For at least a generation, the Dissolution of the Monasteries has been a profoundly uncontroversial topic. A stream of books appeared in the 1960s and 1970s which effectively produced a broad consensus about the place of monasticism in early Tudor England.Footnote ¹ This work largely overturned an earlier school of thought, championed by G. G. Coulton, which had argued that Henrician charges of monastic vice were substantially accurate in their thrust if not always in their precise detail.Footnote ² It was now acknowledged that many monks, canons and nuns continued to follow a tolerably observant way of life and iniquity was far from general. Nevertheless, late medieval English monasticism was judged to be lacking in zeal and dynamism, with ‘historians of widely different religious persuasions … in remarkable agreement that the monasteries of early Tudor England and Wales were no longer playing an indispensable role in the spiritual life of the country, certainly not one to justify their continued enjoyment of so large a part of the landed wealth of the kingdom’.Footnote ³ This interpretation was most influentially advanced by Dom David Knowles, who still towers over English monastic history nearly fifty years after the completion of his classic four-volume work on the subject. For Knowles, the religious had drifted too far from their original rules into a comfortable and compromised existence. The only significant exception to this lack of rigour was found in the Carthusian order and the recently imported communities of Observant Franciscans and Bridgettines.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, it seems to typify the English scene that the Observant movement, prominent in contemporary France and Ireland, made so little headway in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England.

Not only were the religious orders lukewarm in their observance, but they were also relatively remote from the concerns of ordinary people. This assessment remains commonplace today: in recent works Richard Hoyle has argued that ‘monks no longer contributed much in the way of spiritual leadership to the world in which they lived’, with their prayers unfashionable and anachronistic; and Andrew Pettegree has concluded that pre-Reformation English monasteries ‘played a marginal role in the restless search for salvation that occupied the thoughts of many laypeople’.Footnote ⁵ It was therefore no coincidence that the monasteries were one of the first components of ‘traditional religion’ to fall in the mid sixteenth-century reforms, and that the entire edifice was brought down with relatively little opposition. There were few signs of outright hostility to monasteries among the populace, but nor was there very much to fight for when it became clear that the king was set on wholesale suppression. This apparent detachment of the religious orders from the laity in late medieval England has been implicitly endorsed by the battery of revisionist works on late medieval popular religion which largely exclude the regular clergy from discussion. The heart of late medieval religion was the parish and the role of the religious orders in lay piety was peripheral at best. Consequently, the suppression of neighbouring Barlinch Priory seems to have been among the least of the parishioners of Morebath's problems in the mid-1530s, involving only the loss of a little charitable and educational assistance: ‘It is perhaps unlikely that anyone in Morebath wept bitter tears over the disappearance of their local monastery’, largely because the other (arguably modest) reforming measures of the summer of 1536 ‘touched parish life more closely’.Footnote ⁶

This consensus concerning the backdrop to the Dissolution remains powerful. Two of the most recent overviews of late medieval English religion, by Robert Swanson and Felicity Heal, have endorsed it without reservation.Footnote ⁷ Alongside this long-dominant depiction of late medieval English monasticism as unremarkable and marginal, there has also been a large measure of agreement concerning the motivations for the Dissolution. Henry viii needed money, particularly in the light of the unstable international situation, and the religious houses were easy targets. For Christopher Haigh, the first stage of the Dissolution ‘was cloaked in the language of spiritual reform, but the real motive was financial’; G. W. O. Woodward agreed that ‘finance is … the key to the proper understanding of the dissolution’; whereas David Knowles asserted ‘with some confidence’ that ‘financial, and not religious, motives, were uppermost in the minds of both king and minister’.Footnote ⁸ Arguably, therefore, the greatest weakness of the monastic order in early Tudor England was its great wealth. The enormous resources held by monasteries across the land were never easy to justify; but in the face of increasing economic strain in early sixteenth-century England and the critiques concerning the distribution of church wealth voiced by humanists,Footnote ⁹ monastic income was perhaps more vulnerable than ever. It was hardly surprising, then, that the king's attention was drawn to monastic endowments as a potential panacea for his recurrent financial problems. It is also telling that plans for dissolution advanced most rapidly at times of particular crisis, notably the 1534 Kildare rebellion and the aftermath of the Treaty of Nice between Francis i and Charles v in June 1538.Footnote ¹⁰

Yet despite the continuing popularity of this interpretation of the Dissolution, alternative approaches to late medieval monasticism and its termination have recently begun to be put forward. In particular, the depiction of the late medieval religious orders as stagnant and out of touch is coming under sustained assault. Detailed studies of particular houses and orders have produced a rather more sympathetic picture of the religious orders than used to prevail.Footnote ¹¹ A much more positive evaluation of the contribution of the religious to late medieval intellectual life and to the material well-being of their lay neighbours has been advanced.Footnote ¹² And there has also been an attempt to highlight the ways in which monasteries could exert a significant influence on the everyday religious lives of the laity.Footnote ¹³ This new line of argument has not been unanimously accepted, but there has unquestionably been considerable progress in finally integrating the history of the religious orders into the widely-accepted revisionist framework for the late medieval Church.Footnote ¹⁴

