s. It must have been felt, however, by the astute Cromwell, who is credited with the first conception of the design, that to succeed, a project such as this must be sustained by strong yet simple reasons calculated to appeal to the popular mind. Some decent pretext had to be found for presenting the proposed measure of suppression and confiscation to the nation, and it can hardly now be doubted that the device of blackening the characters of the monks and nuns was deliberately resorted to. The visitation opened apparently in the summer of 1535, although the visitatorial powers of the bishops were not suspended until the eighteenth of the following September. Preachers were moreover commissioned to go over the country in the early autumn, in order, by their invectives, to educate public opinion against the monks. These pulpit orators were of three sorts: "railers", who declaimed against the religious as "hypocrites, sorcerers, and idle drones, etc."; "preachers", who said the monks "made the land unprofitable"; and those who told the people that, "if the abbeys went down, the king would never want any taxes again."This last was a favourite argument of Cranmer, in his sermons at St. Paul's Cross. The men employed by Cromwell -- the agents entrusted with the task of getting up the required evidence -- were chiefly four, Layton, Leigh, Aprice, and London. They were well fitted for their work; and the charges brought against the good name of some at least of the monasteries, by these chosen emissaries of Cromwell are, it must be confessed, sufficiently dreadful, although even their reports certainly do not bear out the modern notion of wholesale corruption. The visitation seems to have been conducted systematically, and to have passed through three clearly defined stages. During the summer the houses in the West of England were subjected to examination; and this portion of the work came to an end in September, when Layton and Leigh arrived a...
