The Smash and Grab Delusion
“The dissolution of the monasteries was the greatest single act of vandalism in English, and perhaps European history,” undertaken by “a grasping and tyrannical king, and effected through... ruthless, cynical and philistine men.” So wrote the architectural historian Sir Howard Colvin in an essay on the topic in 1999.
This view of the Dissolution as a callous “smash and grab” – one that resulted in the wanton destruction of the nation’s medieval heritage – has permeated both the academic literature and popular imagination since the event itself, despite Hilary Mantel’s heroic attempt to humanise Thomas Cromwell. But is that all there is to the story of what is indisputably one of the most significant events of the 16th century?
Carried out between 1536 and 1541, the dissolution of the monasteries saw agents of King Henry VIII and his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, shutting down more than 800 of England’s religious houses and confiscating their possessions. Given that it was enacted in the wake of Henry’s break with the Catholic church of Rome – and his prosecution of a series of costly wars – the king’s targeting of the monasteries has widely been characterised as a bold and brutal bid to cement his religious supremacy, and to divert the church’s vast wealth into his coffers.
Our view of these events is inevitably influenced by surviving contemporary, or near-contemporary, accounts. And no account was more influential than Michael Sherbrook’s While the beneficiaries of the closure of the monasteries remained largely silent, those, like Sherbrook, who felt aggrieved were most certainly not – and they
