ABSTRACT
This is the story of Edward Kirkby’s deposition from the office of abbot of Rievaulx. It has been briefly told before, but the author of that article, published over forty years ago, was not aware of some important evidence and burdened his account with misleading preconceptions.1 Perhaps it is not surprising that all monastic events in the decade 1530-40 should tend to be linked with greater events in Church and State: the Dissolution is commonly allowed to cast its distorting shadow both fore and aft. When a single London monastery is dissolved historians suspect a carefully staged dress rehearsal of the larger destruction;2 similarly they ascribe the fate of Abbot Edward Kirkby to his ‘opposing the king’s new doctrines’.3 But this concentration on the outstanding event is most perilous. The monasteries of the day do not seem to have been invariably aware of their coming doom; their history continued to be centred upon the narrower compass of their own interests.4 We shall see that Kirkby’s story does indeed reflect some issues of more general importance, but it is not true that he was deposed because he quarrelled with the new state of things or because the king wanted him out. In fact, Henry VIII in person never enters upon the stage and is likely to have remained practically ignorant of Edward Kirkby. Like others of that time, the abbot has been permitted to wear an undeserved, if rather tiny, crown of lesser martyrdom-lesser because, surviving the 1530s, he lacks the full qualifications for a victim of Henry VIII.5 The facts must rob him of his touch of spurious glory, but his unmasking may help towards a better understanding of that troubled age.
