The 1536 Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries: Same Suppression ...

some conventual priories were allowed to continue. Given the above figures, it appears no more
than a hundred priories were closed by Henry V. Further, even if it is assumed that Henry V
received approximately £7,000 a year, the majority of the revenues went towards colleges and
establishing new houses. Consequently, the money did not remain in the king‘s hand for long. 56
After the suppression of the alien priories, the monasteries went largely undisturbed, with
a few exceptions, until Cardinal Wolsey began his suppression in the early sixteenth century.
Wolsey‘s actions can be seen as the precursor to the Dissolutions of 1535-9. As Deirdre
O‘Sullivan writes, ―his actions have often been taken as their model, not least because his
principal assistant in 1525-29 was his successor in Henry VIII‘s favour, Thomas Cromwell.‖ 57
Baskerville boldly states ―The Cardinal‘s dissolutions...made all the forest of religious
foundations to shake; justly, proving the King would finish to cut the oaks, seeing the Cardinal
had begun to cut the underwood.‖ 58 Wolsey, however, had conformed his suppressions to
existing models, such as to the foundation of Magdalen College, where he studied at and was
later elected fellow of in 1497. In 1458, William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester founded
Magdalen College by suppressing the small priories of Selbourne in Hampshire, and Sele in
Sussex. Waynflete was not the only one to support a college with monastic resources; ―the
endowment of educational establishments by the laity gained increasing prominence in the
fifteenth century, and in a number of instances obligations and resources were transferred from
monasteries to these.‖ 59 In 1413, for example, Edmund Mortimer had petitioned to refound
Stoke-by-Clare priory in Suffolk, a former alien priory, as a secular college, which meant a
56 Chester William New, History of the Alien Priories in England to the Confiscation of Henry V: Dissertation
(Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing Company, 1916), 66-7.
57 Deirdre O‘Sullivan, ―The ‗Little Dissolution‘ of the 1520s,‖ Post-Medieval Archaeology 40 (2006): 227.
58 Baskerville, 109.
59 O‘Sullivan, 231.
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