CAPÍTULO 3. APLICACIÓN DEL PROCEDIMIENTO PARA LA PLANIFICACIÓN
3.4 Conclusiones del tercer capítulo
By the end of 1534 the break with Rome was complete and Henry VIII was head of the English church. As the practical effects of the implementation of religious changes concomitant upon the legislation became increasingly apparent, however, there was widespread popular discontent and the king faced the most serious challenge of his reign in the autumn of 1536 with the outbreak of the Pilgrimage of Grace. This was, in effect, a series of linked uprisings which began in Lincolnshire, spreading rapidly northwards to Yorkshire, westwards to the Lake Counties and south from there into Lancashire, Cheshire’s neighbour. Although the rebels themselves had a variety of stated grievances, a common underlying cause was opposition to the recent religious changes, notably the dissolution of the monasteries and the abrogation of saints’ days.42
To date, there has been no serious attempt to examine why the rebellion did not spread from Lancashire into Cheshire. For many, both contemporaries and later historians, this should have been a logical progression. In order to understand why Cheshire did not join the rebellion it is necessary to consider both the potential for popular support for the Pilgrimage and the position of the gentry.
A complicating factor in Cheshire in 1536 was the upset of the balance of power in the county occasioned by the execution of William Brereton on 17 May, accused with
others of adultery with Anne Boleyn.43 The rivalry between the Breretons and other local families, notably the Egertons and the Duttons had been a dominant feature of local political life for more two decades.44 As Eric Ives has put it, prior to his fall William Brereton had been ‘master in Cheshire and North Wales’, his position largely derived from his court connections, and the scramble for lands and offices which followed his death exacerbated local rivalries.45 By the autumn of 1536 the attention of the leading county families was absorbed by this power struggle in which for the leading protagonists the retention of the goodwill of the king was paramount.
The composition of commissions such as the one responsible for producing the
Valor Ecclesiasticus in 1535 suggests that support from the centre favoured neither party at that time and may, indeed, have been aimed at striking a balance of power.46 Of
43
E. W. Ives, ‘Brereton, William (c.1487x90–1536)’, DNB (online edition accessed 11 July 2009); E. W.
Ives, ‘Court and County Palatine in the Reign of Henry VIII: the Career of William Brereton of Malpas’,
THSLC, 123 (1972 for 1971), pp. 32-3. It is unlikely that Brereton was guilty of the charges brought against him and Ives has suggested that Thomas Cromwell exploited the situation in the spring of 1536 to
remove ‘a potential obstacle to his plans for Wales’ (DNB). Brereton’s school friend, George Constantine,
credibly declared that ‘yf any of them was innocent, it was he’: T. Amyot, (ed.) ‘Transcript of an Original
Manuscript, Containing a Memorial from George Constantyne to Thomas Lord Cromwell’, Archaeologia,
23 (January 1830), p. 65 (LP xiv(2), 400). George Bernard, however, while not apportioning any guilt to
Brereton has adopted a more phlegmatic approach. ‘What we do know is that Anne knew Brereton; and it
is just conceivable that their relationship was more intimate than was prudent.’ G. W. Bernard, Anne
Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (New Haven and London, 2010), p. 180. It may be noted here that following the execution of the courtier, William Brereton of Malpas, leadership of the Brereton faction in Cheshire passed to Sir William Brereton of Brereton, a distant relation.
44 E. W. Ives, ‘Patronage at the Court of Henry VIII: the Case of Sir Ralph Egerton of Ridley’, Bulletin of
John Rylands Library, 52 (2) (1970), pp. 365-9; Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, pp. 214-6.
45 Ives, ‘Court and County Palatine’, pp. 22, 33-4, c.f. Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, pp. 214-6,
where Thornton has stated that this is an exaggeration of Brereton’s influence. Thornton’s view is not, however, supported by a contemporary description of him as ‘a man wiche in the sayd countye of Chester had all the holle rewle and governaunce under owre sovereign lord the kings grace’, quoted in E. W. Ives
(ed.), Letters and Accounts of William Brereton of Malpas (The Record Society of Lancashire and
Cheshire, 116, 1976), p. 2; S. J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government, 1485-1558, p. 36.
