The Unpensioned Ex-religious in Tudor England

Abstract

The first Register of the Faculty Office, in Lambeth Palace Library, is a document which throws much light upon those who left religion before 1538. These ex-religious were, in the main, unpensioned. Although the late E. H. W. Dunkin made an almost complete transcript of the register in 1890, these early records of the Court of the Faculties were at one time thought to be lost. So much has been written about the treatment of the ex-religious, their pensions and benefices, that only the appearance, or more correctly the re-appearance, of fresh evidence justifies further consideration of this subject. Views as to whether the ex-religious were well treated or ill treated have been widely expressed, and of those who applied for capacities in 1536, Professor Knowles has recently written ‘whatever the numbers concerned, they were certainly not very large, and as they were the first religious to appear in the market in search of employment they were probably absorbed without great difficulty’. Any material which increases our knowledge of the unpensioned religious should be brought before scholars for, as the late Geoffrey Baskerville wrote in 1937, ‘the after-careers of the religious who were dispersed in 1536 are more difficult to trace than those of their companions whose sense of vocation led them to accept transference to the larger monasteries, and who were eventually able to claim a pension.’