“In consideration whereof it may please the king’s majesty of his most charitable benignity, moved with pity in that behalf, to convert the revenues and profits of the sum of the said promotions into some godly foundation, whereby the said poor inhabitants, daily there multiplying, may be relieved, and the youth instructed and brought up virtuously, or otherwise, according to his most godly and discreet wisdom, and the inhabitants shall daily pray to God for the prosperous preservation of his most excellent majesty, long to endure.”[383]
It is hardly necessary to say that the petition had no effect. At Bury, as indeed all over England, the claims of the sick and poor were disregarded and the money passed into the possession of the crown. The hospitals that mediæval charity had erected and supported were destroyed; the youth remained untaught; the poor were deprived of the charity which had been, as it was supposed, secured to them for ever by the wills of generations of Catholic benefactors; the poor prisoners in the jail at Bury had to go without their Sunday Mass and their winter fire; whilst the money that had hitherto supported chaplains and chantry priests to assist the parish priests in the care of their districts was taken by the crown.
For Yorkshire the certificates of the commissioners have been published by the Surtees Society. The same impression as to the utility and purpose of the chantry and other assisting priests may be gathered from almost every page. For example, the chantry of St. Katherine in the parish church of Selby: “The necessity thereof is to do divine service, and help the parish priest in time of necessity to minister sacraments and sacramentals and other divine services.”… For “the said parish of Selby is a great parish, having but one curate, and in the same parish is a thousand houseling people; and the said curate has no help in time of necessity but only the said chauntry priest.”[384]
Again: “Two chantries of our Lady in the parish church of Leeds, ‘founded by the parishioners there to serve in the choir and to minister sacraments and other divine service, as shall be appointed by the vicar and other honest parishioners there, which they do.… The necessity thereof is to do divine service, to help the curate, and minister the Sacraments, having 3000 houseling people.’”[385]