46LP viii, 149(35); for the Cheshire commissioners LP viii, 149(70). The commissioners were William
Brereton, Sir Piers Dutton (sheriff in 1534 to 1537 and 1542), Urian (mistranscribed as Brian) Brereton, Sir Thomas Fouleshurst of Crewe in Nantwich deanery (sheriff in 1528), Sir Edward Fitton of Gawsworth in Macclesfield deanery (sheriff in 1531 and 1543), Sir William Stanley of Hooton in Wirral deanery, Sir John Holford of Holford in Frodsham deanery (sheriff in 1541), Sir John Done of Utkinton in Chester deanery (sheriff 1529 and 1530), John Carrington of Carrington in Frodsham deanery, William Venables
the seventeen valuation commissioners for Cheshire, those named first were William Brereton and Sir Piers Dutton. Eight of the county’s other leading gentry were included, among them supporters of both Brereton and Dutton. The commission also included five lawyers and other palatine officials from Chester, together with two auditors. The
personnel of the Cheshire commission may be compared with the commissioners for Lancashire where the county was surveyed by two different commissions because the work was divided by diocese. The commission for the northern area of Lancashire, in the diocese of York, included only three laymen, none of them local. Although Joyce Youings observed that each county’s commission normally comprised the bishop and local gentlemen, this was not always the case since the Cheshire commission included no clergy at all.47
It has been pointed out that a comparison with other valuations of monastic income carried out around the same time for different purposes shows that the valuations of the Valor Ecclesiasticus for the Southern Province were generally accurate.48 In the case of Norton Priory in Cheshire, however, Patrick Greene has compared the valuation in Valor Ecclesiasticus with the Augmentation Office Ministers’ Accounts and found a significant difference of 33% between the gross income of £258 11s 8d (£180 7s 6d net) in the Valor and £343 13s 7¼d in the
of Kinderton in Middlewich deanery (sheriff in 1526), John Birkenhead, Richard Hassall, Richard Sneyd, William Glaseor, Otwell Worsley and the two auditors, Henry Parker and Richard Hawkins.
47LP viii, 149(68); Christopher Haigh, The Last Days of the Lancashire Monasteries and the Pilgrimage
of Grace (Chetham Society 3rd series, 17, 1969), pp. 37-8; Joyce Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London, 1971), p. 36.
48 David Knowles, Bare Ruined Choirs (Cambridge, 1976), p. 125. As Cheshire was in the diocese of
Augmentation Office accounts.49 Greene suggested that Sir Piers Dutton, as one of the assessors of Frodsham deanery where Norton was situated, may have deliberately arranged for the value to be falsified in order to reduce the net annual income below £200 thus bringing the monastery within the criteria for dissolution under the act of suppression.50 This seems unlikely, however, since there was no talk of a national programme of dissolutions on the basis of their income until the end of February or early March 1536 and the valuations which formed the basis of the Valor Ecclesiasticus
were mostly submitted by the autumn of 1535.51
The Dutton family had a long connection with Norton and a large part of the abbey’s lands had been gifted by them. By May 1536 rumours of the permanent disposal of monastic lands were circulating in the county and some local gentry were quick to seize the opportunity to lobby for available property. On 8 May Sir William Brereton wrote to Cromwell that he had been informed that ‘certeyne howses of religion in
Cheschyre’ were to be suppressed and asking that he ‘moue the kynges grace to haue me in rememberaunce my seruyce done to his highnes in dyuerse isyues whiche haue byn to my great cost and charge and yf yt please his grace by your meanez to lok vppon me’.52 It is clear from this letter that Sir William Brereton looked on Cromwell as a patron.
49 Greene, Norton Priory, pp. 17-19. Patrick Greene directed the excavation of Norton Priory in the 1970s
in the course of which he carried out detailed research on the history and possessions of the house for which there is no surviving cartulary.
50
J. Patrick Greene, ‘The Impact of the Dissolution on Monasteries in Cheshire: The Case of Norton’, in
Alan T. Thacker (ed.), Medieval Archaeology, Art and Architecture at Chester (Leeds, 2000),
p. 155; Youings, Dissolution, p. 36.
51 Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, pp. 224-6.
52
TNA: PRO SP 1/103, f. 256 (LP x, 825). Sir William Brereton of Brereton, later lord justice of Ireland,
had served in Ireland from 1534 to 1536 and it is probably this service to which he is referring in his
letter; Mary Ann Lyons, ‘Brereton, Sir William (d. 1541?)’, DNB (online edition accessed 17 February
2008). It may also be noted Sir Piers Dutton was William Brereton’s uncle, since his sister, Eleanor, had married Sir Randle Brereton of Malpas, William Brereton’s father (Ormerod, ii, p. 796). This relatively close family relationship did not, however, inhibit the rivalry between the two men but is a further example of how the local gentry were connected by close ties of kinship.