Alongside this growing emphasis on the continuing relevance and even vitality of late medieval monasticism, the second main pillar of the traditional interpretation of the Dissolution has also been challenged. George Bernard has argued that the attack on the monasteries in the 1530s did not simply proceed from the king's financial requirements, but was in part a product of ‘Henry viii's vehement hostility to the monasteries’. Bernard has reminded us that much of the resistance to Henry's religious reforms came from members of the regular clergy, in the shape of support for Catherine of Aragon and Elizabeth Barton, opposition to the Royal Supremacy and active involvement in the popular risings of 1536. Bernard has also made a strong case for the king's Erasmian loyalties, arguing that Henry shared Erasmus' distaste for pilgrimages and had little inherent enthusiasm for the religious life.Footnote ¹⁵ There is certainly good evidence that the king found the religious orders far from inoffensive by the mid-1530s. In a letter written to the duke of Norfolk in February 1537, quoted by Bernard, Henry rails against ‘those personnes, that call them selfes religious’. Much of the letter's hostility stems from the involvement of the religious in the Pilgrimage of Grace, but there are also signs of a more general dislike of the monasteries. The king heartily approves of the duke's attempts to blacken the name of the monks, ‘that the ignoraunt people may perceive, howe they have been abused in them, and the rather leave the supersticions, in to the whiche they [the religious] have, of long tyme, trayned them’.Footnote ¹⁶

In accusing the monasteries of deceiving the common people and training them in superstition, Henry viii was not making a novel criticism. Erasmus' famous colloquy ‘A pilgrimage for religion's sake’ (1526) featured the shrines of Walsingham and Canterbury Cathedral and their monastic guardians ‘who show uncertain relics for certain ones, and attribute more to them than ought to be, and basely make a gain of them’.Footnote ¹⁷ This line of attack was also taken up by evangelicals in the 1530s. Writing to Heinrich Bullinger in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Thomas Cranmer castigated ‘unlearned priests and monks’ seeking to make money from the ignorance of the people, and lamented how ‘many readily listened to them … rather reaching out to acorns and swinish food, to which once they were accustomed, than to the purest wheat’; and Nicholas Wyse criticised the ‘furred hodes’ for deceiving people with counterfeit miracles.Footnote ¹⁸ The contention that the religious orders were exerting a considerable (and nefarious) influence on the population through their saints' cults was commonly articulated in 1530s England.

Indeed, as Peter Marshall has recently demonstrated, the association of monasteries with superstition was a recurrent theme running through the entire Dissolution process.Footnote ¹⁹ The injunctions issued to the royal visitors of the monasteries in 1535 required that the religious ‘shall not show any relics or feigned miracles for increase of lucre’, whereas ‘superstition’ was one of the five headings under which the Compendium compertorum was organised.Footnote ²⁰ In the event, the attack on monastic shrines found no place in the 1536 Act for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries, perhaps because this statute pre-dated the Henrician attack on pilgrimage and the cult of saints. But the close identification between monasticism and superstition re-emerged strongly in 1538, with the exposure of the allegedly fraudulent pilgrimage venues at the Cistercian abbeys of Boxley and Hailes, which helped to justify the extension of the suppression process taking place in that year. This motif, of fraudulent monks deceiving the people with their feigned miracles, retained its currency after the completion of the Dissolution. Therefore the King's Book of 1543 recalled ‘the superstitious works of men's own invention, which be not commanded of God, nor approved by his word, in which kind of works many christian men, and specially of them that were lately called religious (as monks, friars, nuns and such other) have in times past put their great trust and confidence’.Footnote ²¹

Can we assume from these examples that the Henrician regime believed monasteries to be at the forefront of sponsoring the ‘superstitious’ veneration of images and relics in early Tudor England? Or was this association primarily a propagandist tactic for discrediting the religious? The 1538 campaign against monastic shrines could be viewed as an attempt to blacken the name of the monks at a time when it was financially convenient to press ahead with dissolution. Evangelicals too might have found it convenient to exaggerate the connection between monasteries and pilgrimage ‘in order to strike a chord with the prejudices of a generally conservative king’, who seems to have held Erasmian views on this issue.Footnote ²² This would seem to be an important question for assessing not only the motivations behind the Dissolution, but also the place of monasteries in late medieval religion and society. If the religious were indeed highly influential as sponsors of pilgrimage, this would add credence to the view that ideological motivations held a place of significance in the Dissolution. And in the light of the continuing popularity of pilgrimage into the early sixteenth century,Footnote ²³ it would also strongly affirm the continuing relevance of the religious orders in pre-Reformation England. It is therefore necessary to turn to the pre-Reformation evidence concerning monastic shrines in order to make some judgement about their prominence.

How close, then, was the relationship between monasteries and pilgrimage in late medieval and early Tudor England? Can monasteries be described as playing the critical role in training the laity in ‘superstition’ that Henry viii and other hostile commentators ascribed to them in the 1530s? It is immediately apparent that several of the great pilgrimage shrines of medieval England were housed in monasteries. The Marian image at Walsingham Priory, Becket's shrine at Christ Church, Canterbury, the Holy Rood of Bromholm, the Holy Blood of Hailes, the shrine of St Cuthbert at Durham: all these major cults were initiated and managed by monks and canons. Not all the most famous English shrines were based in monasteries, of course, and others were housed in secular cathedrals and collegiate churches. But it is clear that the great monasteries of medieval England remained heavily involved in pilgrimage in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ben Nilson has carefully documented the fortunes of the major saints' cults sponsored by the cathedral priories in the later Middle Ages. Similarly, James Clark has drawn attention to the efforts of several large Benedictine houses seeking to maintain the popularity of their long-standing shrines in fifteenth-century England.Footnote ²⁴

Whether these efforts were entirely successful, however, might be questioned. There was a marked fall in the offerings received at the traditional shrines of the monastic cathedrals over the later Middle Ages, and by the second half of the fifteenth century only the shrine of St Etheldreda of Ely seems to have been generating a sizeable yearly income. Only Worcester Cathedral Priory and its newer image of the Virgin succeeded in extending its appeal in this period, with offerings from pilgrims apparently reaching a peak of nearly £100 per year in the early sixteenth century.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, the fate of the shrines of the cathedral priories seems to encapsulate the perceived experience of monasteries more generally in late medieval England: that is, institutions striving to retain their traditional dominance, but gradually losing ground in the face of new devotional trends. The attempts by houses like Crowland and Evesham Abbey to revive interest in the cults of the less-than-fashionable St Guthlac and St Egwin in the fifteenth century serve only to bolster this impression.Footnote ²⁶

