In addition to the liquidation of the estate and the destruction of the monastic building, the commissioners had also to deal with the inhabitants of the monastery and their dependants. The fate of the dispossessed religious has often in the past provided a topic for inaccurate general statements. Historians and antiquaries of a romantic or conservative temper, attributing to Tudor England the sentiments and modes of action common in other countries and ages where the suppression of a monastery has been an incident in the bitter conflict of creeds and ideologies, have assumed that to the religious as a class dissolution meant the violent wrench from a life given to God in seclusion, and the ejection into a hostile world with only a meagre and irregular pittance. This view, it must be acknowledged, receives some support from isolated contemporary witnesses who, through prejudice or insufficient information, may have exaggerated the misfortunes of the monks and nuns; it cannot, however, be maintained in its original simplicity in face of all the evidence now available. That the lot of some of the religious was hard, and undeservedly hard, need not be questioned. At some houses, at least, there must have been individuals with a vocation and an aptitude for an observant religious life who had, knowingly and willingly, set aside other hopes when first devoting their lives to God and who had a right, therefore, on every score to live those lives out in congenial surroundings.