On the authority of Hugh Latimer, it has long been believed that Henry viii's first act for the suppression of monasteries had a relatively easy ride through parliament in spring 1536 because evidence of what was by Christian standards rampant sexual immorality in the monasteries and nunneries of England was presented to it. What Latimer said, in a sermon delivered in the presence of Edward vi some thirteen years later, was this:

He knew what he was talking about because, in March 1536, he was an eyewitness in the House of Lords as the recently appointed bishop of Worcester. Most historians of the dissolution of the monasteries have connected his comment with the details of sexual misbehaviour gathered by the royal commissioners who carried out a rapid visitation of English monasteries and nunneries in the second half of 1535 and early 1536. This very different type of monastic visitation took a peculiar interest in the sex lives of monks and nuns, and the commissioners coined their own word, ‘comperts’, to describe what they found out. ‘Comperts’, an obvious Anglicisation of ‘comperta’, means ‘things that have been found out’, or findings. The only instances of this obsolete word listed in the Oxford English dictionary come from the years 1535–9.

An extant summary of a large sample of these findings, known as the Compendium compertorum, has seemed particularly significant in this context, although it is necessary to emphasise at once that two documents survive under this title, and it is important to distinguish them. They were juxtaposed by the nineteenth-century collators who arranged the state papers of the reign of Henry viii in the order in which they now stand in their bound guard books.Footnote ² The first of them, the one that historians generally mean when they mention the Compendium, recapitulates the ‘comperts’ from the religious houses of northern England. It consists of sixteen leaves of paper within a vellum cover, and its title, written on the front cover in a later hand, defines its scope as the province of York and the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield: Compendium compertorum per Doctorem Layton et Doctorem Legh, in visitatione regia Provincia Eboracensi ac Episcopatu Coven. & Lichfielden. It is tempting to infer that this document is either the clean copy or the duplicate that William Blithman told Cromwell he was making after two of the royal commissioners, Richard Layton and Thomas Legh, had concluded their tour of the north in February 1536. However, if so, he used a different hand in the Compendium from the one he used in writing to Cromwell.Footnote ³ But even if this document is not Blithman's work, it will have been related to it.

The document for Norwich diocese is just four leaves of paper, headed simply ‘Compendium compertorum’. Despite generic resemblances that led the editors of Letters and papers to conclude that both documents are in the same hand, this is not the case.Footnote ⁴ The Norwich document is in the hand of John ap Rhys (another of the royal commissioners), who authenticates it at the end with his name, notarial cipher and the comment ‘Concordat cum compertis’ (‘it agrees with the comperts’). It can be very confidently identified with a paper that Legh and ap Rhys told Cromwell they were sending to him with a letter of 11 November 1535. Writing from Westacre Priory, they say they are enclosing ‘an abridgement of the compertes from the last ye had unto Crabbehouse’, and they draw his attention in particular to the notes on West Dereham. The surviving Norwich Compendium ends with an entry for Crabhouse Priory (which stood beside the Great Ouse, a few miles north of Downham Market), and includes an entry for West Dereham.Footnote ⁵ It must therefore be the enclosure sent with that letter. The notarial attestation shows that this summary had been prepared from original ‘comperts’ that are now lost. It is striking that while numerous letters sent to Cromwell by the various commissioners in 1535–6 refer to enclosed ‘comperts’, only one example of this primary material, which must have been considerable, is known to survive. This is a sheet of paper headed ‘Compendium compertorum apud Chertsey’, which was sent to Cromwell by Thomas Legh with a letter dated 29 September.Footnote ⁶

