monuments of a political revolution which William Shakspere himself had not seen; but which, in the boyhood of his father, had shaken the land like an earthquake, and, toppling down its "high steeples," had made many "An heap of lime and sand, For the screech-owl to build her baleful bower." Such were the ruins he looked upon, cumbering the ground where, forty years before, stood the magnificent abbey whose charters reached back to the days of the Kings of Mercia. The last great building of the Abbey of Evesham is the only one properly belonging to the monastery which has escaped destruction. The campanile which formed an entrance to the conventual cemetery was commenced by Abbot Lichfield in 1533. In 1539 the good abbot resigned the office which he had held for twenty-six years. His successor was placed in authority for a few months to carry on the farce which was enacting through the kingdom, of a voluntary grant and surrender of all the remaining possessions of the religious houses, which preceded the Act of 1539" for dissolution of abbeys." Leland, who visited the place within a year or two after the suppression, " rambling to and fro in this nation, and in making researches into the bowels of antiquity,"* says, "In the town is no hospital, or other famous foundation, but the late abbey." The destruction must indeed have been rapid. The house and site of the monastery were granted to Philip Hobby, with a remarkable exception; namely, "all the bells and lead of the church and belfry." The roof of this magnificent fabric thus went first; and in a few years the walls became a stonequarry. Fuller, writing about a century afterwards, says of the abbey, “ By a long lease it was in the possession of one Mr. Andrewes, father and son; whose grandchild, living now at Berkhampstead in Hertfordshire, hath better thriven, by God's blessing on his own industry, than his father and grandfather did with Evesham Abbey; the sale of the stones whereof he imputeth a cause of their ill success." All was swept away. The abbey-church, with its sixteen altars, and its hundred and sixty-four gilded pillars, its chapter-house, its cloisters, its library, refectory, dormitory, buttery, and treasury; its almery, granary, and storehouse; all the various buildings for the service of the church, and for the accommodation of eighty-nine religious inmates and sixty-five servants, were, with a few exceptions, ruins in the time of William Shakspere. Habingdon, who has left a manuscript 'Survey of Worcestershire,' written about two centuries ago, says, "Let us but guess what this monastery now dissolved was in former days by the gate-house yet remaining; which, though deformed with age, is as large and stately as any at this time in the kingdom." That gateway has since perished. Of the great mass of the conventual buildings Habingdon states that nothing was left beyond "a huge deal of rubbish overgrown with grass." One beautiful gateway, however, formerly the entrance to the chapterhouse, yet remains even to our day. It admits us to a large garden, now let Its out in small allotments to poor and industrious inhabitants of Evesham. The change is very striking. The independent possession of a few roods of land may perhaps bestow as much comfort upon the labourers of Evesham as their former dependence upon the conventual buttery. But we cannot doubt that, for a long course of years, the sudden and violent dissolution of that great abbey must have produced incalculable poverty and wretchedness. princely revenues were seized upon by the heartless despot, to be applied to his unbridled luxury and his absurd wars. The same process of destruction and appropriation was carried on throughout the country. The Church, always a gentle landlord, was succeeded in its possessions by the grasping creatures of the Crown; the almsgiving of the religious houses was at an end; and then came the age of vagabondage and of poor-laws. The general effects of the dissolution of the abbeys have been well described by Edmund Howes: "In the time of Henry VIII. the clergy was exceeding rich and powerful, and were endowed with wondrous stately palaces and great possessions, so as in every city, and county, and towns corporate, and in very many remote. places, then were very strong and sumptuous houses for religious persons: as abbeys, priories, friaries, monks regular, minories, chantries, nunneries, and such-like; at which time the clergy grew proud, negligent, and secure, presuming, like the Knights Templars, upon their proper greatness, as well in regard of the reasons aforesaid, as that every Lord Abbot and Lord Prior that wore mitre sat in the upper Parliament and had free voices, as Barons, subsistent with the Bishops. The Lords, and Ladies Abbesses, of which houses were usually of noble birth, and sometime of the blood royal, as well women as men; for by this time, through the charitable devotion and special affection of former kings, princes, peers, and common people, the monasteries were so much increased, gloriously builded and adorned, and plenteously endowed with large privileges, possessions, and all things necessary. Albeit they relieved the poor, and raised no rents, nor took excessive fines, yet they many ways neglected. : their duty to God and man, being verily persuaded their estate and safety to be more safe and secure than ever was any condition of people, because their houses were repaired, their rents increased, their churches new builded and beautified, even to the very day of their general dissolution, which came suddenly upon them, like the universal deluge. For, whilst the religious persons thus flattered and secured themselves, the King obtained the ecclesiastical supremacy into his particular possession, and therewithal had power given him by Parliament, to survey and reform the abuses of all those houses and persons above said: but the King, because he would go the next way to work, overthrew them, razed them; many ruins of them remain a testimony thereof to this day whereat many of the peers and common people murmured, because they expected that the abuses should have been only reformed, and the rest have still remained. The general plausible project which caused the Parliament. consent unto the reformation or alteration of the monasteries was that the King's exchequer should for ever be enriched, the kingdom and nobility strengthened and increased, and the common subjects acquainted [acquitted] and freed from all former services and taxes, to wit, that the abbots, monks, friars, and nuns, being suppressed, that then in their places should be created forty earls, threescore barons, and three thousand knights, and forty thousand soldiers, with skilful captains, and competent maintenance for them all, ever out of the ancient churches' revenues, so as, in so doing, the King and successors should never want of treasure of their own, nor have cause to be beholding to the common subjects, neither should the people be any more charged with loans, subsidies, and fifteens. Since which time, there have been more statutelaws, subsidies, and fifteens than five hundred years before. And not long after that the King had subsidies granted, and borrowed great sums of money, and died in debt, and the forenamed religious houses were utterly ruinated, whereat the clergy, peers, and common people were all sore grieved, but could not help it."