A HISTORY OF SURREY resuscitation by Mary. Bermondsey went to Sir Robert Southwell, Master of the Rolls. For good or for evil a great effect was wrought upon the life of the county by these confiscations or forced surrenders. An aggregate income of over 3,800 for the six larger houses alone, or something like the income of a duke, was withdrawn from uses which were partly at least religious, charitable and educational, and appropriated by the Crown or put into the hands of ordinary lay proprietors. The dissolution of religious guilds touched the poor still more nearly, and, with the confiscations of chantries and chapels, in some cases affected the parochial organization. Okewood Chapel in Wotton parish was in practice a parish church, and on the petition of the neighbourhood was preserved as such on a sorely diminished income. Other chapels, like St. Catherine's at Arlington, Hallibourne and Watenden near Sutton, Stamford Chapel near Epsom, Brookwood, a chapel near Chobham, and others, disappeared altogether or went to ruin. Cuddington Church, as we have seen, was demolished. The dissolution of the religious houses had affected parishes too. Capel had belonged to Reigate Priory, and the dissolution left it at the caprice of a lay impropriator of the tithes to put in the cheapest priest he could get to perform the services. St. Martha's-on-the-Hill, the chapel that is in reality Sancti Martyris, St. Thomas of Canterbury, had been served by canons of Newark, and was left to decay. One South wark parish was suppressed when St. Mary Overie fell, and that church was made a parish church for St. Mary Magdalen's and St. Margaret's combined. The Bishop of Winchester throughout these changes was Stephen Gardiner, ruling from 1531 to 1551, when he was deprived. Gardiner the statesman, as opposed to Gardiner the ecclesiastic, was a supporter of the royal supremacy and of the party of Catholic reform. Whether he approved in his heart of the dissolution as it was carried out is of course very doubtful. But he could not preserve even his episcopal estates from the greed of the king, and probably thought it safer to concur in what he could not prevent. But Surrey under Henry VIII. was not the scene of any violent resistance to ecclesiastical changes. 1 It furnished of course some victims to Henry's policy. One gentleman of Surrey, Sir Nicholas Carew of Beddington, was involved in the ruin which overtook the relatives of Cardinal Pole, the relics of the Yorkist party, in 1538. They were pretty certainly plotting, or at least looking out for a revolution to stay the violent courses of the king, and paid the penalty of losers in the game. The principal charge however against Carew was that he had talked with the Marquis of Exeter about a change in the times. He suffered in 1539. No one was too great or too small for Henry's resentment to touch him. John Griffiths, vicar of Wandsworth, his servant, and a Franciscan named Waire were hanged in 1539 for denying the royal supremacy. In 1541 Sir David Genson, a knight hospitaller, was hanged at St. Thomas's Waterings, on the Kent road, near the boundaries of Newington and 1 The great agent of change, Thomas Cromwell, is said to have been a Surrey man by birth, son of a Putney blacksmith, 372