It has seemed to most historians who have considered the matter that the two summary documents are examples or drafts or copies of the sort of thing that was read out in parliament in 1536 to the horror of the assembled members.Footnote ⁷ However, in his recent study of the dissolution, James G. Clark has challenged this interpretation. While agreeing that this looks at first sight as though it might ‘embody the casebook spoken of by Latimer’ (not that he actually speaks of a ‘casebook’, though that is what most historians have inferred), Clark argues that the text is ‘the only one of its kind’ and ‘only a partial return from three dioceses’, and that there is ‘no trace of, or reference to, another matching booklet’.Footnote ⁸ As he rightly observes, the material from the northern visitation, which is the bulk of what survives, hardly looks likely to have been ready in time for formal presentation to parliament in early March.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, he argues, Latimer's words do not constitute proof that a document of this kind was formally read out, but might simply reflect the parliamentary reaction to the claims made in ‘the opening clause of the statute itself’.Footnote ¹⁰

The preamble to the first act for the suppression of monasteries (27 Henry VIII c. 28) starts as follows: ‘Forasmoche as manifest synne, vicious, carnall and abhomynable lyvyng is dayly used & commytted amonges the lytell and smale Abbeys Pryoryes and other Relygyous Houses of Monkes Chanons & Nonnes.’ A little further on it continues thus: ‘And albe it that many contynuall vysytacions hath bene hertofore had by the space of two hundreth yeres and more, for an honest and charitable Reformacion of such unthrifty carnall & abhomynable lyvyng, yett neverthelesse lytell or none amendement ys hytherto hadde, but ther vycyous lyvyng shamelesly encreaseth & augmentith.’Footnote ¹¹

These are grave accusations, but they do not constitute evidence,Footnote ¹² and they do not sound like the reading out of the ‘enormities’ that Latimer recalled. It is hard to imagine such airy generalisations eliciting cries of ‘down with them’, unless perhaps from an audience already primed by familiarity with the sort of shocking details collected by the commissioners. It is possible that the reading of the preamble incited howls of fury. But it is not likely.

It is worth observing here, chiefly because it seems not to have been remarked upon before, that the first act for the suppression of monasteries, astonishingly, does not appear in the sessional print of the statutes passed in the final session of the ‘Reformation Parliament’ (4 February–14 April 1536).Footnote ¹³ Nor is it found in the various collected editions of the statutes published from the 1540s onwards (which merely reissue the sessional prints).Footnote ¹⁴ The sessional print for the spring parliament ends at 27 Henry VIII c. 27, ‘An acte establyshinge the courte of augmentations’.Footnote ¹⁵ The reason for not printing the act on the monasteries can only be conjectured. But perhaps the regime was worried that publishing it might provoke discontent or even rebellion before the suppression got under way. Even though the suppression act was mentioned in the preamble to the act for the Court of Augmentations, a passing reference (in an act which, printed at the back of the booklet, and of a strongly technical and administrative nature, would probably attract little attention) may have been deemed less inflammatory than printing the act of suppression itself, which would have meant highlighting its baldly explicit title on the contents page.

Clark develops his argument further by suggesting that, far from being designed to harvest evidence with which to discredit English monasticism, the visitations of 1535 were a serious attempt to promote observant reform in the religious life in England, and were often favourably received as such.Footnote ¹⁶ But this intriguing notion does not stand up to close scrutiny. Observant reform is usually driven from within religious orders, not by sceptical and hostile outsiders who rarely spent more than a day in any house they visited. As Dom David Knowles showed convincingly, over fifty years ago, some of the conditions imposed upon monasteries in this visitation went far beyond even the letter, let alone the spirit, of the various monastic rules.Footnote ¹⁷ The insistence that enclosure excluded venturing outside the precincts for any reason was utterly impractical and was greeted with anxiously polite incredulity, as abbots and priors besieged Cromwell with requests for dispensation from this absurdity. The point was to make life difficult, not to make observance rigorous.

