Thomas Stevens (monk)

Thomas Stevens (or Stephens), Abbot of Netley Abbey and Beaulieu Abbey; (b. probably. c. 1490) (died 1550) was an English renaissance clergyman and Cistercian monk. As abbot of Netley and Beaulieu he had the right to a seat in the House of Lords.

Little is known of Thomas' early life, but at some time in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century he became a monk at the small and poor Cistercian monastery of Netley Abbey in Hampshire. There he took holy orders and rose through the ranks so that by 1529 he was elected abbot of Netley, succeeding John Corne.

Thomas was evidently a skilled administrator and agriculturalist. Under his stewardship his often financially troubled abbey remained solvent (a difficult task given the small endowment and the vast cost of providing hospitality to travellers by land and sea and the king’s sailors) and he was able to build up a farm surplus worth more than £100, a huge sum for the time and not far off the annual net income of the abbey, and to pay down the debts. He also maintained high standards of religious life at the abbey, and he and his seven monks gained good reports to the king from the local gentry and were much respected in the neighbourhood. Thomas was trusted by the government too, as is shown by his being given custody of two Franciscan friars, who presumably had offended the king by opposing his religious policies.

These policies were soon to have a dramatic effect on Thomas’ own life. In 1535 Netley's income was assessed in the Valor Ecclesiasticus, Henry VIII's great survey of church finances, at £160 gross, £100 net, which meant the following year that it came under the terms of the first Suppression Act, Henry's initial move in the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which closed all monasteries with incomes of less than £200 per year. Abbot Thomas and his seven monks were forced to surrender their house to the king in 1536.

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