what did henry the 8 do to the monastries and what effect did it have?

Answer 1

The Pope responded to these events by excommunicating Henry in July 1533.(Historians disagree on the exact date of the excommunication. According to Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples, the bull of 1533 was a draft with penalties left blank and was not made official until 1535. Others say he was not officially excommunicated until 1538 by Pope Paul III.) Considerable religious upheaval followed. Urged by Thomas Cromwell, Parliament passed several Acts that enforced the breach with Rome in the spring of 1534. The Statute in Restraint of Appeals prohibited appeals from English ecclesiastical courts to the Pope. It also prevented the Church from making any regulations without the King's consent. The Ecclesiastical Appointments Act 1534 required the clergy to elect Bishops nominated by the Sovereign. The Act of Supremacy 1534 declared that the King was "the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England"; the Treasons Act 1534 made it high treason, punishable by death, to refuse to acknowledge the King as such. The Pope was denied sources of revenue such as Peter's Pence.

Rejecting the decisions of the Pope, Parliament validated the marriage between Henry and Anne with the Act of Succession 1534. Catherine's daughter, the Lady Mary, was declared illegitimate, and Anne's issue were declared next in the line of succession. All adults were required to acknowledge the Act's provisions; those who refused to do so were liable to imprisonment for life. The publisher or printer of any literature alleging that Henry's marriage to Anne was invalid was automatically guilty of high treason, and could be punished by death.

Opposition to Henry's religious policies was quickly suppressed. Several dissenting monks were tortured and executed. Cromwell, for whom was created the post of "Vicegerent in Spirituals", was authorised to visit monasteries, ostensibly to ensure that they followed royal instructions, but in reality to assess their wealth. In 1536, an Act of Parliament allowed Henry to seize the possessions of the lesser monasteries (those with annual incomes of £200 or less).

In 1536, Queen Anne began to lose Henry's favour. After the Princess Elizabeth's birth, Queen Anne had two pregnancies that ended in either miscarriage or stillbirth. Henry VIII, meanwhile, had begun to turn his attentions to another lady of his court, Jane Seymour. Perhaps encouraged by Thomas Cromwell, Henry had Anne arrested on charges of using witchcraft to trap Henry into marrying her, of having adulterous relationships with five other men, of incest with her brother George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, of injuring the King and of conspiring to kill him, which amounted to treason; the charges were most likely fabricated. The court trying the case was presided over by Anne's own uncle, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk. In May 1536, the Court condemned Anne and her brother to death, either by burning at the stake or by decapitation, whichever the King pleased. The other four men Queen Anne had allegedly been involved with were to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Lord Rochford was beheaded soon after the trial ended; the four others implicated had their sentences commuted from hanging, drawing and quartering to decapitation. Anne was also beheaded soon thereafter.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries, referred to by Roman Catholic writers as the Suppression of the Monasteries, was the formal process during the English Reformation by which King Henry VIII confiscated the property of the monastic institutions in England between 1538 and 1541. He was given the authority to do this by the Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in 1534, which made him Supreme Head of the Church of England.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries did not take place in an isolated political context. Other movements against the jurisdiction of the Church of Rome had been underway for some time — most of them related to the Protestant Reformation in Continental Europe — but the religious changes in England were of a different nature than those being seen in places like Germany. Henry VIII's dispute with Rome was political, not theological.

The resulting changes were essentially a form of "State Catholicism" instead of a complete religious shift away from the Roman Catholic traditions in England's churches. Henry VIII expressed the church's continued Catholicism with 1539's Six Articles, which remained in effect until after his death. Cardinal Wolsey had obtained from the Pope a Papal Bull authorizing some limited reforms in the English Church as early as 1518.

Henry VIII's Anglican Church retained strong Catholic influences until the reign of his son and heir Edward VI. Protestant rites introduced during that time were largely due to the influence of two men during the reigns of both kings: Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, who served as Lord Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King's Person in the regency organization for Edward VI. Cranmer secretly married the niece of a Lutheran theologian of Nuremberg.

