Dissolution of the Monasteries
Destruction of Manuscripts and Books -England
Despoiling the monasteries
Between 1536 and 1540, on the orders of Henry VIII, every single abbey and priory in England – some 800 in total1 – was dissolved, or forcibly closed.2 These included Glastonbury Abbey, Holy Trinity Priory, Lindisfarne, and Roche Abbey.
The Act of Supremacy in 1534 declared Henry VIII the Supreme Head of the Church of England, separating England from papal authority. This and subsequent acts gave the Crown the authority to disband monasteries in England, Wales and Ireland, appropriate their income and dispossess them of their assets.3
The term ‘dissolution of the monasteries’ encompasses all the religious establishments that were appropriated by the Crown in this period. 4 The work of despoiling the monasteries of their riches began almost immediately after they were suppressed.
Destruction of Monastic Libraries
The dissolution of the monasteries led to significant cultural losses, particularly the destruction of monastic libraries.5 Monastic libraries were repositories of manuscripts, illuminated texts, chronicles, theological works, and local records.
When the religious houses were dissolved, their substantial libraries and archives were either dispersed or destroyed. These acts of destruction were a cataclysmic assault on the cultural patrimony of medieval and early sixteenth-century England.6
The intellectual consequences of the dissolution of the monasteries and the dispersal or destruction of their libraries are difficult to comprehend. It has been estimated that less than 6,000 medieval books from monastic libraries survived.7
John Leland and private collectors mitigated some losses,8 but the Dissolution was a pivotal moment in the erosion of England’s medieval literary heritage, particularly for Anglo-Saxon and church-related texts. During the actual dissolutions (1536–40) libraries were plundered, and it is at this period that so much was either destroyed or hidden underground by ex-religious or acquired by private collectors. For the most part what survived, what wandered to new homes, depended on who was at the right place at the right time.9
More than any other individual N.R.Ker was responsible for tracing the earlier provenances of manuscripts that survived the suppressions.10 One year after the appearance of his Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books in 1941 he published a summary of his findings as ‘The Migration of Manuscripts from the English Medieval Libraries’.11
The Monastic Database
The Monastic Database is a comprehensive research tool developed by University College London (UCL). It is a systematic guide to one of the most significant collections of pre-modern documents, focusing on records produced by medieval English monasteries. It includes a listing of approximately 16,000 estates owned by English religious houses, with details like acquisition dates and bibliographical references, as documented in the hard-copy publication English Monastic Estates, 1066-1540 (List and Index Society, Special Series, 2007).12
What Became of the Monks and Nuns at the Dissolution? English Heritage.
Clark, James. The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History. Yale University Press, 2021; Lyon, Harriet. Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Dissolution of the monasteries 1536-1540. National Archives.
I could not find any images of destruction of monastic libraries, though there are many pictures of the ruins of monasteries. I used GROK to make an image of a destroyed monastic library. This article at Wikipedia has images of the ruins of many monasteries: List of monasteries dissolved by Henry VIII of England (partial).
C. E. Wright, ‘The dispersal of the libraries in the sixteenth century’, in Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright (eds.), The English Library before 1700: Studies in its History (London, 1958), pp. 148–75.
Ramsay, Nigel. ‘“The manuscripts flew about like butterflies”: the break-up of English libraries in the sixteenth century’, in James Raven (ed.), Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity (London, 2004), pp. 125–44.
Ronald Harold Fritze, ‘“Truth hath lacked witnesse tyme wanted light”: the dispersal of the English monastic libraries and Protestant efforts at preservation, ca. 1535–1625’, Journal of Library History 18 (1983), pp. 274–91.
Ker, Neil R. Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books (London, 1941).
Carley, James P. (1989). "John Leland and the Contents of the English Pre-Dissolution Libraries: Lincolnshire". Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society. 9 (4): 330–57; "Leland, John." In The Oxford Companion to the Book. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Also: John Leland (antiquary) (1503 – 1552).
“Ker, N. R. (Neil Ripley) (1908–82).” The Oxford Companion to the Book 2010. Ker was lecturer and (from 1946) reader in palaeography at Oxford. He wrote widely on medieval English MSS and prepared several important catalogues: Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (1941; 2e, 1964), Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (1957), and Medieval Manuscripts of Great Britain (5 vols, 1969–2002), a catalogue of medieval MSS not previously described.
NEIL R. KER, THE MIGRATION OF MANUSCRIPTS FROM THE ENGLISH MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES, The Library, Volume s4-XXIII, Issue 1, June 1942, Pages 1–11.
Jurkowski, M., Nigel Ramsay, Simon Renton, and List & Index Society. 2007. English Monastic Estates, 1066-1540 : A List of Manors, Churches and Chapels. Kew, Surrey: List and Index Society.
Your ability to bring these important elements of book and information history astounds me. Just, as you reminded me of Cutter yesterday, today I recall the readings I did on Lindisfarne many years ago in my all too random studies.