The merely financial aspects of the problem can be investigated with better prospect of success. Bishop Stubbs, with characteristic caution, said that “the income from the monasteries cannot be stated in reasonable figures”[2] and this is no doubt true if we desire to estimate the whole extent of the wealth which passed from the Church at the time of the Dissolution. Full details, especially of the valuables in the churches and other movables, can never be obtained. But there is a good deal of material for arriving, approximately at any rate, at such things as annual income and expenditure, and if we can discover those we shall obtain figures and facts which will be of great service in many ways. Many counties had far wealthier monasteries than Staffordshire. The richest counties in England in this respect were Yorkshire and Middlesex, but both of these are exceptional, the former by reason of its disproportionate area, and the latter because it contains the City of London and many of its suburbs. Somerset and Lincolnshire were placed next by their trading centres, and Kent by its position on the main road between the capital and the Continent. Of the remaining thirty-four English counties (excluding Monmouthshire), Staffordshire came twenty-fifth in monastic wealth, the following being poorer: Durham, Cumberland, Northumberland, Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Derby, Hereford, Westmoreland and Rutland. The last-named possessed only a single house. Staffordshire, with a total monastic wealth of some £1,600 annual net income,[3] comes in a group which includes the following counties: Shropshire (£1,966), Lancashire (£1,698), Durham (£1,515), Cumberland (£1,311) and Northumberland (£1,177).[4] It takes its comparatively low position not because it possessed any houses of exceptional smallness or poverty at the time the valuation from which the above figures were taken (1535), but because all the houses were of moderate size without there being any very wealthy abbeys to inflate exceptionally the total. The richest house in the county, Burton Abbey, was only rated at £412 5s. net income.[5] On the whole the Staffordshire houses represent the monasteries of average income, with no great and famous abbeys to monopolise the attention and interest and to introduce exceptional elements. The history of the suppression in Staffordshire will illustrate the suppression of the ordinary religious houses. That of the great and famous abbeys is well known, but it will be interesting to see how the ordinary average houses fell.