It is possible, therefore, that any close association of monasteries with pilgrimage in the minds of humanists and reformers stemmed from a small number of high-profile shrines, which owed their fame largely to past glories. It should also be noted that the dominance of major pilgrimage sites in late medieval England has come to be challenged by several recent studies. This work has shifted the focus decisively away from the great cult centres towards the vibrant and shifting scene of local pilgrimage.Footnote ²⁷ In the later Middle Ages, popular devotion was increasingly focused on images rather than relics, a trend which encouraged a democratisation of shrine promotion since an image (unlike the body of a saint) could just as easily be held by a parish church as by a great religious house. It is now well established that late medieval England was teeming with lesser pilgrimage sites, and for most people a visit to a local miraculous image must have been a much more integral part of their devotional lives than a pilgrimage to Walsingham or Canterbury. Most research on local pilgrimage has focused on parochial cults, but the role of monasteries in the promotion of lesser shrines also deserves attention. Any assessment of the role of the religious in pilgrimage and the veneration of saints must therefore look beyond the famous cult centres of the great houses towards the many smaller cults based in monasteries of all sizes throughout the realm.Footnote ²⁸

There can be little doubt that many middle-sized and smaller monasteries set out to influence popular religion in this way. It is likely that the majority of religious houses possessed a collection of relics, such as the finger bone of St John the Baptist, the rings of St Hippolitus and St Edmund of Canterbury and the comb and chafing dish of St Richard of Chichester itemised in the late fifteenth-century inventory of the tiny Berkshire priory of Selborne.Footnote ²⁹ The commissioners who put together the Compendium compertorum found relics at almost every house they visited, many of which were said to have been used by the laity for specific assistance, particularly in pregnancy or labour. There are also a number of relics that are reported to have been attracting more general interest. At Repton we hear that ‘a pilgrimage is made to St Guthlac and his bell, which they put upon people's heads to alleviate headache’; at Roche there was ‘pilgrimage to an image of Christ crucified, found, as supposed in Roche’; and at Hampole ‘pilgrimage to St Richard [Rolle], a saint not canonized’.Footnote ³⁰ For Eamon Duffy, the Compendium comprises ‘widespread evidence of the integration of monastic shrines into the fabric of popular religion’,Footnote ³¹ and it should be underlined that the majority of these shrines was housed in lesser monasteries, both male and female. On the other hand, the commissioners had every cause to exaggerate the scope of the ‘superstitious’ practices they found in religious houses, as further justification for their imminent suppression. Whether this source provides a wholly reliable picture of monastic influence is therefore debatable.

Another indication of monastic efforts to touch popular devotion can be found in the granting of indulgences. Diana Webb has highlighted the importance of this source as ‘a very rough guide to the landscape of shrine promotion’, and it is notable that lesser religious houses appear prominently in the evidence she has assembled.Footnote ³² For example, in December 1397 the small alien priory of Monmouth was granted an indulgence for those venerating its collection of Christocentric relics; and the following year the Cistercian Boxley Abbey was similarly favoured to mark the two principal feasts of the cross: one of the earliest references, it would appear, to the Boxley Rood of Grace. In several such instances the monastic image or relic for which the indulgence was granted was said to have been attracting ‘a multitude’ of pilgrims, such as the finger of St John the Baptist at Mottisfont Priory in 1457 or the ‘cross of the true wood of Our Lord's cross, as it is asserted’ on display in the chapel of St Laurence in Markby Priory in 1475.Footnote ³³ This evidence from indulgences is of great interest in revealing ‘the multiplicity of small-scale cults and would-be cults which clamoured for the attention, and served the needs, of local populations’. But, as Webb recognises, we cannot know for certain from the formulaic language used in these documents whether these cults were genuinely popular or whether they were merely aspirational pilgrimage sites, seeking indulgences to extend their limited appeal.Footnote ³⁴ Once again, the attempts made by monasteries to influence popular religion emerge clearly, but the response of their lay neighbours is much more difficult to ascertain.

Other sources survive from late medieval England which offer a glimpse of popular pilgrimage locations from the consumer's perspective: in particular, household accounts, wills and pilgrim badges. Household accounts recording the costs of journeying to a shrine, either in person or by proxy, give some indication of the venues visited by the elites in late medieval England. The importance of monastic shrines in early sixteenth-century England is immediately apparent from several such lists. For example, the accounts of the 3rd duke of Buckingham record his pilgrimages to Keynsham Abbey, St Augustine's Abbey Bristol, Glastonbury Abbey, St Anne in the Wood, Our Lady of the Pew at Westminster, Our Lady of Barking, the Holy Rood at Greenwich, the Child of Grace at Reading Abbey (all visited in 1508), Our Lady of Walsingham (1519), Our Lady of Kingswood and St Aldhelm's shrine at Malmesbury Abbey (both 1520), Our Lady of Belhouse Bristol, Tewkesbury Abbey, St Kenelm at Winchcombe Abbey, Hailes Abbey, Windsor and Our Lady of Eton (all in 1521): a set of destinations predominantly, though certainly not exclusively, monastic.Footnote ³⁵ The long list of shrines visited on behalf of Elizabeth of York in 1502 also contains numerous sites in the hands of religious houses, including again the Child of Grace at Reading, the Holy Blood of Hailes and the Marian shrine at Walsingham, as well as Our Lady of Worcester and the Rood of Grace, Boxley.Footnote ³⁶

