chapter 2._

"Far from benefiting the cause of the monastic houses, the immediate effect of the Pilgrimage of Grace was to bring ruin on those monasteries which had as yet been spared. For their complicity or alleged complicity in it, twelve abbots were hanged, drawn and quartered, and their houses were seized by the Crown. Every means was employed by a new set of Commissioners to bring about the surrender of others of the greater abbeys. The houses were visited, and their pretended relics and various tricks to encourage the devotion of the people were exposed. Surrenders went rapidly on during the years 1537 and 1538, and it became necessary to obtain a new Act of Parliament to vest the property of the later surrenders in the Crown. ... Nothing, indeed, can be more tragical than the way in which the greater abbeys were destroyed on manufactured charges and for imaginary crimes. These houses had been described in the first Act of Parliament as 'great and honourable,' wherein 'religion was right well kept and observed.' Yet now they were pitilessly destroyed. A revenue of about £131,607 is computed to have thus come to the Crown, while the movables are valued at £400,000. How was this vast sum of money expended?

(1) By the Act for the suppression of the greater monasteries the King was empowered to erect six new sees, with their deans and chapters, namely, Westminster, Oxford, Chester, Gloucester, Bristol and Peterborough. ...

(2) Some monasteries were turned into collegiate churches, and many of the abbey churches ... were assigned as parish churches.

(3) Some grammar schools were erected.

(4) A considerable sum is said to have been spent in making roads and in fortifying the coasts of the Channel.

(5) But by far the greater part of the monastic property passed into the hands of the nobility and gentry, either by purchase at very easy rates, or by direct gift from the Crown. ...

The monks and nuns ejected from the monasteries had small pensions assigned to them, which are said to have been regularly paid; but to many of them the sudden return into a world with which they had become utterly unacquainted, and in which they had no part to play, was a terrible hardship, ... greatly increased by the Six Article Law, which ... made the marriage of the secularized 'religious' illegal under heavy penalties."

_G. G. Perry, History of the Reformation in England,