#occcasional actual tudor history woven into my nonsense

[cinemaocd]

Thomas Cromwell's big book, The Valor Ecclesiasticus

Reading this morning in History Today about the Valor Ecclesiasticus, a massive survey of all religious holdings that was begun in 1535, and completed in less than 18 months (or at least it was completed enough to be acted upon as 1/4 of the religious houses in England were closed by the end of that period). It details not only the holdings down to every last bone of every last saint, but maps, and the detailed accounts of the tenants, as the Church was the largest landlord in England.

This document was probably Cromwell's greatest achievement, just in terms of sheer output, as it covered not only the 800 religious houses and their tenants' activities, which often required tracing people across county lines, etc. something that had never been done at that point. The data was collected rapidly, from a wide variety of sources. In many cases, church officials simply refused to meet with Cromwell's commissioners. In those cases the commissioners took matters into their own hands and made broad guesses about holdings based on what they could observe.

After the Valor was completed and the associated religious houses closed, it was set aside and forgotten until 1800, when Parliament funded a team of scholars led by John Caley to "translate" the document into some useful information, attempting essentially turn it into a modern ledger book. Caley took 38 years to do this, spent thousands of pounds more than he was meant to, held the documents hostage in his home and then promptly died as soon as the last volume was published. The government found the results "a mischief of confusion" and it was never used. Historians largely ignored the Valor and Caley's "translation" for the most part, except, fascinatingly, around the time of the Russian Revolution, some Marxists attempted to use it as a blueprint for modernizing Russian agriculture!

Now it is being digitized for the first time.

One thing that I gleaned from the article, was that special attention was paid to dams on rivers, which were used by many religious houses for private fisheries. This interfered with Cromwell's general scheme of improving the navigability of waterways (no son of Putney could love a dam that stops a barge moving on a river). This right of the government to take private property away from the church was critical to create a modern government that could conduct nationwide schemes like improving the navigability of the waterways.

The leap from not having fishing dams on every river, to the profitable canal system borrowed from the Low Countries in later centuries, was not dramatic after the legal impediments were removed. And you really can't have the industrial revolution in England without it.

I have for a long time characterized Cromwell as someone had multiple motivations for almost every decision he undertook. Usually there would be a personal profit motive as well, which is unseen. It really depends on the political leanings of the historian as to which of those motives people have tended to see, be they greed, Lutheranism, Machiavellian political maneuvering etc, but as far as I'm concerned, his motivations could simply be: I find fisheries on the Themes and its tributaries annoying because they interfere with my daily commute.

Another interesting thing in the article was the discussion of class mobility provided by unseen parts of the monastic system. There was a class of clerks, agents, etc. that were enriched by managing the church's land holdings. Cromwell's agents often came from this pool of men, and he himself, given his start assisting Wolsey, could be seen as also coming from this class. Putting the overall management of this class of people into the hands of Parliament and away from the Pope was a huge improvement for them and you can see it as the bedrock on which the British Civil Service was built.