Rather more common than lists of pilgrimage sites in aristocratic household accounts are those contained in testamentary records. However, wills are less informative than might be hoped, since shrines mentioned therein rarely offer any clue about the agency behind the cult. Take, for example, the series of local pilgrimage centres cited in the well-known fifteenth-century will of Alice Cooke of Horstead in Norfolk. To be visited on her behalf were Our Lady at Reepham, St Spyrite at Elsing, St Parnell of Stratton, St Leonard without Norwich, St Wandreda of Bixley, St Margaret of Horstead, Our Lady of Pity at Horstead, St John's Head at Trimingham and the Holy Rood at Crostwight. Almost nothing is known about most of these shrines, and only St Leonard of Norwich can be identified as a monastic cult.Footnote ³⁷ The precise location of and sponsorship behind the remainder of these sites is not apparent from the naked list provided by the will. In the light of these difficulties, it is perhaps unsurprising that historians of local pilgrimage have rarely considered questions of agency in their discussion of this phenomenon. But the possibility that some at least of the sites named by Alice Cooke had connections with a religious house cannot be dismissed.

A glance at some of the more popular Marian shrines of late medieval England reinforces this point. References in wills or household accounts provide for pilgrimage to Our Lady of Arneburgh, Barking, Caversham, Crowham, Doncaster, Ipswich, Knaresborough, Lynn, Northampton, Sudbury, Willesden, Woolpit and Worcester, to name only some of the most frequented sites. Now we happen to know from other sources that Our Lady of Arneburgh was associated with Yarmouth Priory, Our Lady of Caversham was served by canons of Notley Abbey, Our Lady of Lynn was controlled by Lynn Priory, Our Lady of Woolpit by monks of Bury and Our Lady of Worcester by the cathedral priory of that city.Footnote ³⁸ The shrine at Barking may have had some connection with the nuns of Barking Abbey, whereas the cult centres at Northampton and Doncaster were in the charge of Carmelite friars.Footnote ³⁹ In the light of the obscurity of several of these cult centres, those sites with demonstrable links to religious houses can be considered only the minimum number with such connections.

In other cases it is only material evidence which points to monastic involvement in a popular local shrine. This can be seen in the cult of Richard Caister, the vicar of St Stephen's, Norwich, which developed in East Anglia following his death in 1420. Caister's would seem to have been a classic parochial cult, based around a parish priest and centred on his parish church. However, the surviving pilgrim badges from Caister's shrine, which have been found as far away as London and Salisbury, portray the priest surmounted by the Trinity.Footnote ⁴⁰ This imagery has been convincingly interpreted as a reference to Norwich Cathedral Priory, dedicated to the Trinity, which was rector of the parish of St Stephen. The Caister badges therefore provide an evocative representation of monastic oversight of this local, parish-based cult.Footnote ⁴¹

Pilgrim souvenirs, available in increasingly large numbers from late medieval England, can themselves provide some indication of the relative popularity of shrines.Footnote ⁴² In catalogues of recovered pilgrim badges and other souvenirs, monastic cults tend to predominate. Large numbers have been connected to the shrines at Canterbury and Walsingham, with significant quantities also identified with the Holy Rood of Bromholm, the Rood of Grace at Boxley, Edward the Confessor's shrine at Westminster Abbey and that of Thomas of Lancaster at Pontefract Priory, for example.Footnote ⁴³ Yet souvenirs of this kind present their own problems of interpretation. Badges and ampullae from some shrines are much more easily provenanced than materials from other cult centres. Souvenirs from shrines associated with a distinctive saint, such as St Thomas Becket or the Confessor, are readily identifiable. Equally, where large numbers have been found from a single location (sometimes including moulds) it is possible to attribute badges to shrines on stylistic grounds. However, the large numbers of souvenirs displaying Marian imagery or roods are very difficult to place. As a result, such badges reveal more about pilgrims visiting more traditional cult centres, such as Bury St Edmunds and St Albans, than about those journeying to the multiplicity of fashionable Marian shrines in late medieval England.

Another gauge of the popularity of pre-Reformation shrines can be provided by the comments of contemporaries. In 1361 the Cistercian Merevale Abbey was granted the power to absolve those dying during pilgrimage to the abbey ‘by the crush of people or by falling sick of various illnesses prevalent in these days’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In letters to Lord and Lady Lisle of March 1538, John Husee singled out the pilgrimage sites of Our Lady of Southwick and the rood at Bermondsey, along with the Holy Blood of Hailes, as important monastic shrines put down by the royal commissioners in that year.Footnote ⁴⁵ A letter from the Council of the North of December 1537 relates that ‘many pilgrims’ resorted to the chapel of St Saviour in Newburgh Priory; whereas late medieval Welsh poems attest to the appeal of the Holy Rood of Brecon in the priory church and the rood of the Dominican friars of Bangor.Footnote ⁴⁶ Further anecdotal evidence concerning the appeal of monastic shrines comes from the comments of the antiquarian John Leland, who referred to popular pilgrimages at the smaller monasteries of Cleeve, Bodmin, Scilly, Netley, Southwick and Hilbre Island.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is also sometimes possible to infer the popularity of monastic cult centres from surviving buildings. The importance of the monks of Basingwerk's shrine at Holywell is illustrated by the magnificent well chapel which survives at the site; and Bradwell Priory's Marian image was sufficiently popular in the fourteenth century for the monks to construct a special chapel adjoining the priory church to house it.Footnote ⁴⁸