Thornton has pointed out that the leaders of the two main factions in Cheshire had different patrons at court and so to some extent dominance in the county power struggle reflected shifts of influence at the centre. While Sir William Brereton reported to Cromwell, Sir Piers Dutton, who also spent time in London, sent his reports to the chancellor, Audley.53 When Audley sent a commission for the appointment of Dutton to the Council in the Marches in October 1537 Rowland Lee who, as discussed above, was Cromwell’s man, sent the commission on to Cromwell for corroboration.54
Cromwell implemented a general visitation of the church from July 1535.55 The majority of the surviving evidence from this general visitation, in the form of the
Compendium Compertorum or summary of findings, relates only to reports of faults found in religious houses, however.56 The visitors for Cheshire were Thomas Legh and Richard Layton and in June 1535 Layton had written to Cromwell requesting their appointment as commissioners in north because
ther ys nother monasterie sell priorie nor any other religiouse howse in the north but other Doctor lee or I haue familier acqwayntance within x or xij mylles of hit so that no knauerie can be hyde from us in that contre nor ther we cannot be ouerfayssede nore suffer any maner Iniuries, we knowe and haue experiens bothe of the fassion off the contre and the rudenes of the pepull.57
53
Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, p. 211.
54LP xii (2), 985, 993.
55 Anthony N. Shaw, ‘The Compendium Compertorum and the Making of the Suppression Act of 1536’
(PhD Thesis, University of Warwick 2003), p. 24, gives the starting point as late July 1535 while Elton,
Policy and Police, pp. 247-8, thought that the visitation had not started until September. Elton pointed out that the visitation covered the whole church although it is often treated by historians as though it applied only to the regular clergy.
56
25 Henry VIII, c. 21; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, p. 192. Almost nothing survives of the
parochial visitation detecta.
57 BL Cotton Cleopatra E IV, f. 13 (LP viii, 822). ‘Rudeness’ here used to denote ignorance and lack of
The royal visitors thus set out with a bias against both the religious of the north and the local population, even though both were northerners. Although Thomas Legh was probably from Cumberland he may have had relatives in Cheshire, as he is said to have been distantly related to the Legh family of Adlington.58 From the reports submitted to Cromwell the key issues investigated were sexual crimes, apostasy, and the relics and assets of each house.59 Their reports thus provided a variety of types of evidence which could be used in any concerted move against the monasteries.
The archdeaconry of Chester was visited in five days in February 1536, the last house to be visited in the circuit was Combermere, and the visitors were back in London by 29 February. Shaw has suggested that the inclusion of three secular colleges in this last, rushed, phase of the visitation demonstrates that ‘that the purpose of the Visitation was largely about ensuring conformity with the Royal Supremacy amongst all bodies of clergy, not just religious.’60
There is no evidence that the friaries in Chester were visited, although some houses of friars in other areas were visited.61 It is likely that Layton and Legh split up for most of this period in view of the speed with which this part of the visitation was carried out. Both men must have visited the important Abbey of Chester, however, as the abbot wrote of ‘the Kinges moste dredde Iniuccions to me lately exhybyted by the worshipfull Doctor Layton and Doctor Leghe’.62
The visitors clearly
58
Frank Renaud, ‘Suppression of Religious Houses’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire
Antiquarian Society, 7 (1890 for 1889), pp. 83-4; Anthony N. Shaw, ‘Legh, Sir Thomas (d. 1545)’, DNB
(online edition accessed 13 June 2013). Legh was a cousin of Rowland Lee, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield.
59
Shaw, ‘The Compendium Compertorum’, p. 93.
60Ibid., pp. 239-40.The report on the Cheshire houses is to be found at TNA: PRO SP 1/102, f. 94, 94v,
100 (LP x, 364(4)). It does not include any information about Vale Royal, probably because the house had
been visited in the summer of 1535 in connection with the election of the abbot; Shaw, ‘The Compendium
Compertorum’, pp. 77-8, 192.
61 For example the Dominican Friars in Lancaster; LP ix, 1173 (ii).
left the abbot in no doubt that this visitation was being carried out at the command of the king.
