p 313. 42. The fullest account of the late medieval exchequer is that of A. Steele, The Receipt of the Exchequer, 1377-1485 (Cambridge, 1954), who spent many years on the subject but unfortunately concentrated on the receipt rolls to the virtuaI exclusion of the issue rolls and fell into at lea& one of the traps left by the institution for the unwary -a misinterpretation of fictitious loans. See the review by E. B. Fryde in History, Vol XL, 1955, p 336, and the article on 'Fictitious Loans' by G . L. Harriss in Economic History Review, 2nd series, Vol VIII, 1955-6, pp 187-99. 43. For a clear brief account of later medieval exchequer practice see S. B. 'Chrimes, An Introduction to the Administrative History of Medieval England, Oxford, 2nd ed, 1961.44. An indeterminate number of monastic records, of course, were lost at the Dissolution. Despite the fact that the receivers had orders to send all records to the Court of Augmentations it is improbable that all, or even the greater part, came into royal custody.Then when property was granted away the grantee had the right, which he generally exercised, to claim records pertaining principally to his acquisition -and these records thenceforth were subject to all the mischances of ordinary lay records. C. R. Cheney, 'The Papal Legate and English Monasteries

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The dissolution of the monasteries in England was a dramatic action which both at the time and since has captured popular imagination. A persisting myth pictures the monks turned out by the agents of Henry VIII departing, slowly chanting, into the snow-bound countryside which shrouded their later fate from human eyes. Historians, who have been equally drawn to the subject, have given the picture a different slant. The story of the suppression has been fitted into a wider background of fast-moving religious and secular change in the decade 1530 to 1540, and can be seen as one of a number of moves which were designed at once to strengthen the king's control over the Church and to improve his finances. By 1536, indeed, the religious were already accustomed to the passage of royal commissioners and had had the power of the crown brought forcibly home to them by a number of direct royal interventions in matters of internal monastic discipline.

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