Nor is the evidence adduced to suggest that this Henrician ‘reform’ of 1535 met with a favourable reception persuasive. Thus, while Abbot Robert Hamlyn of Athelney certainly used the phrase ‘thankes be to god’ in a letter to Cromwell after the visit of the royal commissioner Dr John Tregonwell, it is stretching a point to interpret this as a ‘heartfelt declaration’ by someone who wished ‘to identify themselves with a spirit of reform’. What Abbot Robert wrote was that Dr Tregonwell had carried out his visitation at ‘oure poure monastery … wher he fonde (thankes be to god) the house yn metely good order, as yt wyl apere at hys returne’. And the purpose of his letter was to request a dispensation allowing him to leave the monastery precincts on monastic business, notwithstanding the new injunctions.Footnote ¹⁸

There is in particular no justification for the claim that some sort of folk memory of this supposed observant reform lingered on until the turn of the century. The evidence offered for this is taken from none other than the future Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot. It is worth citing this claim:

Abbot did indeed write these words, but it is important to put them in their context. Having remarked on the ‘carnall kinde of behavior’ that had already overwhelmed the monasteries in the days of St Bernard of Clairvaux, which he illustrates with a five-line citation from Bernard himself in characteristically acerbic mood, Abbot proceeds, with unmistakable irony:

George Abbot, it transpires, saw in 1535 not a successful reformation, but a spectacular exposé of monastic corruption. This is just what one would expect from an author engaged at that moment in anti-Catholic polemic: the book in which he mentioned it was called The reasons which Doctour Hill hath brought for the upholding of papistry.

Still more interesting, though, is how Abbot continues the passage just cited, for in doing so he alludes to the publication of some of the ‘comperts’ in print. This is a clue which, when pursued, leads to evidence of the existence of another substantial, but now lost, and largely forgotten, compilation of findings from the 1535 visitation. Abbot goes on as follows:

This makes the unfamiliar suggestion that the sins of the monks were published in print. The work to which Abbot is referring can be identified as Henri Estienne's L'Introduction au traite de la conformite des merveilles anciennes avec les modernes: ou, Traite preparatif à l'Apologie pour Herodote. Despite appearances, Abbot need not actually have read this in French, because an English translation had appeared the year before. Whether he used the French or the English, though, his marginal note refers to ‘Cap. 21’, and chapter 21 of the Apology for Herodotus was indeed his source, for Estienne provides there a series of details concerning the ‘whoredoms, adulteries, incests and sodomies’ of English priests and monks who are identified by name and monastery. The English translation of Estienne is opaque about what his source was, rendering Estienne's observations as

The original French is no clearer, referring to ‘l'extraict auquel cela est escript, tiré d'un livre Anglois’.Footnote ²¹

Given that the scholar-printer Estienne was based in Geneva, the likelihood is that his source was a printed book by an English exile. The obvious candidate is the prolific John Bale, and an examination of his output reveals two works in which he provided details of monastic sins and crimes from the 1535 visitation. The first was Bale's Scriptorum illustrium Maioris Brytanniae … catalogus, though this gives only a small sample of what is to be found in Estienne's Apology. Estienne's immediate source was Bale's Acta romanorum pontificum.Footnote ²² All the details Estienne cites can be traced here.

In these two works, however, Bale does something much more useful for the historian than simply name and shame a few dozen monks. In the Catalogus, he provides invaluable details about his source:

In the Acta he adds the name of Thomas Legh to a list of the royal visitors, and a few lines later he referred to his source under exactly the same Latin title as before.Footnote ²⁴ Only then, in each case, did he launch into the salacious details.

