The Statute of 1545 stated that it was well known that the governors and wardens of hospitals, or the greatest number of them, did not exercise due authority nor expend the revenues in alms according to the foundation. The avowed object of the Act was “to reduce and bring them into a more decent and convenient order.
THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS HOUSES AND ITS EFFECT UPON HOSPITALS
“_The hospital . . . is like to go to utter decay. . . . For my own part I think often, that those men which seek spoil of hospitals . . . did never read the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew; for if they did, and believed the same, how durst they give such adventure?_”
(Archbishop Grindal, letter to Burleigh, 1575.)
When the Primate wrote thus to the Lord Treasurer, he added:—“that if any hospitals be abused (as I think some are) it were a more Christian suit to seek reformation than destruction.” Although the decline of some hospitals led to the dissolution of many, it by no means follows that such a course was justifiable.
Speaking generally, charities which had outlived their usefulness had already been suppressed before the general Dissolution and their property transferred to other purposes. The leper-houses of Windsor and Huntingdon, for example, were evidently deserted and ruinous when they were annexed to Colleges at Cambridge (1462); and the hospitals of Romney, Aynho and Brackley had been appropriated to Magdalen College, Oxford (1481–5) because they were no longer carrying out the founder’s intentions. St. John’s, Reading, and St. Bartholomew’s, Bristol, had already been converted into schools, the latter as recently as 1532.
[Illustration: _PLATE XXIV._ AMBULATORY OF ST. LEONARD’S, YORK]
In most of the existing hospitals good work was being [p227] done; the _Valor Ecclesiasticus_ and Chantry Surveys show that money was expended upon useful charities. Layton’s report of St. Mary’s, Leicester, that it was “well kept and honest men therein” was true of many almshouses throughout the land. Where evils are complained of, they were not so much breaches of morality on the part of the household, as neglect and wastefulness in administration. A carefully-regulated commission to inquire into matters of finance could well have rectified abuses in ill-managed institutions. Had justice and magnanimity held sway instead of rapacity and selfishness, the old houses of mercy would have been refreshed and their utility doubled just when a far wider charity was needful on account of the annihilation of benevolent monasteries. This was done in some foreign countries. Through the protection of Gustavus Vasa, Swedish lazar-houses survived the Reformation. In Denmark, Dominican and Franciscan friaries were transformed into hospitals, and the leper-houses subsequently became places of isolation for contagious diseases. In France, where there was no ecclesiastical upheaval, decayed hospitals were reformed (1545) and put under the control of the bourgeois class (1561).