desecrated image of Our Lady of Walsingham, , but merely a threnody of loss. The noble towers, the shining vanes which used to herald the morning sun, the pleasant •seat, the goodly hospitality Woe's me for Walsinghame! is the burden of it. And what Norfolk felt for Walsingham Somerset knew for Glastonbury, and Wilts for Lacock and Malmesbury. There was real loss behind the grief."