Dissolution of the monasteries

Between 1536 and 1541 the government of Henry VIII closed every monastery, priory, nunnery and friary in England and Wales and many in Ireland, taking their lands and wealth for the Crown. The dissolution followed Henry's break with the papacy and transferred a large share of the country's land into royal and then private hands. It ended a way of life that had shaped English society for centuries and historians rank it among the most radical upheavals England has known.

By one historian's count, England had nearly 900 religious houses on the eve of the closures, home to roughly 12,000 monks, canons, friars and nuns. Most had been founded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and endowed with estates and parish tithes. Together they controlled about half of all church income and around a quarter of the landed wealth of the kingdom, and they appointed the clergy to some two-fifths of parishes.

When the pope would not annul his first marriage, Henry had himself recognised as Supreme Head of the Church in England, a position confirmed by the Act of Supremacy in 1534. Almost all religious houses accepted the royal supremacy under heavy pressure. Resistance came chiefly from Carthusian monks, Observant Franciscan friars and the Bridgettines of Syon; some London Carthusians were executed for treason in 1535 and others died in prison.

The king's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, ordered a survey of all church wealth, the Valor Ecclesiasticus, and sent commissioners to inspect the monasteries in 1535. Their reports of laxity and superstition were hurried and, where they can be checked, often exaggerated. Parliament then passed the first Suppression Act, allowing the king to close houses worth less than £200 a year. About 243 smaller houses were shut, their property managed by a new Court of Augmentations, while monks and nuns could transfer to larger houses or return to the world.

The closures fed popular anger in the north. In 1536 risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, demanded Cromwell's removal and the protection of the monasteries. Henry calmed the rebels with promises and then had some of their leaders executed. From 1537 the government moved towards closing all houses through so-called voluntary surrenders, offering pensions to cooperating monks and threatening heads of houses with treason charges. A second Suppression Act of 1539 confirmed the process. That autumn the abbots of Glastonbury, Reading and Colchester were executed for treason. Waltham Abbey, among the last to go, surrendered in March 1540.

Monks typically received pensions of around £5 a year and nuns about £3, while friars got only a small one-off payment. Only around 15 per cent of the monastic wealth went to religious or educational purposes, including six new dioceses and colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Much was sold off, especially to pay for Henry's wars and coastal defences in the 1540s, creating a new class of gentry landowners with a stake in the religious changes. Monastic libraries were scattered or destroyed, and hospitals and almshouses were lost. Historians still disagree over how much the poor suffered from the end of monastic charity.

In Ireland, where Henry's authority was limited, closures proceeded slowly through deals with local lords, and about half of the houses had been suppressed by his death in 1547. Under the Catholic Mary I a few communities were briefly restored, but Elizabeth I dissolved them again after 1558.

Our 1530 map shows the Kingdom of England on the eve of the dissolution, part of the wider upheaval of the Protestant Reformation.