Under Henry VIII, acts allegedly reforming certain abusive practices in the church were passed in November 1529. They set caps on fees for probating wills and mortuary expenses for burial on hallowed ground, tightened regulations covering rights of sanctuary for felons and murderers, and reduced to four the number of church offices to be held by one man. These were less forms of "religious reformation" than they were ways of establishing royal jurisdiction in a "State Catholic" framework.

Nevertheless, resistance among the pro-Roman ecclesiastics was stiff, and was spurred on by Reginald Pole. Henry VIII originally offered Pole the archbishopric of York or the diocese of Winchester if he would support his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Pole withheld his support and went into self-imposed exile in France and Italy in 1532, where he continued his studies in Padua and Paris. Pole was made cardinal under Pope Paul III in 1536 over Pole's own objections, so as to be a potential "Pope's man" in England in an anticipated more pro-Roman future. In 1542 he was appointed as one of the three legates to preside over the Council of Trent, and after the death of Pope Paul III in 1549, Pole missed being elected pope by only one vote.

It has been suggested by English historical scholars, like J. J. Scarisbrick the author of The Reformation and the English People, that getting the lands and treasuries of those religious houses was as much Henry's purpose in splitting with the Church of Rome as getting divorced from Catherine of Aragon; however, the evidence points away from this, since he spent five years pressuring the Pope for his annulment before finally giving up and breaking with Rome. Moreover, during the period, it was a politically dangerous activity for the king to do, because there was little popular enthusiasm in Britain for Protestantism. Rather, having gained control over the church, he was unable to resist the temptation to use its wealth to clear the country's debts — especially as the church had an income three times greater than that of the state.

Additionally, it may have been a form of politics: that once the break with Rome had occurred, the Dissolution could be seen as a form of removing the organizations that were the mainspring of Henry VIII's political opposition, as well. The truth is likely a mixture of all these.

Henry had himself declared Supreme Head of the Church of England in February 1531. In April 1533 an Act in Restraint of Appeals eliminated the right of clergy to appeal to "foreign tribunals" (Rome) over the King's head in any spiritual or financial matter.

In 1534 Henry had Parliament authorize Thomas Cromwell, a layman in the King's service since 1530, to "visit" all the monasteries (which term includes abbeys. priories and convents), ostensibly to make sure their members were instructed in the new rules for their supervision by the King instead of the Pope, but actually to inventory their assets. A few months later, in January 1535 when the consternation at having a lay visitation instead of a bishop's had settled down, Cromwell's visitation authority was delegated to a commission of laymen. This phase is termed the "Visitation of the Monasteries."

In the summer of that year, the visitors started their work, and "preachers" and "railers" were sent to deliver sermons from the pulpits of the churches on three themes:

The monks and nuns in the monasteries were sinful "hypocrites" and "sorcerers" who were living lives of luxury and engaging in every kind of sin;
Those monks and nuns were sponging off the working people and giving nothing back and, thus, were a serious drain on England's economy;
If the King received all the property of the monasteries, he would never again need taxes from the people.
Meanwhile, during the last half of 1535, the visiting commissioners were sending back to Cromwell written reports of all the scandalous doings they said they were discovering, sexual as well as financial. A law that Parliament enacted in early 1536, relying in large part on the reports of impropriety Cromwell had received, provided for the King to take all the monasteries with annual incomes of less than £200, and that was done: the smaller, less influential houses were emptied, their few inhabitants pensioned and their property confiscated. Monastic life had already been in decline. By 1536, the thirteen Cistercian houses in Wales had only 85 monks among them. Their reputation for misbehaviour was likely overstated, however.

These moves did not raise as much capital as had been expected, even after the king rechartered some of the confiscated monasteries and confiscated them again. In April 1539 a new Parliament passed a law giving the King the rest of the monasteries in England. Some of the abbots resisted, and that autumn the abbots of Colchester, Glastonbury, and Reading were executed for treason.

