Henry VIII.’s first attack on religious houses was made upon those whose yearly incomes did not exceed £200. But the work thus begun did not end here. It is said that 376 small monasteries were doomed; of these 123 escaped immediate dissolution. Throughout 1535 and the succeeding five years the work of suppression was carried on. During that time the monks foresaw that ultimately they were doomed, and had time to sell or hide their choicest possessions before the Commissioners appeared to claim them. Then no doubt many valuable manuscripts and papers were destroyed, or else either hidden or removed out of the country. In several places some of these buried treasures have come to light after being concealed for a long time. In this way a beautiful copy of the Reading Abbey Chartulary was preserved for two hundred years, having been concealed in a secret chamber adjoining a chimney-stack in an old manor-house at Shinfield, only discovered by workmen during some repairs in the eighteenth century. [Illustration: READING ABBEY CHARTER. (_Photographed by Mr. A. A. Harrison, of Theale. Kindly lent by Lord Fingall._)] This book[3] is a good example of its kind, being perfect as the day when it was first hidden away. In it are written the grants of lands from the Abbey’s second foundation by Henry I.[4] Vast possessions given bit by bit--generally by those families whose ancestors lay buried in the abbey church, for whose souls prayers were desired. The inventories of relics are very curious, and the vestments also are described. There is a long list of the books in the abbey libraries of Reading and Leominster. All the books in this long list disappeared, no one knows where or how. Two volumes, a missal and a book of hours, said once to have been part of the abbey library, were sold by auction in 1889. Nor was Reading the only instance of the total disappearance of valuable monastic manuscripts. Gasquet speaks of the wanton destruction of manuscripts at this period, and says that they were sold for all kinds of uses. Mr. Maskell, ‘Monumentæ Ritualia Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ,’ reckons there must have been more than 250,000 volumes of Church service books in use, and that they must have been destroyed to prevent men from following the worship of their forefathers. A most interesting article on ‘Ancient Prymers,’ the service books of the people, appeared in the _Antiquary_ of March, 1892, written by Mr. Henry Littlehales. [Illustration: READING ABBEY CHARTULARY. (_Photographed by Mr. A. A. Harrison, of Theale._)]