Moreover, the great monasteries were each severally tricked.  The one was asked to surrender at one time, another at another; the one for this reason, the other for that.  The suppression of Chertsey, the example perpetually recurring in these pages, was solemnly promised to be but a transference of the community from one spot to another; then when the transference had taken place the second community was ruthlessly destroyed.  There is ample evidence to show that each community had its special hope of survival, and that each, until quite the end of the process, regarded its fate, when that fate fell upon it, as something exceptional and peculiar to itself.  Some, or rather many, purchased temporary exemption, doubtless secure in the belief that their bribe would make that extension permanent.  Their payments were accepted, but the contracts depending upon them were never fulfilled.

When the Dissolution had taken place, apart from the private loot, which was enormous, and to which we shall turn a few pages hence, a methodical destruction took place on the part of the Crown.

In none of the careless waste which marked the time is there a worse example than in the case of Reading.  The lead had already been stripped from the roof and melted into pigs; the timbers of the roof had already been rotting for nearly thirty years, when Elizabeth gave leave for such of them as were sound to be removed.  Some were used in the repairing of a local church; a little later further leave was given for 200 cartloads of freestone to be removed from the ruins.  But they showed an astonishing tenacity.  The abbey was still a habitation before the Civil Wars, and even at the end of the eighteenth century a very considerable stretch of the old walls remained.

Westminster was saved.  The salvation of Westminster is the more remarkable in that the house was extremely wealthy.

Upon nothing has more ink been wasted in the minute research of modern history than upon an attempted exact comparison between modern and mediaeval economics.

It is a misfortune that those who are best fitted to appreciate the economic problems and science of the modern world are, either by race or religion, or both, cut off from the mediaeval system, and even when they are acquainted with the skeleton, as it were, of that body of Christian Europe, are none the less out of sympathy with, or even ignorant of, its living form and spirit.

The particular department of that inquiry which concerns anyone who touches the vast economic revolution produced by the Dissolution of the monasteries is the comparison of values (as measured in the precious metals) between the early sixteenth century and the early twentieth.

No sensible man needs to be told that such a comparison is one of the very numerous parts of historical inquiry in which a better result is arrived at in proportion as the matter is more generally and largely observed.  It is one in which detail is more fatal to a man even than inaccuracy, and it is one in which hardly a single observer who has been really soaked in his subject has avoided the most ludicrous conclusions.