Some important inferences can be drawn from these two passages. First of all, the Latin title Breviarium compertorum in monasteriis, conventibus, collegiis can be taken as the proper title of what was a formal document – probably compiled in Latin. Bale is explicitly telling us what the book ‘is called’. Secondly, it was a duly attested compilation. It was clearly attributed to, and probably signed by, three royal commissioners, and was notarially authenticated. The role of the notary in the preparation of the Breviarium can be taken as that of authenticating it as a trustworthy summary of the more detailed ‘comperts’ from which it had been compiled.Footnote ²⁵ The notary in question, Thomas Barthelet or Bartlett, is not to be confused with the king's printer, Thomas Berthelet. Even though in the Catalogus Bale spells the name exactly like that of the printer, he gives it as ‘Bartheletum’ in the Acta. The form ‘Bartlett’ is preferred here for the notary, to avoid ambiguity. Bale's notary ‘Thomas Barthelet’ is presumably to be identified with the notary who, as ‘Thomas Bartlett’, was working for Archbishop Warham in 1526.Footnote ²⁶ Bartlett seems to have passed subsequently into the service of Archbishop Cranmer, who wrote to Cromwell in 1535, asking him in turn to take the man on, because he did not wish to be ordained to the priesthood, which left Cranmer unable to offer him a suitably remunerative position.Footnote ²⁷ Over the next couple of years a Thomas Bartlett (or Bertlett) is named in various letters as a clerk or servant to Cromwell, once or twice in connection with the dissolution of the monasteries.Footnote ²⁸ With a fine sense of poetic justice, Cromwell provided for Bartlett by requiring the prior and convent of Canterbury Cathedral to grant him (with another of Cromwell's servants) the reversion of a lease on one of their properties.Footnote ²⁹

Thirdly, John Bale, working in Basel in 1558, had the actual Breviarium itself in his possession. One can only speculate about when and how he had acquired it, but it was presumably before he was chased out of Ireland by irate Catholics in the second half of 1553, following the death of Edward vi. If he did take it both to and from Ireland, it was something he valued very highly, as he took it with him when he had to abandon much else in his haste to escape. The likeliest explanation as to how the Breviarium came into his hands in the first place is that he received it direct from Thomas Cromwell, who secured his release from imprisonment in the mid-1530s and took him under his wing as the playwright and director for his troupe of travelling players.Footnote ³⁰ After it had served its immediate political purpose (to be discussed next), he would have appreciated its polemical potential in the hands of a man like Bale.

Finally, the Breviarium exactly fits the bill for the sort of thing that could have caused the uproar Latimer reports as having erupted in the parliament house. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what else this compilation could have been meant for, given that it was never published. However, if the ‘comperts’ were to be presented to parliament for political reasons, to help lever a challenging and revolutionary act onto the statute book, then it would have been entirely appropriate to present it with all the formality of a duly authenticated legal document, buttressed by the authority of three doctors of law, all of whom had been active in the royal visitation. As for the reading aloud of the document in parliament, it is worth remembering that, five years before, the opinions of the European universities on the invalidity of the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon had likewise been read out, first to the Lords and then to the Commons. Although the Breviarium was doubtless a Latin text, its narrow scope and repetitive nature would have made it amenable to impromptu translation and we can be sure that its sensational contents would have been presented to parliament in English.

As far as can be ascertained, the Breviarium itself is no longer extant. All that survives are the excerpts Bale printed in the 1550s. What we know, however, demonstrates that the Compendium compertorum was not, as has recently been suggested, the only thing of its kind. The Breviarium, with its grand title and notarial attestation, was presumably a finished manuscript of presentation quality. The Compendium looks more like a working text, perhaps a draft for a supplement to the Breviarium. Its coverage was entirely different from that of the Breviarium, which seems to have encompassed only religious houses in the dioceses of southern England (definitely including Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Salisbury and Bath and Wells). One might conjecture that the Compendium was left as a working draft because, after the spectacular success of the Breviarium, it was no longer needed. The act passed easily, the suppression was soon under way, and the necessary reputational damage had been done.