Alongside these valuable but impressionistic indicators of popularity, there survive in a small number of cases records in monastic account rolls of the offerings received from pilgrims. Obedientiary accounts are rare for all but the largest religious houses. However, a significant number survive from small dependent priories, located in the archives of their far better recorded mother houses. From the evidence of these accounts, it would appear that numerous lesser monasteries could rely on regular revenues from pilgrims in late medieval England.Footnote ⁴⁹ Particularly striking are the records from the five cells of Norwich Cathedral Priory. Of these houses, only one (Aldeby Priory) received no recorded income at all from offerings to an image in the later Middle Ages. Oblations at Hoxne Priory, whose monks served two chapels connected with the martyrdom of St Edmund, were modest. Yarmouth Priory, however, collected sums of about £10 a year from its chapel of St Mary of Arneburgh throughout the first half of the fifteenth century. When the popularity of this cult began to wane, the monks installed an image of ‘Good King Henry’ in a chapel in their cemetery which at its peak in 1484/5 attracted as much as £17 per year.Footnote ⁵⁰

In the same year, a new image of Our Lady in the chapel of the Red Mount, Lynn, drew offerings of £20 for the monks of Lynn Priory. This sum had risen to £34 by 1497/8, before stabilising at around £15 a year between 1500 and 1525.Footnote ⁵¹ But most impressive of all was the cult of St Leonard, at the priory of that dedication just outside Norwich. Oblations to the image of St Leonard fetched between £25 and £35 each year for much of the third quarter of the fourteenth century, before tailing off gradually over the next fifty years. However, the priory accounts display a remarkable upturn in the cult's fortunes from the early 1430s and annual cash sums of between £30 and £45 were left at the image for most of the following three decades. Although the popularity of this cult decreased thereafter, it was still consistently drawing in offerings of at least £10 per year until the mid-1520s.Footnote ⁵²

No other shrine recorded in the accounts of dependent priories approached this level of popular support. But several other daughter houses can be seen to have sponsored cults that must have had a significant impact on the religious lives of their localities. Durham Cathedral Priory's cell of St Leonard, Stamford, was receiving an income of about £5 per year from the pyx of St Leonard in the late fourteenth century, although annual oblations had fallen to under one pound by the 1430s. The sole extant account from St Bees Priory, a cell of St Mary's York, shows offerings of £3 7s. 9d. left to St Bega's bracelet. Rumburgh Priory in Suffolk, another tributary of St Mary's York, was also a local centre of veneration for this saint, attracting oblations of between £2 and £3 per year throughout the fifteenth century.Footnote ⁵³ Modest offerings to saints can also be found in the accounts of Finchale and Cowick Priories.Footnote ⁵⁴

The account rolls surviving from dependent priories can therefore provide a rough indication of the impact of monastic shrines on their localities. The sums involved are in most cases modest, and suggest cults of no more than local appeal. But the number of priories which were able to attract pilgrims to their houses is of particular interest. Account rolls can be traced from twenty-eight dependent priories,Footnote ⁵⁵ and the fact that nine of these small houses (32 per cent) can be seen to have drawn income from venerated images or relics suggests that a significant proportion of lesser monasteries were involved in this activity. Moreover, since several of the accounts concerned were not fully itemised and only a handful survive from some priories, this figure represents a strict minimum. The accounts analysed by Nilson reveal that the majority of cathedral priories also drew a regular income from pilgrims,Footnote ⁵⁶ again suggesting that a significant number of late medieval England's 650 or so monasteries played some part in the promotion of popular saint cults.

More precise indicators of how many religious houses involved themselves in the sponsorship of popular saints' cults in pre-Reformation England must elude us. The one source that could potentially provide some overview of the impact of monastic cults is the Valor ecclesiasticus of 1535. The impression given by this tax assessment of the revenue coming to religious houses from pilgrims is far from encouraging. According to the Valor, only Walsingham Priory was drawing a large income from pilgrims by the mid-1530s, with offerings to the house's Marian image valued at £260 12s. 4d. per year.Footnote ⁵⁷ Also still remunerative was the image of Our Lady in Worcester Cathedral Priory (£40 per year) and Becket's shrine (£36 2s. 7d.).Footnote ⁵⁸ Lesser offerings of between £5 and £10 per year are attributed to the shrines of Hailes, Caversham, Bromholm and Syon, and a small group of religious houses are also recorded as drawing sums of a few shillings or pence from pilgrims.Footnote ⁵⁹

Should we take this picture at face value? It is immediately apparent that this assessment sits uneasily alongside the considerable evidence already cited for the popularity of monastic shrines over the later Middle Ages. However, there remains the possibility that these figures offer a reliable measure of the appeal of monastic shrines by the middle of the 1530s, and that these cult centres had faced a serious decline in the number of visiting pilgrims in the generation leading up to the Dissolution. It is not easy to measure the impact on the pilgrim trade of Erasmian satire and Lutheran polemic, both particularly intense from the 1520s. But the small number of monastic accounts which run into the 1530s do suggest a downturn in the fortunes of saints' cults in this decade. Cash offerings to Our Lady of the Mount in Lynn fluctuated between £15 and £22 for most of the period between 1500 and 1514, before falling away to £9 8s. 6d. in 1528/9. Income recovered to £11 in 1531/2, but then seems to have declined precipitously, since no oblations to the shrine are recorded in the account of 1535/6.Footnote ⁶⁰ The appeal of the cult of St Leonard in Norwich seems also to have waned in the years leading up to the Dissolution. Between 1500 and 1528 offerings remained fairly stable at a rate of £8–£10 a year. The 1530s, however, saw a gradual decline in income from the shrine from £6 9s. 9d. in 1531/2 to just over £3 in 1534/5 and only 35s. 6½d. in 1535/6.Footnote ⁶¹ A similar decline over the 1530s is also discernible in the accounts for the shrine of St Cuthbert, Durham, with receipts falling from more than £11 in the mid-1520s to £7 10s. 3d. in 1536/7 and £4 7s. 5½d. in 1537/8.Footnote ⁶² In the absence of fuller data caution is required. But there are certainly signs that attacks on the cult of saints may have begun to create some uncertainty or reluctance to offer money at monastic shrines by the early 1530s.Footnote ⁶³ It is also notable that no examples of newly-established monastic cults are known in England after the late fifteenth century, although not enough evidence is available to be certain that none existed.