* The sense which we justly entertain of the advantages of the Reformation has accustomed us to shut our eyes to the tremendous evils which must have been produced by the iniquitous spoliations of the days of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. The religious houses, whatever might have been their abuses, were centres of civilization. Leland says, "There was no town at Evesham before the foundation of the abbey." Wherever there was a well-endowed religious house, there was a large and a regular expenditure, employing the local industry in the way best calculated to promote the happiness of the population. Under this expenditure, not only did handicrafts flourish, but the arts were encouraged in no inconsiderable degree. The commissioners employed to take surrender of the monasteries in Warwickshire reported of the nunnery of Polsworth, "that in this town were then forty-four tenements, and but one plough, the residue of the inhabitants being artificers, who had their livelihood by this house." In another place Dugdale says, "Nor is it a little observable that, whilst the monasteries stood, there was no act for relief of the poor, so amply Dugdale's Warwickshire,' p. 800. *Continuation of Stow's Chronicle.' did those houses give succour to them that were in want; whereas in the next age, namely 39th of Elizabeth, no less than eleven bills were brought into the House of Commons for that purpose." We have little doubt that the judicious encouragement of industry in the immediate neighbourhood of each monastery did a great deal more to render a state provision for the poor unnecessary than the accustomed "succour to those who were in want." The benevolence of the religious houses was systematic and uniform. It was not the ostentatious and improvident almsgiving which would raise up an idle pauper population upon their own lands. The poor, as far as we can judge from the acts of law-makers, did not become a curse to the country, and were not dealt with in the spirit of a detestable severity, until the law-makers had dried up the sources of their profitable industry. Leland, writing immediately after the dissolution of the Abbey of Evesham, says of the town that it is "meetly large and well builded with timber; the market-sted is fair and large; there be divers pretty streets in the town." While the abbey stood there was an annual disbursement there going forward which has been computed to be equal to eighty thousand pounds of our present money. The revenues, principally Dugdale's Warwickshire,' p. 803. 6 + History of Evesham,' by George May. A remarkably intelligent local guide. derived from manors and tenements in eight different counties, are seized upon by the Crown. The site of the abbey is sold or granted to a private person, who will derive his immediate advantage by the rapid destruction of a pile of buildings which the piety and magnificence of five or six centuries had been rearing. More than a hundred and fifty inmates of this monastery are turned loose upon the world, a few with miserable pensions, but the greater number reduced to absolute indigence. Half the population at least of the town of Evesham must have derived a subsistence from the expenditure of these inmates, and this fountain is now almost wholly dried up. In the youth of William Shakspere it is impossible that Evesham could have been other than a ruined and desolate place. Not only would its monastic buildings be destroyed, but its houses would be untenanted and dilapidated; its reduced population idle and dispirited. Its two beautiful parish churches, situated close to the precincts of the abbey, escaped the common destruction of 1539; but till within the last seven years that of St. Lawrence had been long disused, and had fallen into ruin. It is now restored; for after three centuries of destruction and neglect we have begun to cherish some respect for what remains of our noble ecclesiastical edifices. The act for the suppression of the smaller religious houses (27th Henry VIII.) recites that "manifest sin, vicious, carnal, and abominable living, is daily used and committed amongst the little and small abbeys, priories, and other religious houses." But in suppressing and confiscating all such small houses, whose annual expenditure is not two hundred pounds, the same statute affirms that, in the "great solemn monasteries of this realm, thanks be to God, religion is right well kept and observed." The smaller houses were destroyed, according to the statute, through the ardent desire of the King's most royal majesty for "the increase, advancement, and exaltation of true doctrine and virtue in the said church." And yet, in four years, the "great solemn monasteries of this realm, wherein, thanks be to God, religion is right well kept and observed," were also utterly suppressed and annihilated, under the pretence that they had been voluntarily surrendered to the King. It was the policy of the unscrupulous reformers-who, whatever service they may ultimately have worked in the destruction of superstitious observances, were, as politicians, the most dishonest and rapacious-it was their policy, when (to use their own heartless cant) they had driven away the crows and destroyed their nests, to heap every opprobrium upon the heads of the starving and houseless brethren, of whom it has been computed that fifty thousand were wandering through the land. The young Shakspere was in all probability brought into contact with some of the aged men who had been driven from the peaceful homes of their youth, where they had been brought up in scholastic exercises, and had looked forward to advance in honourable office, each in his little world. Some one of the Grey Friars of Coventry, or the Benedictines of Evesham, must he have encountered, hovering round the scenes of their ancient prosperity; sheltered perhaps in the cottage of some old servant who could labour with his hands, and upon whom the common misfortune therefore had |