These, or four of them, were to make a return as to the number of "Chantries, Hospitals, Colleges, Free Chapels, Fraternities, Brotherhoods, Guilds and Salaries, or Wages of Stipendiary Priests" in their parish, together with all particulars as to the revenues, ordinances, objects, abuses, names and titles of the same. Full lists were to be drawn up of the lands and possessions of the Chantries, Colleges, and Gilds, and enquiry was instituted respecting any recent dissolutions or alienations which might have been made in prospect of the recent Act.
The contingency alluded to in the last article has sufficed to provide some writers with an excuse for the measure destroying the Chantries. No doubt the shock which the action of Henry VIII. in reference to the monasteries had given to all forms of corporate property had led many of the Gilds to attempt the realization of their property. All such transactions were to be null and void.
[Sidenote: _Gilds too powerful and popular to be wholly destroyed._]
Accordingly the commissioners went down to each town and hamlet and took full particulars of all matters concerning the Gilds and Chantries. "All such as have enye vestments or other goods of the Co{ y} [of Mercers are ordered] to bring them in," in order to be sold, with the rest of the Chantry fittings, "to the most p'fitt." The fate of the other kinds of property held by the Gilds, such that is as could not be definitely made out to have been intended for the support of obits and the maintenance of lights, seems to have depended considerably on fortuitous circumstances. In each individual case the Gild had to secure for itself the best terms it could. Sometimes its property was obtained by the town, either by grant or by purchase[121]. At Shrewsbury the almshouses of the Drapers and Mercers survived[122], and the vicar of S. Almond's Church in the same town still receives the yearly sum which the Shearmen settled on the chaplain they maintained in that church.
[Sidenote: _Perversion of the confiscated revenues._]
[Sidenote: _Disastrous effects on Gilds, and on Craftsmen._]