Nevertheless, it would be an exaggeration to say that support for monastic cults was collapsing in the years leading up to the Dissolution. Miracles continued to be proclaimed at the shrines of religious houses as late as the mid-1520s,Footnote ⁶⁴ and there is also good reason to believe that the Valor significantly underestimates the popularity of these cults. Firstly, it values offerings to the image of St Leonard at only 6½d. per year, considerably below the sums recorded in the priory's accounts for the mid-1530s. Secondly, the Valor omits oblations to St Cuthbert's shrine in Durham altogether.Footnote ⁶⁵ The absence in the 1535 assessment of offerings to the Rood of Grace at Boxley Abbey is also surprising, in the light of the regular complaints about the popularity of the shrine from its opponents in the 1530s.Footnote ⁶⁶ The conclusion that the Valor does not provide an accurate representation of the value of monastic shrines in the mid-1530s is strengthened by collation with other assessments made during the Dissolution process. Ministers' accounts for Pilton Priory in Devon record offerings of £10 per year to the Marian image in the church of Pilton, whereas the miraculous taper of Our Lady at Cardigan Priory was said in 1538 to be attracting ‘great pilgrimage’, and to be ‘so worshipped and kissed and used to swear in difficult matters that profits amounted to a great sum, twenty nobles [£6 13s. 4d.] of which went as a pension to the abbot of Chertsey’. The Valor records oblations of only 32s. under Pilton and omits the cult at Cardigan altogether, although it does include the pension payable to Chertsey with no indication of what it was for.Footnote ⁶⁷ Equally, the suppression records for Cleeve Abbey state that the Marian image housed in the cliff-top chapel visited by Leland brought in an annual income of £20 to the monks at the Dissolution; but again the Valor makes no reference to this cult.Footnote ⁶⁸ It is perhaps not surprising that income from pilgrims should be seriously under-represented in a tax assessment. The revenues from a miraculous shrine were highly unpredictable, and it may be that monasteries came to some agreement with their assessors, which took into account the problems of including highly fluctuating sources of income in a valuation that would (or so they thought) be the basis for the taxation of the monastery for years to come. We should also remember that not all offerings made to a shrine were in the form of cash. It seems fair, therefore, to conclude that monastic cults retained much – if perhaps not all – of their appeal right up to the Dissolution.

The sums of money being received from pilgrims at most of these shrines were not enormous, and do not approximate to the revenues received at the greatest cult centres of late medieval England.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nevertheless, annual cash offerings of £5–£10 denote a significant local cult. This empirical evidence from monastic accounts and suppression records provides a good indication of the appeal of these pilgrimage centres in pre-Reformation England, and carries some cumulative force. There remain, however, important questions about these cults that cannot be answered by reference to balance sheets and profit margins alone. How were monasteries able to attract support for the miraculous images and relics they possessed? Can monks, nuns and friars be considered central figures in ‘training’ the laity in the veneration of saints, or was their role in stimulating pilgrimage relatively minor? How important were local monastic cults in comparison with the many shrines situated in parish churches? These are not easy questions to answer, but fortunately there survives sufficient material about monastic cult centres in pre-Reformation England to advance some hypotheses about their overall significance in late medieval and early sixteenth-century popular religion.

As we have seen, an examination of the pre-Reformation fortunes of shrines sponsored by the greater monasteries of late medieval England might suggest increasingly forlorn attempts to maintain the popularity of rather outdated cults. However, most of the cults found in lesser religious houses were of a much more fashionable nature. The large majority of the sites mentioned above were centres of Christocentric or Marian devotion, whereas several others were connected with popular late medieval saints. Both the priories of Yarmouth and St Leonard's Norwich installed images of ‘Good King Henry’ in the late fifteenth century, although the former cult proved rather more successful than the latter. We also hear of an image of St John Schorne in Binham Priory in Norfolk in the early sixteenth century, which was attracting interest from as far away as Northamptonshire.Footnote ⁷⁰ Far from being out of touch with and detached from trends in lay devotion, these monasteries were instead extremely sensitive to the tastes of their lay neighbours. Furthermore, where it is possible to trace the origins of cults of this kind, it can be seen that the religious were more than willing to take the initiative in channelling popular piety.

In October 1350 the abbot of Lesnes received a royal grant of a plot of land on the highway at Newington to build a chapel ‘at the cross where Robert le Bouser was killed’. Le Bouser may have been a pilgrim murdered en route to Canterbury, and seems to have been the focus of a growing local cult. The canons of Lesnes, appropriators of the parish of Newington, were quick to respond to this popular interest and their adoption of the cult seems to have helped ensure its longevity since St Robert was still receiving mention in local wills in the early sixteenth century.Footnote ⁷¹ A similarly enterprising approach was taken by the nuns of Clementhorpe in York, who constructed a chapel on the site where Archbishop Scrope had been executed in 1405, in a field adjacent to the nunnery. The miracles which ensued at this chapel soon reached the ears of Thomas Walsingham in St Albans.Footnote ⁷²