An analysis of the institutions covered by Bale's extracts is revealing, and what is offered here overlaps with an earlier analysis conducted by Anthony Shaw on the basis of the English translation of Bale's Acta published in 1574 as The pageant of popes (which therefore lacked the details of the source provided in the Catalogus).Footnote ³¹ Bale refers to ten religious houses, all of them male: Abingdon Abbey, St Augustine's Abbey in Bristol, St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, Bath Abbey, Battle Abbey, Bermondsey Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, Maiden Bradley Priory, Monkton Farleigh Priory and Shulbrede Priory. He also includes data from two collegiate churches – Chichester Cathedral and the Chapel Royal of St George at Windsor. The authenticity of the text is confirmed by the fact that forty-two of the forty-nine monks named can be identified from entirely independent sources as belonging to the institutions concerned. Thus the incestuous Abbot Thomas of Abingdon can be identified as Abbot Thomas Rowland, whose signature headed the rest at the surrender of his house on 9 February 1538.Footnote ³² Of the sixteen named at Battle Abbey, nine (including Abbot John) can be certainly, and another two probably, identified with men who signed the surrender deed on 27 May 1538, while one had left the abbey by summer 1536.Footnote ³³ The surrender deed for Canterbury Cathedral Priory does not survive, but six of the nine men named by Bale can be identified among the signatories to the royal supremacy there on 12 December 1534, and all nine can be identified from some source or other.Footnote ³⁴ Of the thirteen monks of St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury whom Bale names, eleven (including the abbot, John Essex) were among the signatories of the surrender deed on 30 July 1538, and one had left the religious life by the end of 1535.Footnote ³⁵ And three of the four monks of Shulbrede were granted dispensations to abandon the religious life.Footnote ³⁶ Richard Lyncombe and William Bewshon of Bath Cathedral Priory signed up to the royal supremacy on 22 September 1534.Footnote ³⁷ The prior of Monkton Farleigh, ‘Ludovicus’, is evidently Lewis Brecknock, and Abbot William of Bristol is William Burton.Footnote ³⁸ As for Prior Richard of Maiden Bradley, with his ‘five whores and six bastards’, he stars in one of Richard Layton's ebullient letters to Cromwell, as having ‘but vj. children’, with ‘one dowghter mariede’ thanks to a dowry from the priory's resources.Footnote ³⁹ Identifying the secular clergy named at Chichester and Windsor is more challenging, because the records for the 1530s at both places are patchy. At St George's Windsor, three out of the ten named in Bale can be identified, all of them among the minor canons or vicars choral.Footnote ⁴⁰ As for Chichester, Anthony Shaw found that of eleven men named there, only one, John Champion, was among the cathedral canons, but that another five could be identified as vicars choral in records of visitations in the 1520s.Footnote ⁴¹

Even more remarkably, just one man, Richard Layton, conducted the visitations at eleven of the twelve institutions featured in Bale's extracts, namely at Abingdon, Bath, Battle, Bermondsey, Bristol, Canterbury (both houses), Chichester, Maiden Bradley, Monkton Farleigh and Shulbrede – all of them between the beginning of August and the end of October.Footnote ⁴² It is not known who conducted the visitation of Windsor, or when, though Shaw's conjecture that the visitor there, too, was Layton seems highly plausible.Footnote ⁴³ The fact that we now know the full scope of the source on which Bale was drawing (it was not simply ‘Layton's Act Book’Footnote ⁴⁴) makes the prominence of Layton's work in Bale's selections very striking. That Bale should by chance have lit upon eleven institutions that Layton had visited in a sample of just twelve out of over 100 included in the Breviarium is vanishingly improbable on the assumption that the most sensational material was distributed evenly among the reports of the various commissioners. It is neither conceivable in itself nor reconcilable with what is known of Layton's movements that he could have personally visited all of the institutions covered by the Breviarium. And given that the names of Bedyll and Legh were also put to the document, it seems reasonable to conclude that the fruits of their labours were included in it. However, Clark has argued very plausibly that Layton was the most prurient of the commissioners.Footnote ⁴⁵ Certainly his letters to Cromwell contain the most memorable material reported by any of the visitors, and generally provide the entertaining highlights quoted by modern historians. The most tempting inference is that Bale, who shared Layton's eye and taste for scandal, was drawn to the things he cited because they were the best stuff in the book. There was doubtless also material contributed by the other commissioners. But Bale cites nothing that can definitely be traced to anyone other than Layton. So it seems very likely that the material which sparked uproar in parliament in March 1536 was the dirt Layton had dug up and carted back to London. This minor royal and ecclesiastical functionary may, therefore, have played a disproportionately major role in the dissolution of the English monasteries.

