“We beseke you (most deare Soueraine) euen for the hope you haue in the redemption of Christ, that you call to remembraunce that dreadfull daye, whan your Highnesse shall stande before the judgement seat of God in no more reputation then one of those miserable creatures which do nowe daylye dy in the stretes for lack of theyr dwe porsion.” He continues to point out in forcible language that the portion due by God’s ordinance to poor impotent folk, the lame, blind, lazar and sore members of Christ—who once had been lodged in hospitals and almshouses—is now given by the king and his nobles to “reward those gnatonical elbowhangers, your chaplaines.” In spite of the vehement abuse of parasitical clergy in which the above writer indulges, it was in the main lay-people rather than churchmen who divided the spoils. Fuller—who quaintly [p232] writes that “this king made three meals, or (if you will) one meal of three courses, on Abbey-lands, besides what Cardinal Wolsey (the king’s taster herein) had eaten beforehand”—goes on to say “yet surely more tendernesse was used to hospitalls,” and finds “very few of them finally suppressed.” But hospital endowments did certainly form a substantial dish at Henry’s feast, to which many royal favourites were bidden. Some fell with the smaller priories (1536), a few with the greater houses (1539), and others were extinguished under the Act for dissolving chantries, free chapels, hospitals, and guilds (1545); a further Act of confiscation marked the first year of Edward VI’s reign (1547). In some places charities were indiscriminately swept away. A manuscript history of Gorleston records, for example, that “Henry VIII ordered that all the premises of . . . the Hospitals of St. James, St. John, St. Bartholomew, St. Luke, and the church and hospital of St. Nicholas . . . should be sold.” No consistent plan was followed, but—whether under ecclesiastical or lay control—charities were destroyed or spared at will. Speaking generally, institutions in private hands were suppressed, those in the possession of corporate bodies, retained. [Illustration: _PLATE XXV._ ST. LEONARD’S, YORK]