In both these cases the monastery concerned was swift to respond to an opportunity to encourage and direct popular veneration of an incipient cult. This same resourcefulness can be observed in more detail through the account rolls of Lynn Priory. The appeal of the cult of Our Lady of the Mount, Lynn, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is clearly attested by the significant sums recorded in the Lynn accounts.Footnote ⁷³ The first mention of the cult comes in 1481/2 when offerings of a few shillings are recorded from the chapel of St Mary ‘on the mount’. In 1484/5, however, oblations to this image totalled an impressive £20 and they continued to rise for the next dozen years or so. What caused the sudden explosion of support for this image? It could be attributed simply to the erratic and unpredictable patterns of popular veneration, as rumour of miracles in the locality gathered its own momentum. But it is something of a coincidence that the remarkable upturn in the fortunes of this cult occurred at exactly the same time as the first signs of investment in it by the monks of Lynn. In 1484/5, not content simply to profit from the cult from afar as rectors of the parish, the monks paid an annual farm of 20s. to lease the land where the chapel stood, as well as the stipend of a warden of the chapel. Five years later the priory laid out almost £40 on a new and impressive chapel to house the image, a remarkable building which still stands today. A major restructuring of the chapel took place in 1505/6, with the addition of an upper chapel, at a further cost of over £20, but the priory's investment in the cult proved entirely justified. The image of the Virgin continued to attract oblations of at least £10 per year right up to the 1530s;Footnote ⁷⁴ and there is every reason to believe that the transformation of this cult from its modest beginnings in 1481/2 into the highly popular local shrine that it was to remain for half a century can be attributed to the sponsorship of the monks of Lynn.

A similar though rather more controversial scenario can be observed at Frithelstock Priory in Devon in the mid-fourteenth century. In 1351 Bishop Grandisson of Exeter ordered (ineffectively) that a chapel built by a ‘certain regular’ of Frithelstock in the vicinity of the priory should be destroyed immediately. The bishop declared that the miracles attributed to the image of the Virgin at the site were ‘counterfeit’, and the canons were censured for seeking to profit from what Grandisson deemed a false cult.Footnote ⁷⁵ Here again, therefore, we find a small monastery seeking to stimulate and direct lay piety through a new saint cult under its supervision, and apparently enjoying a fair measure of success on a local level. Indeed, in this case, the canons seem to have been more closely attuned to popular religious tastes than the ecclesiastical authorities thought desirable. We might also note that all three examples of false miracles recorded by Sir Thomas More in his Dialogue concerning heresies came from religious houses, although instances of such cynical deception were presumably not common.Footnote ⁷⁶

There is some reason to believe, then, that religious houses were not only responsive to trends in popular devotion, but were also able to exert considerable influence in channelling lay piety. The proportion of local pilgrimage sites in monastic hands is impossible to calculate, or even approximate, but must have been a significant percentage of the total number. It is possible to point to four main factors that would have enabled the religious to play an important role in the promotion of saints' cults on a local level in late medieval England. Firstly, the large number of parish churches appropriated to monasteries ensured that the regulars would be the beneficiaries of many popular cults. It was customary for the rector to receive a large percentage of the oblations offered within the parish, providing the religious with a financial incentive to involve themselves with any potential cult within their jurisdiction.Footnote ⁷⁷

Secondly, even smaller monasteries were in a position to invest in an incipient cult if they believed that it would pay dividends. It is significant that in all the examples cited above the religious paid for the construction of a chapel to house the miraculous image. Such an undertaking could be expensive, as the expenditure of the monks of Lynn on the chapel of the Red Mount indicates. This chapel, which survives largely intact, indeed provides some indication of the effect that could be created by framing an image in this way.Footnote ⁷⁸ In its completed form, the building consisted of two storeys with the image probably housed in the cruciform upper room. The upper level is small, but decorated with a fan-vault that has been compared to those of the New Work at Peterborough and King's College, Cambridge. Richard Marks has recently suggested that the chapel, built on a hill outside the town walls, was intended to embody a Passion narrative and that the Marian image it contained may have been a Pietà. The numinous effect created by a structure of this nature is not difficult to imagine.

The construction of a chapel also provided a sacramental setting for the image, with an altar for the celebration of the mass and a permanent clerical staff to supervise and officiate at the image. The impact of this kind of investment should not be underestimated. As one Lollard critic of images and pilgrimage complained:

It is not surprising therefore that the first act undertaken by monasteries seeking to encourage devotion to a new cult was the construction of a chapel to house the image. We might also note that even a smaller house like Lynn Priory, with an annual income of around £100 in the late fifteenth century, was able to invest a considerable sum of money in its cult.Footnote ⁸⁰ It is at the same time unlikely that many parish priests could have found the resources to commission something on the scale or beauty of the chapel of the Red Mount.

Thirdly, the religious may have been in a strong position to stimulate popular piety in this way because of their reputation as guardians of shrines. Traditionally, pilgrimage sites were associated with monasteries and the possession of a cult image or relic in the hands of the religious may still have seemed a fitting arrangement in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This point cannot be pressed too far, since the later Middle Ages was of course a time when images and relics regularly found their way into domestic settings, not to mention parish churches. Nevertheless, it is significant that when Archbishop Warham wanted to authenticate the alleged miracles of Elizabeth Barton in the mid-1520s, his seven-man commission of enquiry included three monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, and two Observant friars. Subsequently, the Holy Maid was directed into the nunnery of St Sepulchre, Canterbury, and her career guided by monks of the cathedral priory.Footnote ⁸¹ This diversion of Barton and the cult surrounding her into monastic channels seems to have been an entirely natural process, and did much to legitimise her revelations and enhance her appeal.

Fourthly, the debate over the ‘liminality’ of the pilgrimage experience suggests a further line of enquiry concerning the place of the religious house in this area of popular religion. It has been argued that one of the central appeals of medieval pilgrimage was the opportunity it provided to cross boundaries and transcend everyday experience.Footnote ⁸² The recognition of the importance of local pilgrimage in late medieval England, however, has led Eamon Duffy to stress instead the familiarity of this activity: ‘going on pilgrimage is a liminal phenomenon only if, and much to the same extent, that going to market was a liminal phenomenon’.Footnote ⁸³ The role played by religious houses in local pilgrimage might help us to reconcile these two arguments. Entering the enclosure of a religious house could restore some liminality to even a local pilgrimage, since this would take pilgrims beyond the boundaries of their everyday religious experience. This certainly seems to have been the case for the female pilgrims who overran the precinct of Meaux Abbey in the mid-fourteenth century, after they had been given access to the monastery in order to venerate the monks' new crucifix.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is not inconceivable, therefore, that shrines controlled by religious houses could offer for some a more satisfying pilgrimage experience than images housed in parish churches.

