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Don't work but don't get married and don't count on a living pension. This is an audio read of The gender pension gap of 1539, or how women got screwed by the Dissolution of Monasteries.

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  • (00:00) - The Gender Pension Gap of 1539
  • (01:17) -  The gender pension gap, or how women got screwed by the dissolution of monasteries.
  • (02:37) - Dissolution 101
  • (04:01) - The (near) impossibility of marriage or work
  • (06:00) -  Pay on your way in, get paid on your way out
  • (08:20) - Sidebar: What happened to "Jillian Heron the idiot"?
  • (09:57) - The making of a pension gap
  • (11:25) - Sidebar: How do we know all this?
  • (13:56) - Sidebar: Could you live on £2.67 a year?
  • (15:00) - "Many a young nun proved an old beggar"
  • (18:06) - Outro

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Creators and Guests

Host
Isabelle Roughol
Journalist & public historian

What is Broad History?

The history you think you know, with women in it this time

[00:00:00] Isabelle Roughol: Hello and welcome to Broad History, a podcast about the history we think we know with women in it this time. I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol.

This is an audio read of the long read I just published at broadhistory.com, titled The Gender Pension Gap of 1539, or How Women Got Screwed by the Dissolution of Monasteries.

This is adapted from original research I did for my master's in public history, from which I am just graduating next week, and I thought I'd celebrate in a rather nerdy way by sharing this research with you. But don't worry, this is shorter and way less academic than the original. I do recommend checking out the website for some really fun illustrations, but if like me, you like your stories told to you, like you are 7 years old and getting tucked into bed, here we go.

As always, you can support this work by signing up for membership on a monthly or annual basis at broadhistory.com/membership. You can also make a donation of any amount. All of it helps buy me more time to do this research, and this audio and written work. Again, thank you so much for those who have already supported me. It's at broad history.com/membership now. Here we go.

[00:01:17]  The gender pension gap, or how women got screwed by the dissolution of monasteries.
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[00:01:17] Isabelle Roughol: The gender pension gap, or how women got screwed by the dissolution of monasteries.

Where did the nuns go when Henry VIII closed all religious houses circa 1539? This may feel like a niche question, but think about it. Here you have in a few short years, the complete destruction of an entire industry, tens of thousands of people having to reinvent their way of life, and an unprecedented transfer of wealth to powerful plutocrats.

Plus, because Henry loved his paperwork, we have reams of data about it and a unique opportunity to compare the fate of men and women under the exact same circumstances.

The event has come to be known as the dissolution of monasteries, but the moniker helps us ignore half the story. It was a dissolution of monasteries and nunneries.

Actually, 20% of the story: female institutions were a minority and there were only an estimated 1900 nuns in England at the time. That makes them much easier to follow in the archives. What I found is that the dissolution dealt a much heavier blow on religious women than on their male peers. But most interesting of all is that it wasn't because of blatant gender discrimination. Even five centuries ago, it was subtle structural inequities in a nominally fair system that guaranteed women worse outcomes. Sounds familiar?

[00:02:37] Dissolution 101
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[00:02:37] Isabelle Roughol: Dissolution 1 0 1.

Refresher: Henry wanted to marry Ann Boleyn, but was already married to Catherine of Aragon. When the Pope wouldn't grant him a divorce, he decided to break with Rome, create his own church, and grant himself the divorce.

One key element of the creation of the Church of England was the suppression of all monastic life. Religious institutions were [00:03:00] seen as corrupt and too loyal to Rome.

Dissolution didn't happen all at once. From 1535, men and women under 24 were excused from their vows, given secular clothes, and told to go home.

Henry, really in practise his favourite bureaucrat Thomas Cromwell, then disbanded suspended the lesser houses with income under 200 pounds a year, which took care of most countryside nunneries. Before long in 1538, it was the turn of greater houses such as those in the capital, which drew a healthy income from vast urban property holdings.

By 1540, there wasn't a monastery, convent, friary or priory left, in England. Henry redistributed their lands, buildings, and goods to the crown and to his favourite aristocrats. It was the biggest transfer of wealth in British history on par with the portioning of former communist countries among oligarchs in the early 1990s.

