The Dissolution of the Chantries

Abstract

The dissolution of the chantries in 1548 has long been recognised as a momentous event in the development of English parish life but, compared with its more famous antecedent, the dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s, it has received a disproportionately less thorough treatment by historians of the Tudor Reformation. In one respect this is not surprising. The monasteries were much larger institutions whose extensive ruins have left enduring monuments to the iconoclasm of the Henrician regime. All but the wealthiest of the chantries, however, were on a much smaller scale, and the majority of them had incomes which were only a small fraction of the resources of a medium-sized monastery. Yet it is generally agreed that, at least in the towns of England, the group of intercessory institutions which are known collectively as ‘chantries’, probably played a more important role in the lives of the common people than the monasteries ever had. In any town of reasonable size there was likely to have been at least one chantry or some other intercessory institution such as fraternity or guild with which the local people would have been familiar. The larger market towns and the cathedral towns boasted dozens of these institutions and in London they were to be found in their hundreds. It was not just the towns that could boast of these types of institutions.