All this evidence points to the conclusion that monastic influence in the promotion of popular saints' cults, a central facet of lay religion, has not been given the prominence it deserves. This is not to deny the importance of parochial shrines in late medieval religion. The majority of local pilgrimage sites were housed in parish churches, and sponsored by parochial clergy and congregations. Many parish churches were the recipients of indulgences in the later Middle Ages, in order to encourage pilgrims to venerate their images and relics. The cult of St Sidwell in Morebath, which grew up after the parish priest, Christopher Trychay, provided a new image of the saint in 1520, is now well known. And one might also cite the parochial cult of St Urith of Chittlehampton, valued at £50 per year in the 1530s, or the chapel of St Anne built in a nearby wood by Richard Bernardi, the vicar of Luton, in 1491 ‘from his own goods’ after miracles had been reported there.Footnote ⁸⁵ Equally, it is possible that some of the cults recorded in monastic accounts were in fact the product of parochial endeavours, the profits from which were simply diverted in part to the religious house as rector of the parish. In the majority of cases cited above there is fairly unambiguous evidence that it was the religious who took the lead, but in others, such as Pilton and Brecon where the object of devotion was situated within the parochial portion of a shared church, there is some ambiguity over who was the driving force behind the cult.Footnote ⁸⁶

Local pilgrimage in late medieval England was therefore dominated by a combination of monastic and parochial forces; a point recognised by More when he argued that popular saint cults were ‘for the most parte in the handes of suche relygyous persones or suche pore paryshys as bere no greate rule in the convocacyons’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The two parties were not in overt competition, but rather complemented each other's provision. The initial sponsorship of the majority of local cults came from parishioners and their priests. But, in a significant number of instances, a religious house took up the direction of the cult, thereby providing the investment, legitimation and even liminality to allow the cult to meet its full potential. Disputes between monks and parishioners over the offerings to miraculous images are not unknown,Footnote ⁸⁸ but there is little sign of resentment towards religious houses for their appropriation of popular saint cults. Indeed, if parishioners had considered monastic involvement to be an unwanted intrusion into parochial religion, they would quickly have withdrawn their support from the cult concerned. Instead, this seems to have been an area where the religion of the parish and the monastery fused, as well as that of the laity and the clergy more generally. Parochial cults were perhaps more common, but monastic involvement seems to have been widely welcomed because of the particular contribution a religious house could make in stimulating veneration to a miraculous image or relic.

There is every reason to believe, therefore, that religious houses of all kinds – large and small, male and female, old and new orders – were significant influences in the popular devotion of the saints in late medieval England. It cannot be doubted that pre-Reformation monasteries no longer occupied the dominant position in the religious life of the country they had once held. But the success of many religious houses in attracting and maintaining popular support for their miraculous images and relics throughout the later Middle Ages, and their manifest sensitivity to popular devotional trends, belies any charge of irrelevance or marginality. This conclusion also has significant implications for our interpretation of the events of the 1530s. In particular, it would appear that the association between monasteries and superstition in the rhetoric of the Dissolution was not contrived. The centrality of religious houses in the promotion of cult images would have made this line of attack an obvious one for reformers.

The influence the religious were able to exert over the laity in this department of popular devotion would have also provided grounds for hostility towards them. For Erasmians and evangelicals alike, monastic encouragement of superstition among the populace caused real harm, and the handsome profits that passed into the hands of the religious as a result of this activity could only exacerbate the offence. This helps to explain the enmity expressed by numerous commentators towards the monasteries in the 1530s, which we would not expect to find directed at an effete and irrelevant institution. Monastic influence over lay religious tastes seems therefore to have been a genuine cause for concern within the Henrician regime, and to this extent the Dissolution might be presented as a response to the enduring strength of the religious orders rather than to their weakness. It would be overstating the case to claim that this hostility precipitated the attack on the monasteries of the 1530s. Nevertheless, as one ingredient in the campaign against the monasteries, their involvement in promoting popular saints' cults should be taken seriously. Not only did this contribute to the antagonism felt towards monasteries by their opponents, but, as Peter Marshall has argued, it also provided evangelicals with a critique of the religious that would resonate with a king committed to ridding his realm of idolatry.Footnote ⁸⁹

The precise balance between financial and ideological motivations for the suppression of English monasteries must remain elusive. The stimuli for the Dissolution were highly complex, not least because attitudes towards religious houses were far from uniform within the Henrician regime and may well have evolved considerably over the 1530s. But the momentum for change in this decade was greatest where different reforming agendas intersected, and in the attack on the monasteries humanist, evangelical and financial imperatives combined. The need for money may have helped dictate the pace and rhythm of the suppression campaign; but it is hard to explain the Dissolution by reference to the greed of Henry viii and his courtiers alone. It was not necessary to suppress every monastery in England and Wales for the king to make his fortune and protect his coastline, and the dissolution of the friaries cannot have had a primarily financial rationale. The case for an ideological element to the Dissolution therefore deserves further attention. As the monasteries are accorded a more prominent place in our understanding of late medieval religion, the significance and meaning of the Dissolution also require re-evaluation. It is today difficult to argue that ‘the Dissolution formed neither an integral nor an essential part of the Reformation in England and Wales’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The suppression of the religious orders in the second half of the 1530s was instead a central part of the Henrician Reformation, and mattered rather more to the English people and to the reformers than is often acknowledged.