Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton.

  • George Gordon Coulton
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    794/842 (page 760)
    CHAPTER LII (pp. 720-731) continued wit Fraticelli or B6guines or Waldensians), therefore the temporal lords do not get such frequent confiscations of goods as of old, and therefore they are unwilling to pay the Inquisitors so that inquisitions may be made at their [the lords’] expense”—-or possibly “the inquisitions are [now] made at the Inquisitors’ expense”. (5) More himself does not hesitate to jest upon this. In Utopia (p. 43) he makes Cardinal Morton’s jester allude to the beggars’ feeling towards a stingy man: they expect no more help from him “ than if [he] were a priest or a monk”. The Dissolution cannot be fully understood without such documentary evidence as Mr G. Baskerville has just published in his English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries (1937). See note 9 here below. (6) Loci e Lihro Veritatum, 70. (7) A Treatise concernynge the division letwene the spiritualtie and the temporaltie, f. 26 a. (8) Wilkins, Concilia (1st ed.), I. 549. (9) R. L. Poole Essays, 443. Mr Baskerville has now printed in a single volume the scattered evidence which his researches of years have collected. He shows conclusively, from manuscript and printed documents which he has been the first to study exhaustively, that the dispossessed Religious under Henry VIII were incomparably better treated than those who were cast adrift not only by the French Revolution and the Spanish Revolution of 1836, but even by the most orthodox Charles III of Spain (see esp. p. 285). See note 5 here above. (10) See my Five Centuries of Religion (11. 527-31), where I have printed half-a-dozen of his plainest utterances. In that volume (pp. 505 ff.) 140 pages are filled with contemporary generalizations by orthodox Churchmen about the monasteries from the twelfth to the sixteenth century; the overwhelming majority are unfavourable, and often in language which would be thought bigoted in a modern historian. This remains true even in face of the two favourable judgments, unknown to me, supplied by Dr A. G. Little in History for January 1929. Gascoigne (p. 68) quoted St-Cher as witness for the fact “ that all men whom he had known, possessing such plurality of Church livings [as was lamentably frequent everywhere], before their death, had been compelled by their conscience to confess that they had lived damnably by holding two benefices, whereas one sufficed for their needs”. (11) Cal. State Papers (Spain), IV. i. 367. (12) Pollard, Henry VIII, 206; Jesuits and the Middle Ages, 9. (13) See my pamphlet on Malta and Beyond, where I give facts which nobody has ventured to contradict. (This and the preceding pamphlet are published at 6d. each post-free from 72 Kimberley Road, Cambridge.) (14) R. W. Chambers, Sir Thomas More, 369 (cf. 367). (15) Dr Barry in Camh. Mod. Hist. 1. 646.