What happened to the monks and nuns? They were mostly shown the door and told to get on with their lives. That's where paths diverge for men and women.

[00:04:02] The (near) impossibility of marriage or work
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[00:04:02] Isabelle Roughol: The near impossibility of marriage or work.

The Reformation was a domestic conservative revolution. Breaking with the mediaeval glorification of chastity, the new mindset praised marriage as an ideal natural state and defended the political, economic and social interests of the married craftsman as the patriarchal head of his household. The Reformation plucked women out of the cloister and put them back at the centre of the family.

That was all well and good for the next generation, but not for those women that were pushed out of the nunneries. Henry VIII kept fairly Catholic views among them, the primacy of chastity vows, which were made to God, not to Rome. Funny how that didn't apply to his own marriage vows. Any early confusion about the right to marry was dispelled with the passage of the Act of Six Articles in June 1539, which prohibited the marriage of former religious men and women on pain of death.

Those who had married in the preceding, ambivalent months were quick to undo their union, or at least publicly denounced them. The prohibition was only fully lifted with Elizabeth's accession in 1559. By then, even those women who had been in their twenties at dissolution 20 years earlier, were long past marriageable age.

If not marriage, work then? Easy enough for former monks who found positions as clergy in the new church or were welcomed in universities. But the new religion had no use for women whatsoever, however learned in the faith, until the first ordination of women priests in 1994. The few economic activities religious houses had supported, say breweries, apothecaries, book copying and illuminating, required tools In startup capital. Lay sisters may have continued their task in secularised hospitals or entered service elsewhere, but the midling sort and gentry women who were leaving the convent had no trade and little [00:06:00] chance of employment.

[00:06:00]  Pay on your way in, get paid on your way out
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[00:06:01] Isabelle Roughol: Pay on your way in, get paid on your way out.

What was left was the prospect of surviving on a meagre pension. Former monks and nuns were entitled to lifelong payments to compensate for the total destruction of their livelihood, but the way they were calculated exacerbated structural inequities and kept many women in the most abject poverty.

By practise, if not by common law, women entered the convent with a dowry, just like they would a marriage. The religious life was not a refuge for empty-handed girls. It replicated the social hierarchies of wider society. In wills, you see, fathers set aside sums for their daughters to be used either for marriage or for a quote, "profession fee."

The grander the family, the grander the house, and the grander the fee. It could be around 40 pounds for a decent London position, completely outside the reach of most people, with further donations expected in order to go up in the ranks. Even less prestigious institutions expected novices to have some education, to at a minimum arrive with a true so, and to provide for their own needs.

Most convents therefore recruited from the parish gentry, or among city merchants and craftsmen. Women who could not afford such a career became lay sisters. They took simple vows of humility and obedience and laboured in exchange for room and board. This ended up mattering greatly because the way you entered the convent determined how you left it.

Pensions were based on the individual's age, years of profession, or potential office, as well as their house's wealth. Their attribution seems to have been more concerned with maintaining the preexisting social order than ensuring a dignified living for all.

Hierarchy was paramount so that it wasn't rare for the head of the house to receive considerably more than even the most senior nuns. Elizabeth Savage, prioress of the Minories in East London, was granted 40 pounds a year, while her immediate deputies received 12 times less. Her lay sisters were simply dismissed.

They hadn't bought their way in, they wouldn't be bought out. In the lesser houses, rank and file nuns weren't provisioned for at all, only heads of houses received an annuity. Sybil Kirke, the rather reviled ress of Stratford at Bow, was granted 15 pounds while her nuns complained of hunger.

[00:08:20] Sidebar: What happened to "Jillian Heron the idiot"?
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[00:08:20] Isabelle Roughol: Sidebar, what happened to quote "Jillian Herron the idiot"? Monasteries and convents sheltered and fed the most vulnerable: the intellectually or physically disabled, the very old, the very sick and the very poor. Their suppression left a massive gap in the social fabric.

