When the Reformation began, the abbeys were all against it. To the men of the cloister, living by rule and wonted to silence, the bold ideas of the robust prophets of the new time had a harsh and forbidding sound. Rumours of the current sayings and doings found their way into the Abbey--the farmer made report to the cellarer when he brought in his beets and onions--and the brethren shuddered to hear them, as men shake and shiver upon whom the cold wind blows around the corner after a day spent by the warm fire. In the quickening contention between the old learning and the new the monks held with the past. Thus it was also in the increasingly embittered politics of the time. At Jervaulx Abbey, on a July Sunday in 1536, a monk sharply interrupted the preacher who was maintaining that the king was the head of the Church. The monk said that he neither would nor could take the king’s highness for to be the only and supreme head of the Church of England. He affirmed that the Pope was the head of the Church, and not the king. And his brethren agreed with him. That was what they held at Fountains. On one side were the king and the bishops, on the other side were the Pope and the monks. The contrast between abbey and cathedral--between the monks’ church and the bishops’ church,--is of like significance with the contrast between the castles of Kenilworth and Warwick. The two castles took different sides in a great national division; and Kenilworth, which chose the side of Charles, and lost, is a battered ruin, while Warwick, which chose the side of Cromwell, and won, is a stately inhabited mansion. The abbey and the cathedral made their choice in an earlier division. It needs but a glance to tell which chose the side that was defeated. Fountains, like the other monasteries, was ill prepared for the heavy storm. The convent had decreased in numbers. One of the fire-places in the warming-house, one of the ovens in the refectory kitchen, had been blocked up as being no longer needed. The partitions down the rows of pillars in the nave had been removed, for there were no lay brothers to sit in the long lines of stalls. Men were asking menacing questions as to the practical value of these vast establishments which were withdrawing from the general life of the nation so much wealth and strength. Parliament suppressed nearly four hundred of the lesser monasteries, partly on the ground that they were places of evil living, partly on the ground that their revenues were needed for the better benefit of the people; and there were few complaints. Though the greater abbeys were expressly exempted at that time from the accusations of immoral conduct, even they could not escape the charge of rendering but a scanty and uncertain service to the community.