Note (back) — Chapter XIV

Meanwhile, a vigorous assault was made on the strongholds of superstition; pilgrimages were suppressed, and many wonder-working images were pulled down and destroyed. The famous Rood of Boxley, a figure whose contortions had once imposed on the people, was taken to the market-place at Maidstone,[1058] and the ingenious mechanism, whereby the eyes and lips miraculously opened and shut, was exhibited to the vulgar gaze.[1059] Probably these little devices had already sunk in popular esteem, for the Blood of St. Januarius could not be treated at Naples to-day in the same cavalier fashion as the Blood of Hailes was in England in 1538,[1060] without a riot. But the exposure was a useful method of exciting popular indignation against the monks, and it filled reformers with a holy joy. "Dagon," wrote one to Bullinger, "is everywhere falling in England. Bel of Babylon has been broken to pieces."[1061] The destruction of the images was a preliminary skirmish in the final campaign against the monks. The Act of 1536 had only granted to the King religious houses which possessed an endowment of less than two hundred pounds a year; the dissolution of the greater monasteries was now gradually effected by a process of more or less voluntary surrender. In some cases the monks may have been willing enough to go; they were loaded with debt, and harassed by rules imposed by Cromwell, which would have been difficult to keep in the palmiest days of monastic enthusiasm; and they may well have thought that freedom from monastic restraint, coupled with a pension, was a welcome relief, especially when resistance involved the anger of the prince and liability to the penalties of elastic treasons and of a præmunire which no one could understand. So, one after another, the great abbeys yielded to the persuasions and threats of the royal commissioners. The dissolution of the Mendicant Orders and of the Knights of St. John dispersed the last remnants of the papal army as an organised force in England, though warfare of a kind continued for many years.