Here's an example from the Minories, a wealthy house of poor players just outside London's Eastern walls at gate. Jane Gowring, Frances Somer, Mary Pilbeam and Barbara Larke , all nuns in their early twenties, and Bridget Stravye, hard to tell, a novice of just 15 years old, are living there when the 1536 [00:09:00] law forces them out for being under 24.

They petition Thomas Cromwell to be able to stay. I can't tell from the document if they met him in person or it was just a letter. It seems they were heard though because I found them again in the dissolution rolls three years later. They also beg Cromwell to provide for their lay sisters, Margaret Fitzgared, 12 years old, deaf and mute, and Julian Heron, 13, a quote, "idiot fool." Surely the king does not mean for them to fend for themselves, right? By 1539, we see that Margaret is a professed nun of 16, and she is pensioned. But Julian, the intellectually disabled teenager, appears alongside all the unpensioned lay sisters, such as Joan Crosby, 95 years old, or Elizabeth Martin, 68, with just two words: "all cancelled." What happened to them?

[00:09:58] The making of a pension gap
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[00:09:58] Isabelle Roughol: The making of a pension gap.

The historian Kathleen Cooke calculated that the median pension granted women, was four marks or two pounds, 13 shillings, four pence. That's two pounds 67. The median male pension was nearly twice that at five pounds, 10 shillings. Were dissolution era nuns victims of what we'd today call gender pay discrimination?

Syon Abby is an interesting case study to consider the discrepancy. The large Bridgettine house on the banks of the Thames in West London was mixed, home to 52 nuns and 12 months. It wasn't unheard of for larger institutions to house both sexes, but they were always under female leadership, and those women were handsomely rewarded-- 300 marks to the abbess Agnes Jordan, the highest pension given to any woman in the country and higher than all, but a few men.

A mark, by the way, is two thirds of a pound, or 13 shillings and four pence, a common accounting device in the early modern era that makes maths far easier in a non decimal currency system. The highest pensions at Syon went to women in leadership, and monks and nuns down the ladder were then treated equally according to their seniority.

The four lay sisters and five lay brothers each received the exact same sum, for instance, four marks. In the mediaeval and early modern era, class is a much bigger differentiator than gender, and that's exactly what we see across all mixed institutions.

[00:11:25] Sidebar: How do we know all this?
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[00:11:25] Isabelle Roughol: Sidebar, how do we know all this? History loves a bureaucrat. The dissolution was proceeded by a vast nationwide survey of the more than 900 religious houses. The _Valor Ecclesiasticus_ established the worth of each institution's property and income, as well as who lived there. Research gold. What we know of the nun's fate, we then largely infer from the records of the Court of Augmentations, the administration charged with taking control of the religious houses' finances and properties, assigning cash rewards and vitally pensions to the former [00:12:00] religious men and women.

I also crunched the numbers to compare pensions at male and female houses of similar size and income. I'll spare you the maths and give you the conclusion. There is no evidence, at least in London, of willful gender discrimination, only of subtle and relentless systemic inequities.

Pensions were drawn not from some national common pot, but from the estate of each organisation. Two issues with that: first, nunneries were generally poor. Nearly half of England's convents had income below 50 pounds, versus just about one in seven monasteries.

Wealth was built on centuries of donations and land grants from monarchs and wealthy patrons, and you can see how that would favour male institutions. In fact, nunneries were so poor that Cromwell reprieved nearly 50 of them in the first round of dissolution. If he had truly closed all 116 houses worth less than 200 pounds, as the law intended, he would've found himself with thousands of respectable women suddenly out on the street. That stayed the King's hand for at least a couple years.

When nuns of the dissolved houses were given the option to either leave religious life or transfer to another, bigger house, nearly nine out of 10 opted to stay, many more than among men. With little to no pension, without a trade, without the right to marry or even to inherit, there just wasn't much of a life awaiting them outside the convent and they knew it.

Which leads us to the second issue: nunneries were crowded. Once they had absorbed, the refugees pushed out of lesser houses, nunneries had to provide for them. A female house may have had as big a pension pot as the monastery down the road, but it was divided up among many more souls.

