Dissolution

The English Reformation remains controversial. The view of older historians, that the Catholic Church was so decayed that some sort of radical reformation was necessary if not inevitable, has recently been challenged by a number of writers, notably C. Haigh, English Reformations (Oxford University Press, 1993), and E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (Yale University Press, 1992), who paint a picture of a thriving, popular Church. I think Duffy especially over-romanticizes medieval Catholic life; it is interesting that these scholars hardly mention the Dissolution, the last major study of which was by David Knowles in the 1950s, The Religious Orders in England: The Tudor Age (Cambridge University Press, 1959). In this exceptional work Professor Knowles, who was himself a Catholic monk, acknowledges that the easy living prevailing in most of the larger monasteries was a scandal. While deploring their forcible extinction, Professor Knowles considers that they had become so remote from their founding ideals that they did not deserve to survive in their existing form.

Nobody really knows what the English people as a whole thought of the Reformation. There was a strong Protestant movement in London and parts of the south-east; the north and the West Country remained strongly Catholic. But the country in between, where most people lived, is still largely terra incognita. My own view is that the bulk of the common people probably saw the successive changes imposed from above in the same way as Mark and Alice; just that, changes ordered from above by the ruling classes, who told them what to do and how to think, as they always had. There were so many changes – first to an increasingly radical Protestantism, then back to Catholicism under Mary Tudor and back again to Protestantism under Elizabeth I – that people can hardly have failed to become cynical. They kept quiet, for of course nobody was interested in what they thought, and while Elizabeth may not have wished to make windows into men's souls, her predecessors did, with fire and axe.

Those who benefited most from the Reformation were the 'new men', the emerging capitalist and bureaucratic classes, men of property without birth. I think there were many Copyngers in mid-Tudor England; the Reformation was about a changing class structure as much as anything. That is an unfashionable view nowadays; it is naughty to mention class when discussing history. But fashions have changed, and will again.

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