The chosen criterion for wholesale dissolution was financial, but presented as a moral decision; ‘forasmoche as manifest synne, vicious carnall and abhominable lyvyng, is dayly used and comyted amonges the lytell and smale Abbeys Pryoryes and other Relygyous Houses’, those which had clear income of less than £200 per annum were to be suppressed.63 The foundations selected for suppression in Cheshire were Birkenhead Priory, Norton Priory and the house of Benedictine nuns in Chester. Birkenhead Priory was quickly suppressed in May or June 1536.64 Although it had always been a poor foundation, the nunnery in Chester purchased its exemption from suppression for £160.65 The dissolution of Norton Priory was delayed until early October 1536.66
The suppression of monasteries in other areas of England was one of the triggers for the outbreak of the Pilgrimage of Grace in the autumn of 1536.67 Dispute, sometimes acrimonious, continues among historians about many aspects of the Pilgrimage,
including the causes of the uprising, the sections of society which were actively
involved in promoting the unrest and whether there were significant regional variations
63 27 Henry VIII, c. 28.
64
R. Stewart Brown, Birkenhead Priory and the Mersey Ferry (Liverpool, 1925), p. 94; VCH Cheshire,
iii, p. 131.
65 LP xii (1), 311(39); LP xiii (2) i(ii)(3); VCH Cheshire, iii, p. 149.
66 TNA: PRO SP 1/108, f.14 (LP xi, 681).
67
For many years, and arguably to this day, the standard narrative work on the Pilgrimage of Grace was
M. H. and R. Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace 1536-7 and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538 (2 vols.
Cambridge, 1915). Recent studies of the Pilgrimage include Michael Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace; a
Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536 (Manchester, 1996); R. W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford, 2001); Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Pilgrimage of Grace: The Rebellion that Shook Henry VIII’s Throne (paperback edition, London, 2003). Other historians have
considered the Pilgrimage in the context of the early Reformation, for example Shagan, Popular Politics,
chapter 3; G. W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation; Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church
(paperback edition New Haven and London, 2007), chapter 4. For a discussion of the causes and summary
of the progress of the rebellion see Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions
in the underlying causes of discontent.68 It is, however, indisputable that a number of religious changes had given rise to alarm among the commons amid rumours that the entire fabric of parish life was under threat with concerns about the amalgamation of parishes, the suppression of some churches and confiscation of church goods. As George Bernard has persuasively argued, these fears were not irrational in the face of the
physical evidence of confiscation of property when the smaller monasteries were dissolved following the 1536 act and he considers that the dissolution was ‘a central cause in the rebellion’.69
There was also generally quite understandable concern about the fate of churches previously served by monks from the suppressed monasteries.70 Thus, the dissolution of the smaller monasteries en masse has been seen by some historians as the one key event which sparked the uprisings.
Haigh certainly felt that the suppression was crucial in the Lancashire uprising, as evidenced by the restriction of disorder to the north of the county where the
monasteries were still influential, while in the south ‘the houses had ceased to play a significant part’.71
Thus the commons restored the canons of Cartmel and Conishead in north Lancashire while in the south the suppression of the priories of Holland and Burscough was not resisted.72 Following the Pilgrimage of Grace, Robert Aske made a lengthy deposition in which, among other things, he attempted to explain why he felt
68 See, for example, the review by R. W. Hoyle of Michael Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace in American
Historical Review, 103 (3) (June 1998), pp. 879-80 and Michael Bush’s response American Historical Review, 103 (5) (December 1998), p. 1763.
69
Bernard, King’s Reformation, pp. 297, 314.
70 C. S. L. Davies, ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace Reconsidered’, Past and Present, 41 (1968), pp. 54-76; C. S.
L. Davies, ‘Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (eds),
Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 58-91.
71 Haigh, TheLast Days of the Lancashire Monasteries, pp. 58-9.
72Ibid., p. 53. Haigh notes, however, that the earl of Derby was reluctant to remove the lead and bells
that the monasteries were so important to the north of England.73 Haigh’s analysis of his deposition indicated that while he felt that Aske had overstated his case, ‘there is a solid basis of fact for Lancashire for most of the points he made.’74
Aske regretted the loss of abbeys because ‘the abbeys in the north partes gaf great almons to pour men’ as well as educating the children of the gentry.75
In Cheshire, however, there is evidence that responsibility both for the poor and for education was gradually being assumed by the laity by the early sixteenth century. The establishment of grammar schools in the market towns of Stockport, Macclesfield and Malpas under wills and by settlement between 1487 and 1527 has been described above. There had been grammar schools and a song school in Chester from the late fourteenth century,