ABSTRACT

As with many towns of similar size in England, Gloucester withstood the ravages of plague and depopulation for nearly 150 years after the initial wave of the Black Death hit in 1349. The new, chartered, corporation with enhanced liberties that emerged by 1500 was built now on a different industrial base and also had seen many of its religious institutions wither from poverty and neglect. For those seeking a test case for how the forces of laicization transformed a religious society in the later middle ages, they need look no further than at what was happening in and around Gloucester. Within the town limits, the new class of magistrates increasingly availed themselves of enhanced opportunities to encroach on church lands and rights, using new and more sophisticated legal rationales for taking over what had once been exclusive prerogatives of both religious and secular clergy. These municipal leaders were not anticlerical per se, but came to view decrepit religious institutions with impatience, and so actively looked for ways to combine their own personal piety with more productive endowments and enterprises that might meet local needs by providing such things as community almshouses for the deserving poor, employment for the jobless and free schools for boys. While monasteries continued to offer some of these services, their reduced populations and the constant lack of funds-as lay persons came to prefer giving to private chantries and charities-made them less efficient and utilitarian. Gloucester’s leaders for a time attempted to prop up these institutions with steady contributions toward their upkeep, but when the Reformation and dissolutions gave them the chance to take direct control they readily seized the opportunity.