Dissolve those Monasteries!
King Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, dissolved the monasteries in England, starting with the smaller ones of fewer than 12 members then destroyed them all. The assets of the monasteries and shrines were sold to enrich royal coffers, and their members were first sent to the larger monasteries and then into secular life. The Act for the Suppression or Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries (issued March 6, 1536) began their dismantling which ended around 1540. In all, about 800 monasteries and religious shrines were dissolved.
On the surface, it appears that the destruction of beautiful buildings and the confiscation of priceless libraries, relics, and art was a mean and vengeful act against Roman Catholic strongholds. In fact, the dissolution was about bringing an end the most prominent institutions of a corrupt Medieval religion that refused to reform itself or, in many cases, even to perform the basic ministries for which it was founded.
The Medieval Church had grown to be too rich, too powerful, and too corrupt: a far cry from what the fishermen of Galilee had intended. William Langland’s poem “Piers Plowman” (1377) complained of non-residential parish priests who loved money too much, neglected the poor, and thought little of ordinary people. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tails” (1392) said much the same thing. John Wycliffe and his followers, the Lollards, were famously against the corruption that was endemic in the church in the 15th century. In 1500 the church owned massive amounts of land, by one estimate one-third of the Kingdom, which had been exchanged for masses said and the hope of salvation. And when the early Protestant reformers came around denouncing transubstantiation as an evil superstition and the elevated host as idolatrous worship, this could only be seen as the result of a plan to deceive ignorant laymen and women into accepting the oppressive authority of the Antichrist (the pope) and his henchmen.
The suppression of the monasteries was reflective of the cultural and religious discontent of Medieval Catholicism. It served to move the newly formed Church of England (1534) towards a rediscovery of the Bible as the God-inspired authority, to the central message of Scripture: justification by grace through faith alone, to an understanding of priests as ministers of the word, and to see “real presence” as the spiritual reality of Christ, not in the blessed bread and wine, but in the hearts and affections of those who received the grace of the sacrament by faith.
Going to Church in Medieval England, Nicholas Orme
Anticlericalism in Britain, c 1500-1914, Ed. Nigel Aston and Matthew Cragoe
Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life, Diarmaid MacCulloch