And that's how you end up with equal treatment on the surface, but inequity in the outcomes.

[00:13:56] Sidebar: Could you live on £2.67 a year?
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[00:13:56] Isabelle Roughol: Sidebar: Could you live on two pounds 67 a year? In the 1530s, an annual income of five pounds was considered a poor living for a cleric. Life was more expensive in the capital two. In 1531 already, junior clerics complained angrily to the Bishop of London that a yearly wage of 10 marks that six pounds 67 was quote, "but a bare living" given rising costs. The median pension given to an English nun was again four marks, less than half even a bad living. What's more, pensions were fixed and the 16th century economy is known for inflation. By the mid 1540s, half a decade after Dissolution, a lucky senior nun's pension of six pounds was little more than a farm laborer's wage. The last pensions were collected around the turn of the 17th century, at which point their purchasing power had roughly been divided by [00:15:00] three.

[00:15:00] "Many a young nun proved an old beggar"
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[00:15:00] Isabelle Roughol: Many a young nun proved an old beggar.

The life of a former nun was that of a dependent spinster. Those with the option moved in with a parent, a married sister, or a friend.

Once again, aristocratic women fared better. Deprived of work and independence, yes, but at least handsomely housed, ironically sometimes on the very land they had just left. It is not uncommon to see the same family names among the better pensioned, former heads of houses and among the aristocrats who shared the spoils.

Parliament, apparently intent on making their lives difficult, barred former religious women and men from inheriting any part of an estate in order to protect existing heirs... who sat in parliament. That's why the wills of even loving parents only grant former nuns annuities, not property, and beseeched siblings to take care of them. Women passed from the care of a father to that of a stepmother or a brother-in-law, and eventually her parish when all who loved her had gone.

Another coping strategy was for them to maintain a form of communal, and even quasi monastic, living. Two or three former nuns sharing accommodation not far from their old convent helped reduce expenses and face a less jarring transition to secular life.

There are hints of several such arrangements in the pension books where individuals of the same communities can be seen collecting their due together or on behalf of one another. Ties of friendship must have remained. Former nuns provided for their sisters in religion in their own wills and testaments decades after the Dissolution.

It is hard to know how the women of 1539 felt about these sudden monumental changes. If any chronicled their experience of the events, it has been lost to the centuries. All we have are administrative records and a handful of letters among the aristocracy.

The economic impact, we've seen, was devastating the psychological impact, we can only guess at. It's tempting with contemporary eyes to consider the Catholic convent, a retrograde institution, especially under enclosure, which severely restricted nun's contact with the rest of the community. But there was an opportunity for women to live in sorority, to build large organisations, to lead intellectual lives and to contribute to the economy and the culture.

Even women and girls outside the convents couldn't have been indifferent to their only choice of a socially acceptable life outside marriage and motherhood suddenly disappearing.

Those with wealth, family and connections had one fewer option. Others were left with none. As once wrote the 17th century historian Thomas Fuller, who might have seen them as a child on the streets of London, [00:18:00] "many a young nun proved an old beggar."

[00:18:06] Outro
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[00:18:06] Isabelle Roughol: This was The gender pension gap of 1539 or how women got screwed by the dissolution of monasteries, researched, written and read by me, Isabelle Roughol.

If you'd like to support original research and public storytelling about the history we think we know with women in it this time, go ahead and sign up for membership broadhistory.com/membership. With a small monthly or annual payment, you could really make a difference to the existence of this project. You can also at broadhistory.com sign up, and it is completely free, for the newsletter, so you never miss an episode and you get more articles in your inbox.

Thank you for listening. This was Broad History, I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol.

[00:18:49] Speaker: And here's an Easter egg for those of you who are kind enough to listen or read to the end. If you go to the article on the website, and the link is in the show notes, and you go to the very bottom of the page, you will find a button to sign up for membership for the cost of a meagre 16th century nun's pension.

For your first three months, membership is just two pounds and 67 pence. And if you appreciate the joke and wanna support Broad History, thank you so much.