A few words must be said about the final destruction of the English guilds. At the close of the reign of Henry VIII. an act of Parliament was passed vesting the property of colleges, chantries, fraternities, brotherhoods and guilds in the Crown (38 Hen. VIII., c. 4). The king was empowered to send out his commissioners to take possession of all such property, on the plea that it might be “used and exercised to more godly and virtuous purposes.” Henry died before the provisions of the act could be complied with, and a second act was passed through the first Parliament in the reign of Edward VI. (1 Ed. VI., c. 14). This went beyond the former decree of destruction, for after providing for the demolition of colleges, free chapels, and chantries, it proceeded not only separately by name to grant to the king all sums of money devoted “by any manner of corporations, guilds, fraternities, companies or fellowships or mysteries or crafts,” to the support of a priest, obits or lights (which may be taken under colour of religion), but to hand over to the crown “all fraternities, brotherhoods and guilds, being within the realm of England and Wales and other the king’s dominions, and all manors, lands, tenements, and other hereditaments belonging to them, other than such corporations, guilds, fraternities, &c., and the manors, lands, &c., pertaining to the said corporations, &c., above mentioned.”
The Parliament of Henry VIII. assigned as a reason for this seizure of the property of the corporate bodies the need “for the maintenance of these present wars,” and cleverly put into one group “colleges, free chapels, chantries, hospitals, fraternities, brotherhoods, and guilds.” “The act of Edward VI.,” writes Mr. Toulmin Smith, “was still more ingenious, for it held up the dogma of purgatory to abhorrence, and began to hint at grammar schools. The object of both acts was the same. All the possessions of all the guilds (except what could creep out as being mere trading guilds, which saved the London guilds) became vested by these two acts in the Crown; and the unprincipled courtiers who had advised and helped the scheme gorged themselves out of this wholesale plunder of what was, in every sense, public property.”[348]