Dissolution of the East End monasteries
The East End has been renowned for many trades down the centuries – home for what was once the biggest docks on the planet, the sweatshops of the London garment trade, further back it was even the market garden for the neighbouring city.
Few people, though, picture Tower Hamlets as a refuge for those engaged in the quiet and introspection of religious devotion. But in the Middle Ages the area east of the City was home to many of London’s monasteries and nunneries.
Seeking escape from the noise and disease of the capital, the monks, sisters and friars had built their establishments in what was then countryside.
In the few short years between 1535 and 1540 they would all be swept away, as Henry VIII and his Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, set about dissolving the monasteries, casting their members into the streets and plundering their wealth for the royal coffers.
Henry changed the social and religious fabric of his country in the process. But in the decades beforehand, the old English social order of power vested in the competing religious orders, their fabulous wealth housed in the monasteries, was seen in miniature in Tower Hamlets.
Debauchery
The Augustinian, or Austin Friars, were a mendicant, or travelling order of friars, and had first come to England from the Continent in 1248. Augustine himself had become bishop of Hippo in North Africa in 396AD, after renouncing his earlier life of debauchery and self-indulgence. His order was founded on its leader’s fierce opposition to heresy.
By the Middle Ages the Augustinians had become a familiar sight on the streets of London, begging money to continue their charitable works. And by Henry’s time their work on the street had been so successful they had funded both a friary at Aldgate and an Augustine nunnery at Shoreditch.
St Benedict was born in 480 in North Italy, and this Catholic priest invented the whole monastic way of life.
By the Middle Ages, the Benedictine monasteries were largely responsible for the spread of education, the copying of religious scripts, and the teaching of reading in Europe – they founded several Oxford colleges.
The Benedictine nunnery at Bishopsgate was therefore a beacon of learning in the Dark Ages of medieval London.
The third major order vying for the charitable pennies of the East Enders of the time was the Franciscans.
Their founder, St Francis of Assisi, may have eschewed material possessions to live in poverty with the animals, but by the 1500s the Franciscan nunnery at Minories was very rich indeed, as its Greyfriars, or Friars Minor (from who Minories took its name) did their work of soliciting funds on the City’s streets.
Add to the list St Mary’s Hospital at Bishopsgate and St Mary Bethlehem – the notorious Bedlam hospital on the site of what is now Liverpool Street Station – and much of the wealth of the nation resided in Tower Hamlets.
Divorce
Henry had a pressing practical need to subvert the power of the Catholic Church – he was seeking a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and legitimisation of his new wife Anne Boleyn and their children, and the Pope was refusing to play along.
But just as important to such a proud king was that the London monasteries possessed wealth to dwarf his own treasury – and the leaders of those monasteries and nunneries looked to Rome for their authority, not to England’s King.
In 1530, the brown and black-habited mendicant friars were a common sight on the streets of the East End. In 1534, Cromwell’s Acts of Supremacy demanded that all religious orders pledge their allegiance to the Crown instead of the Pope, and made him head of the English Church.
Many agreed. Many didn’t and were executed. But by 1540 the monasteries were gone. Henry had rifled £140,000 in the process – a huge sum, the normal Crown income being only £100,000 a year.
The medieval Tower Hamlets, with its religious authority, was dead. From now on the power and wealth in the East End would rest with the merchants, as Britain’s new fleets brought riches back from all over the globe.