IT is satisfactory to find that another edition of Henry VIII and the English Monasteries is required. So far as the book itself is concerned the present issue is a reprint of the Volume published in 1899, in which the old references of previous editions to documents etc. not calendered at the time the work was written, were altered to accord with the numbers assigned them in Dr. Gairdner's monumental Calendar of Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII. Beyond this I have availed myself of the opinions expressed by this exceptional authority on the documents of this period in the prefaces to the volumes of his Calendar which have appeared since the first publication of this work. Dr. Gairdner's conclusions, which naturally carry great weight, will be found to be in substantial agreement with the views I had previously expressed as to the main incidents in the drama of the suppression of the English monastic houses.
One or two assertions lately made in the pages of Magazines and Journals seem to point to the fact that some at least have misunderstood the argument I have tried to expose in the pages of this book, and it may not be without its use if I devote a small amount of space to set in the forefront of this enquiry the main features of what, in my opinion, has been established by it, as to the moral state of the religious houses at the time of their dissolution.
I do not, and indeed have never contended that in
