Up the down staircase

"Run, master, run; for God's sake, take a house!
This is some priory. In, or we are spoil'd!"

                                                         The Comedy of Errors        (V, i)



Dromio of Syracuse is frantic to get himself and his master Antipholus out of the clutches of their pursuers, and any port of refuge will do in Shakespeare's madcap farce. So they slip into a priory, a religious house of the sort that since medieval times provided comfort and protection (at least in theory) to the lost and the desperate. The confines of a cathedral supposedly offered the same kind of sanctuary, although Thomas Becket would roll his eyes and spill his own blood over that notion.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries prompted by Queen Elizabeth's tyrannical father, King Henry VIII, was a land grab, pure and simple. After many years of wasteful wars and extravagant spending, Henry needed money. He knew his country's greater nobility had long had its eye on the enormous landholdings of the church, holdings that made royal lands look meager in comparison.
 
Henry realized he could swell his coffers to overflowing if, with the administrative help of his lord chancellor Thomas Wolsey, he forcibly closed the monasteries, confiscated their lands, buildings, and other properties, and sold it to the covetous nobles.

Take it all. Sell it all. Pocket the cash. Better bring huge pockets.

So Henry did just that, and in so doing he made his country's landed nobility all the more resistant to the idea of ever returning to the status quo that preceded Henry's earth-shaking Act of Supremacy, which had made the King himself the head of the English church.

Give back the land, the buildings, the finery? Fat chance. Even Henry's Catholic daughter Mary, when she unexpectedly came to the throne in 1553, could see that would never happen. She didn't press the issue.

Pictured above, in Agecroft Hall, is a portion of an ornately carved oak staircase that originally was found in Warwick Priory, a religious house in the shire of Shakespeare's birth that met the same fate as so many others under the crushing thumb of Henry VIII. Like Agecroft Hall, portions of Warwick Priory would eventually, in the mid-1920's, be dismantled and moved to the banks of the James River in Richmond, where it was carefully reconstructed on property adjacent to Agecroft. That priory building is now called Virginia House (pictured below).

The staircase has newel posts and panels that are each carved from one piece of oak, no mean feat given the elaborate designs involved. The origin of the design is uncertain; it may derive from antique motifs distorted for expressive purposes by Italian Renaissance artists. Such designs became popular in northern Europe and particularly in the Netherlands, home to a considerable number of excellent wood-working craftsmen.

Warwick Priory, founded in the 12th century, was suppressed in 1536 at the Dissolution, evidently among the earliest of the religious houses to be shut down. Henry's minister Wolsey had carefully planned to close the smaller ones first, at least in part to get some experience in how to go about such a messy business. Then came the closings of the greater monasteries, and a way of life that had endured for centuries in England ceased to be.