No feature of the monastic economy in Tudor days has been more severely criticized than the alleged superfluity of servants and dependants. The numbers are certainly formidable when seen in the aggregate at a large house, and when compared with the numbers of the religious. Thus at Rievaulx there were, at the Dissolution, one hundred and two ‘servants’ to twenty-two monks; at Gloucester the ratio was eighty-six to twenty six; at Byland eighty to twenty-five; and at Butley seventy-one to thirteen. Moreover, quite apart from precise figures, there are the recurrent complaints of visiting bishops over two or more centuries, while the satirists and reformers dilate upon the hordes of lazy dependants who do nothing but eat and sleep; the term ‘abbey lubber’ was indeed coined to describe such men and their likes.

There is, therefore, every excuse for the general reader to suppose that the monastic servants were a principal cause of any insolvency that might exist, and there has been a marked tendency on the part of both critics and apologists of the monks to stress, if not to exaggerate, the figures for their different purposes. The strictures of Coulton and others are familiar to all; on the other hand Gasquet, writing seventy years ago and concerned to emphasize the disturbance to society caused by the disappearance of the monasteries, did not hesitate to say, after fixing the number of dispossessed religious at eight thousand, that ‘probably more than ten times that number of people were their dependents or otherwise obtained a living in their service’.