The other abbots signed their abbeys over to the King. Some of the confiscated church buildings were destroyed by having the valuable lead removed from roofs and stone reused for secular buildings. Some of the smaller Benedictine houses were taken over as parish churches, and were even bought for the purpose by wealthy parishes. The tradition that there was widespread destruction and iconoclasm, that altars and windows were smashed, partly confuses the damage done in the 1530s with the greater damage wrought by the Puritans in the next century. Relics were discarded and pilgrimages discouraged, however. (See, however, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars : Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (1992), for another view.) Places like Glastonbury, Walsingham, Bury St Edmunds, Shaftesbury and Canterbury, which had thrived on the pilgrim trade, suffered setbacks.
Henry needed more cash; so many of the abbeys now in his possession were resold to the new Tudor gentry, aligning them as a class more firmly to the new Protestant settlement.

The abbeys of England, Wales and Ireland had been among the greatest landowners and the largest institutions in the kingdom. Particularly in areas far from London, the abbeys were among the principal centres of hospitality, learning, patronage of craftspeople and sources of charity and medical care. The removal of over eight hundred such institutions virtually overnight left many gaps.

It is unlikely that the monastic system could have been broken if there had not been a strong feeling of resentment against the church amongst at least part of the general population.

The related destruction of the monastic libraries was one of the greatest cultural losses caused by the English Reformation. Worcester Priory (now Worcester Cathedral) had 600 books at the time of the dissolution. Only six of them have survived intact to the present day. At the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York, a library of 646 volumes was destroyed, leaving only three surviving books. Some books were destroyed for their precious bindings, others were sold off by the cartload, including irreplaceable early English works. It is believed that many of the earliest Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were lost at this time.

"A great nombre of them whych purchased those supertycyous mansyons, resrved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes, some to scoure candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and soapsellers…" — John Bale, 1549
Monastic hospitals were also lost, with serious consequences locally. Monasteries had also supplied charitable food and alms for the poor and destitute in hard times. The removal of this resource was one of the factors in the creation of the army of "sturdy beggars" that plagued late Tudor England, causing the social instability that led to the Edwardian and Elizabethan Poor Laws. In addition, monastic landlords were generally considered to be more lax and easy-going than the new aristocrats who replaced them, demanding higher rents and greater productivity from their tenants.

The destruction of the monastic institutions was unpopular in some areas. In the north of England, centring on Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, the suppression of the monasteries led to a popular rising, the Pilgrimage of Grace, that threatened the crown for some weeks. The demand for the restoration of some monasteries resurfaced later, in the West Country Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549.

Many of the dismantled monasteries and friaries were sold for nominal amounts (often to the local townspeople), and some of the lands the King gave to his supporters; there were also pensions to be paid to some of the dispossessed clerics. Many others continued to serve the parishes. Although the total value of the confiscated property has been calculated to have been £200,000 at the time, the actual amount of income King Henry received from it from 1536 through 1547 averaged only £37,000 per year, about one fifth of what the monks had derived from it.

In 1536 there were major popular risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and, a further rising in Norfolk the following year. Rumours were spread that the King was going to strip the parish churches too, and even tax cattle and sheep. The rebels called for an end to the dissolution of the monasteries, for the removal of Cromwell, and for Henry's daughter, and eldest child, the Catholic Mary to be named as successor in place of his younger son Edward. Henry defused the movement with promises, and then summarily executed some of the leaders.

Answer 2

He closed the monasteries because he put himself as the head of the church after his break with the Pope in Rome and forced priests and other religious to swear allegiance to him or lose their head literally. By closing the monasteries, Henry was able to shut down much of the opposition he had because of the break with the Roman Catholic Church.

Chow!!

Answer 3

It put his son, who was in failing health, on throne, paving the way for first Bloody Mary and then Elizabeth the Great. Shouldn't you be doing your own homework?

Answer 4

The short version

http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Dissolution_of_the_Monasteries.htm

Answer 5

he closed the monestaries so that he could get their land and wealth it was just an added bonus that he wanted to switch to Protestantism

Answer 6

why dont you look it up, you have a whole worlds history on the internet, do the research yourself.

Answer 7

DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK OR DIE OF AIDS