Landed Mobility: the Court of Augmentations and the Circulation of Crown Land in England, 1536-53

Abstract

Traditional accounts of the dissolution of the English monasteries in the 1530s assert that the ex-monastic lands were quickly squandered by a succession of spendthrift royal administrations that paid little heed to the potential long-term value of these new crown lands. More recent research has indicated that the management and ultimate alienation of the landed estates expropriated by the Tudor monarchs was a much more fluid process, involving both sale and exchange, together with ongoing confiscations from individuals and corporations well into the reign of Elizabeth I. At the centre of this system of land exchange and mobility were the two successive courts of Augmentations (1536-1554) that were tasked with administering an increasingly complicated and changing portfolio of crown lands in the years following the dissolution process. This paper will argue that the crown lands continued to be a significant source of royal income until at least the reign of Mary Tudor and will seek to explain how the Court of Augmentations acted as a facilitator for the circulation and exchange of land in the middle decades of the Tudor century.