rally rife all over the country at this time. This they did; and the unscrupulous Dr. Layton declared that he had told the people everywhere that "in this they utterly slandered the King their natural lord." He bade them not to believe such reports; and he "commanded the abbots and priors to set in the stocks" such as related such untrue things. It was, however, as may be imagined, hard enough to suppress the rumour whilst the actual thing was going on. In 1538 and 1539 some 150 monasteries of men appear to have signed away their corporate existence and their property, and by a formal deed handed over all rights to the king. When the work had progressed sufficiently the new Parliament, which met in April, 1539, after observing that divers abbots and others had yielded up their houses to the king, "without constraint, coercion, or compulsion", confirmed these surrenders and vested all monastic property thus obtained in the Crown. Finally in the autumn of that year, Henry's triumph over the monastic orders was completed by the horrible deaths for constructive treason of the three great abbots of Glastonbury, Colchester, and Reading. And so, as one writer has said, "before the winter of 1540 had set in, the last of the abbeys had been added to the ruins with which the land was strewn from one end to the other." It is difficult, of course, to estimate the exact number of religious and religious houses suppressed at this time in England. Putting all sources of information together, it seems that the monks and regular canons expelled from the greater monasteries were about 3200 in number; the friars, 1800; and the nuns, 1560. If to these should be added the number of those affected by the first Act of Parliament, it is probably not far from the truth to say that the number of religious men and women expelled from their homes by the suppression were, in round numbers, about 8000. Besides these, of course, there were probably more than ten time...
