Many important results followed the fall of the monasteries.  The majority of the House of Lords was now transferred from the abbots to the lay peers.  The secular clergy, who had been fighting the monks for centuries, were at last accorded their proper standing in the church.  Numerous unjust ecclesiastical privileges were swept aside, and in many respects the whole church was strengthened and purified.  Credulity and superstition began to decline.  Ecclesiastical criminals were no longer able to escape the just penalty for their crimes.  Naturally all these beneficent ends were not attained immediately.  For a while there was great disorder and distress.  Society was disturbed not only by the stoppage of monastic alms-giving, but the wandering monks, unaccustomed to toil and without a trade, increased the confusion.

In this connection it is well to point out that some writers make very much of the poverty relieved by the monks, and claim that the nobles, into whose hands the monastic lands fell, did almost nothing to mitigate the distresses of the unfortunate.  But they ignore the fact that a blind and undiscriminating charity was the cause, and not the cure, of much of the miserable wretchedness of the poor.  Modern society has learned that the monastic method is wholly wrong; that fraud and laziness are fostered by a wholesale distribution of doles.  The true way to help the poor is to enable the poor to assist themselves; to teach them trades and give them work.  The sociological methods of to-day are thoroughly anti-monastic.

On the other hand, the infidel Zosimus, quoted by Gibbon, was not far wrong when he said “the monks robbed an empire to help a few beggars.”  The fact that the religious houses did distribute alms and entertain strangers is not disputed; indeed it is pleasant to reflect upon this noble charity of the monks; it is a bright spot in their history.  But it is in no sense true that they deserve all the credit for relieving distress.  They received the money for alms in the shape of rents, gifts and other kinds of income.  Hallam says, “There can be no doubt that many of the impotent poor derived support from their charity.  But the blind eleemosynary spirit inculcated by the Romish church is notoriously the cause, not the cure, of beggary and wickedness.  The monastic foundations, scattered in different countries, could never answer the ends of local and limited succor.  Their gates might, indeed, be open to those who knocked at them for alms....  Nothing could have a stronger tendency to promote that vagabond mendicity which severe statutes were enacted to repress.”