The Breviarium also confirms that the initial gathering of the comperta was purposeful. That Layton's material was the most explosive and the most useful of what was brought in probably tells us that he was the most gifted of the agents Cromwell appointed for this task. But Layton's letter to Cromwell of June 1535, in effect his job application, had made it clear from the start that he saw nothing of value in the monastic life. Far from seeking out ‘goode religion (if any be)’ and looking ‘to fynde monk chanons frear prior abbott or any other of what degree so ever he be that shall do the kyngs highness so good seruys [service] in this matter’ (as Clark has argued), Layton was saying that he did not expect to find any ‘goode religion’ (the parenthesis is all-important) and that Cromwell would never find any members of religious orders who would ‘do the kynges hyghnes so good servys in this matter’ as Layton himself – a secular priest.Footnote ⁴⁶ He clearly knew already what Cromwell wanted, and his personal interview with Cromwell before hastening off on his mission would have given him explicit instructions on what really mattered. The fact that enquiries into the morals of monks and nuns were to be comprehensive, and not simply limited to the current situation or the period since the last visitation, shows that the point of the investigation was not to promote moral reform but to stockpile political ammunition. Although there is no reason to suppose that the outcome of 1540 – the complete eradication of English monasticism – was in anybody's mind in 1535 or even 1536, the nature of the moral inquisition carried out by Cromwell's agents (in Layton's case, with peculiar gusto and brio), and the apparent scope and character of the Breviarium, combine to suggest that Cromwell himself may already have had some idea of where he wanted to go.Footnote ⁴⁷ That all the material in the Breviarium that we can securely date had been gathered by the end of October 1535, moreover, suggests, given that Layton was once more on the road soon after Christmas, that this first dossier from the royal visitation was compiled late in 1535, presumably with a view to its deployment in the next parliament (it is hard to imagine what else it was for, though another possibility is publication).Footnote ⁴⁸ It is likely also that it played an important part in the regime's thinking over the winter of 1535–6. Even if Cromwell had some idea where he wanted policy to go, his was probably not the only voice in the discussion.Footnote ⁴⁹

Although Bale's extracts from the lost Breviarium compertorum have been almost entirely overlooked by historians for more than a century, it should be noted in conclusion that while they were never well known, they were noticed from time to time in the centuries after their publication. Bale's Acta romanorum pontificum itself appeared in an English version, The pageant of popes, but as it was never reprinted, its influence was limited.Footnote ⁵⁰ Some of Bale's reports were rehashed from time to time in minor Protestant polemics under the Tudors and Stuarts, and occasionally later.Footnote ⁵¹ Among more serious scholars, John Speed picked the story up from Estienne in the second, expanded edition of his History of Great Britaine, and from him it passed to Thomas Fuller.Footnote ⁵² But neither was aware that Bale was the ultimate source. A generation later, Jeremy Collier drew on Bale's comments in the Catalogus for his ecclesiastical history.Footnote ⁵³ What makes the recent obscurity of Bale's material more puzzling is that Cardinal Gasquet mentioned the charges published in the Pageant in his study of the dissolution.Footnote ⁵⁴ But Gasquet was unaware of what Bale himself had written about his source in the 1550s, and was in any case intent upon casting as much doubt as he could upon the work of the royal commissioners for the visitation. Since Gasquet's time, the only mention of the material found in Bale's Pageant has been a characteristically perceptive discussion in Anthony Shaw's excellent, and regrettably unpublished, doctoral dissertation on the Compendium compertorum. Yet while he spots the link between this material and Layton's 1535 itinerary, and argues effectively against Gasquet in favour of its evidential value, the intermediate origins of this material in Bale's Acta and Catalogus, together with Bale's precise description of their source, eluded even Shaw's attention.Footnote ⁵⁵ Now that Bale's full testimony to its character and scope has been retrieved and recognised in its own right as an invaluable source, the lost Breviarium compertorum can at last be appreciated as having been the first significant product of Henry viii's visitation of the monasteries and as having played a pivotal role in the story of their dissolution.