The dissolution of the monasteries swept away, almost at a blow, the men who tended these coast lights as a sacred duty, and it confiscated the property from the profits of which such lights had been maintained. Leland, when he travelled through England and Wales, after the dissolution had been some little time in progress, found few coast lights remaining: here and there he mentions them, but it is difficult, from his language, to decide whether those he refers to were still nightly lit, or whether he gained from the sailors and fisher-folk with whom he talked that they had been regularly lit shortly before. That our coast, only a little previous to the dissolution, was well lit, and that lighthouses of some kind or other were not uncommon, we may gather from the writer of the _Pilgrimage of Perfection_, who, in the year 1526—when speaking of the benefit to the soul by frequent contemplation of death—says: ‘It depresseth all vanities, dissolution, and lightness of manners, and, _like as the beacon lighted in the night, directeth the mariner to the port intended_, so the meditation of death maketh man to eschew the rocks and perils of damnation’: and that, after the dissolution, all, or the great majority, of these lights were extinguished, we may certainly infer by a study of _The Mariner’s Mirrour_, compiled by Wagener, a Dutch navigator, in 1586, and translated into English two years later by Anthony Ashley. Wagener describes minutely every object on the sea-coast of England, but does not refer to any nocturnal lights, with the exception of those at Shields, which we have seen were established under peculiar circumstances and only just prior to the dissolution. But the want of lighthouses must have been keenly felt by sailors; and those engaged in navigation, no longer able to get what was needed as charity, seem, after a while, to have suggested paying for it. One of the earliest post-reformation lighthouses suggested was that at Winterton, for which we hear proposals in 1585, just about the time that Wagener wrote his description of the English coast. Now what was the site which naturally suggested itself for establishing this light? Why, _the top of the church steeple_; where, likely enough, a similar light had formerly been maintained as an act of charity. The proposal emanated from ‘the masters of her Majesties Navye,’ and was made on behalf of the seamen of the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk; ‘there be,’ it says, ‘many perillous sandes in the sea, thwarte of Hasborrowe Winterton, and the towne of Great Yermouthe, wheruppon manye shippes and men are often perished in the night tyme.’ The danger of these sands might well be avoided ‘iffe a contynuall lighte were maynteyned uppon the steeple of Winterton,’ which might be easily done, without any ‘greate imposition or taxation,’ if every English ship trading by the coast, or to the East countries, paid some small contribution.