The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History
JAMES G. CLARK
(YALE university press, 704 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

Between 1536 and 1540, Henry VIII’s regime dissolved or accepted the ­surrender of all of England and Wales’ 850 houses of monks, friars and nuns, representing 19 separate religious orders, and involving the return to secular life of somewhere between 10,000-12,000 men and women. In purely material terms, the disappearance of monastic life involved the greatest change in landownership since the Norman Conquest. In spiritual terms it extinguished in England an ideal of apostolic discipleship which had been a feature of English Christianity for almost a millennium. A handful of the monastic churches were repurposed as secular cathedrals, but many of the most sublime were unroofed for their lead, raided for building stone or allowed to moulder into ruins. Some of their libraries were appropriated by the Crown, but most were dispersed, and ultimately lost. All of this had been made possible by the single most revolutionary aspect of the English Reformation: the invention of the doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, the claim, whose denial was made a capital offence, that the king was not only head of state but head of the Church in his dominions, the true possessor of a spiritual as well as a political sovereignty which had long been usurped by the Bishop of Rome.