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Context[edit]

Henry VIII c.1537
At the time of their suppression, a small number of English and Welsh religious houses could trace their origins back to Anglo-Saxon or Celtic foundations before the Norman Conquest, but the overwhelming majority of the 625 monastic communities dissolved by Henry VIII owed their existence to the wave of monastic enthusiasm that had Christendom in the 11th and 12th centuries. Very few English houses had been founded later than the end of the 13th century; the most recent foundation of those suppressed being the Bridgettine nunnery of Syon Abbey founded in 1415. (Syon was also the only suppressed community to maintain an unbroken existence in exile, the nuns returning to England in 1861.) Typically, 11th and 12th century founders had endowed monastic houses with both 'temporal' income in the form of revenues from landed estates, and 'spiritual' income in the form of tithes appropriated from parish churches under the founder's patronage. In consequence of this, religious houses in the 16th century controlled appointment to about two-fifths of all parish benefices in England,[2] disposed of about half of all ecclesiastical income,[3] and owned around a quarter of the nation's landed wealth.

The 200 houses of friars in England and Wales constituted a second distinct wave of foundations almost all occurring in the 13th century. Friaries, for the most part, were concentrated in urban areas. Unlike monasteries, friaries had eschewed income-bearing endowments; the friars, as mendicants, looked to support themselves financially from offerings and donation from the faithful, while ideally being self-sufficient in basic foods from their extensive kitchen gardens.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries in England and Ireland took place in the political context of other attacks on the ecclesiastical institutions of Western Roman Catholicism which had been under way for some time, many of them also underlying the Protestant Reformation in Continental Europe. By the end of the 16th Century, monasticism had almost entirely disappeared from those European states whose rulers had adopted Lutheran or Reformed confessions of faith (Ireland being the only major exception); while remaining, albeit in greatly reduced numbers and radically changed forms, in those states that remained Catholic. However, the religious changes in England under Henry VIII and Edward VI were of a different nature from those taking place in Germany, Bohemia, France, Scotland and Geneva. Across much of continental Europe the seizure of monastic property was associated with mass discontent against powerful and wealthy ecclesiastical institutions among common people and the lower levels of clergy and civil society. Such popular hostility against the church was rare in England before 1558; consequently the Reformation in England and Ireland was directed from the highest levels of society, but was initially met with widespread popular suspicion; spilling over, on some occasions and in particular localities, into active resistance.