There were, next, the people who lived by the making and selling of things no longer wanted under the new order. There were the makers of ecclesiastical vestments and robes; altar cloths; wax tapers; instruments required in the celebration of Mass; crosses and crucifixes; beads, reliquaries, images, and all the “properties” required for the old Faith. Also all those who sold tapers, beads, crosses, images, relics, books of hours, mass books, censers and every kind of church vessel. One has only to look at the shops in the vicinity of a French cathedral to understand the extent of the business when not a single cathedral, but a hundred and fifty parish churches, and monastic chapels, had to be provided for, and when all the people, with one consent, acquiesced in the doctrines, and practised the ritual of the Church.
[Illustration: STEPHEN GARDINER, BISHOP OF WINCHESTER (1483(?)-1555)
From an engraving of the portrait in Trinity Hall, Cambridge.]
All these people, thus deprived of their livelihood, were skilled craftsmen. When their occupation was gone, when embroidered altar-cloths, copes and vestments stiff with cloth of gold, carven images, sacred pictures, beads and crosses and crucifixes, were no longer wanted, what could they do? If, at the present day, any single branch of industry is suddenly destroyed, what happens? It is too late for the people concerned to learn another trade. What happened to these unfortunates it is impossible to guess. One thing we know, namely, in general terms, that London was in a miserable condition for a quarter of a century after the Dissolution of the Houses; and we may fairly conclude that not bad trade alone, but also the great number of poor and forlorn creatures who had been hurled by the Reformation from comfort to penury, was one cause of the depression.
Or, if we consider the immediate external effects of the Suppression; think of the unwonted silence, when all the bells of all the Monastic Houses were taken down: instead of the melodious pealing from forty chapels, there was left only the sorry tinkle of the parish bell.
From the streets disappeared all the friars: those of St. Francis, of St. Dominic, of St. Augustine, the Carmelites, and those with the Iron Cross. The old familiar figures had been diminishing in numbers, but they were still visible when the end came: still they went about, opening their money-boxes in the shops, and finding nothing. Afterwards one met, flitting along the streets, stray and forlorn figures clad like craftsmen, but knowing no craft; sturdy beggars who would not work; men and women turned out into the stony-hearted streets, filled with rage and bitterness; looking always for the restoration of the old Order and their own return to the quiet house of ease and comfort. Gone, too, were the servants of the Houses; they had been known by the badge upon their shoulders; gone was the vast army of chantry priests, subdeacons, and ecclesiastics, with all the minor Orders. When Queen Mary restored the ancient Faith the priests appeared again, leaping out from unknown dens and secret places, ready to resume suddenly the restored service before the newly adorned altar. And as London always attracted the masterless and the vagabond and the criminal, so from all parts of England flocked to the City those whom the Reformation had sent out homeless and penniless. The clergy, for their part, lost the greater part of their fees. The baptisms, marriages, and funerals, it is true, continued, but the fees for masses to be said for the dead—the most important part of the fees—the endowments of chantries, post obits, and memorial days, were all swept away. There were many chantry priests in every parish church. Why, only a few years before the Reformation, on the death of Lady Jane Seymour, Sir Richard Gresham ordered 1200 masses to be sung in the City churches for the repose of her soul. And when prayers for the dead were forbidden, and what had been an aristocratic Heaven, open especially to the rich because they could buy their entrance by masses, became a democratic Heaven, open to the poor and lowly as much as to the high and mighty, the loss to the clergy from this source was very great. There was also another loss in the abolition of pilgrimage, and another in the abolition of confession, penance, and extreme unction.