only a few months before. Finally, if the monasteries and convents
were really so bad as they are painted, it is a curious fact that
although Leigh and Leyton were empowered by Cromwell to open the doors
to many of the monks and nuns they could find in the thirteen counties
which they visited only two nuns and fifty-three monks willing to
avail themselves of the liberty which they offered.[9]

As a general rule the monasteries were regarded with kindly feelings
by the great body of the people on account of their charity and
hospitality towards the poor and the wayfarer, their leniency and
generosity as compared with other employers and landlords, their
schools which did so much for the education of the district, and their
orphanages and hospitals. Many of them were exceedingly wealthy, while
some of them found it difficult to procure the means of existence, and
all of them suffered greatly from the financial burdens imposed upon
them in the shape of pensions, etc., by the king or by the family by
whom their endowments were provided originally. For this reason some
of the religious houses, imitating the example of the landowners
generally, began to form grazing enclosures[10] out of their estates
which had been hitherto under cultivation, a step that led in some
cases to eviction and in all cases to a great reduction in the number
of labourers employed. Others of them set up tanneries and such like
industries that had been best left to the laymen. These measures led
to ill-feeling and to a certain amount of hostility, but that the
religious houses were not hated by the people is proved to
demonstration by the rebellions which their suppression evoked in so
many different parts of the country.

It may be said in a general way that the relations between priests and
people were neither particularly close nor particularly strained. The