Latest / Thinking Class / #051 - Prof. James Clark - The Hidden & Profound Impact On English Life Through Henry VIII's Dissolution Of The Monasteries

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#051 - Prof. James Clark - The Hidden & Profound Impact On English Life Through Henry VIII's Dissolution Of The Monasteries · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Professor James Clarke.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: James is professor of history at the University of Exeter and has published widely on medieval monasteries and their place in the medieval world, and he was historical advisor on the BBC TV series Tudor Monastery Farm.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: His book, The Dissolution of the Monasteries, A New History, was published in 2022 to widespread acclaim.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, James and I talk about the impact of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in England, its historical significance, cultural impact, and the common misconceptions surrounding it, how important the role of monasteries were in everyday life, and the gradual impact of their dissolution on local communities, why oversimplified narratives don't appropriately convey the depth of this pivotal moment in English history, and how society, spirituality, and community identity changed, the psychological effects of losing monastic spaces, and why James is worried about how so many of his students live in a perpetual present, and why we need a collective identity beyond personal timelines and much, much more.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: I got so much out of this conversation and more than I could have bargained for.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a big topic on its own.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: James was erudite and lucid, even without heavy preparation.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of his responses came from the heart as well as the head.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: There were several moments where his answer took me down a thought process I haven't really been down before, and it's those moments that you cherish in life.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I really do thank him for that.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoy the show as much as I did, classmates.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And as ever, let's grow this show together.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Please subscribe, follow, share on whatever platform you're listening to or watching the show on.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, Classmates.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Professor James Clark, thank you so much for joining me.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Thinking Class.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for inviting me.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: James, it's my pleasure.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I became interested in the dissolution of the monasteries a few years ago.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: The lockdowns had begun, and I'd always been aware, as an Englishman, about the ruined abbeys that were and monasteries that were strewn around the country.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps we'll get into that a little bit later on as to my exploration of the history.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I I think as an Englishman, you have uh you can have a habit of not really noticing the environment in which you're in.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: So there could be a parish church at the end of the street and you don't even really consider its history, and then you see all these ruins and you go to places like Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire, and you know, this is marvelous.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: But then you don't really ask how it ended up the way it was.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: I ended up down in a deep hole, and I was asking myself, in the end, you know, how did these things even contribute to a sense of what it means to be English and our spiritual life and all of these things?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it'd be great to get into all of that.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: But you wrote a book about the topic which has been covered in various different angles over the years.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: However, the way it was received was this was a very much needed refresh and it is a magisterial work.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's something in itself.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: What was it that made you want to write this new history of the dissolution of the monasteries?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was a sense that in fact, in spite of Tudor history still being dominant and and um on the um shelves of all uh bookstores everywhere, it still seemed that it was left at the margins, as a as a, in my view, the the dominant dramatic episode of the reign of Henry VIII.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, in spite of countless biographies, books about the Tudor regime and all of the major protagonists, yet, and yet this episode remained uh almost offstage.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think I'd had a rising sense of frustration uh sort of through the uh the noughties and into the the 2010s with the um uh acclaim for um uh the Wolfs Hall trilogy uh of Hilary Mantell, that uh once again the episodes that seemed so familiar to so many of the 1520s and 30s and the um the roll call of of uh Tudor Queens and so on, that as this was once again being replayed in in public media and in broadcast media and so on, that still this central episode that has so much more significance than merely church history that it wasn't being addressed.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: And um I I was drawn in actually uh as a as a researcher in this area to some of the the responses when the the first um uh TV adaptation of of uh Wolf Hall um was shown to comment on this.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: And and um I I was really um infuriated, I suppose, by the the neglect of the central um substance of this uh this this era, which is um the I suppose the the challenge, the problem of the church, the the transformation of religious culture.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, it was um indicative of in fact what you've just described, which is um a sort of collective amnesia.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: That we we know these um uh edifices are there, we see them in the landscape, but we're almost sort of tricked into seeing them as somehow organic, that they've just sort of grown out of the landscape, that they they are like a kind of line of trees on our horizon or a rocky outcrop.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: And over generations we've we've edited edited them out of our uh sort of shared inherited narrative of this period, so much so that when um dramatists, novelists, filmmakers once again return to this era and and replay it for our entertainment, they literally do edit out these episodes.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: And suppose I did see my work as a as a way of of trying to to um to pull uh this this aspect of of the era uh back out of the uh out of the sort of wings and onto center stage.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and to challenge um those who are interested in in the Tudor period to confront again this this episode and and perhaps to challenge them to think about why is it that we we seem so reluctant to accept that um the events of the 15, 20s, and 30s are not merely um uh a personal drama, a romantic entanglement between um a monarch and um and and a wife and a lover, um, but but actually something much more profound that that um is is rooted in in cultural experience.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it was very much that that sort of cultural experience that is is um uh touching lives beyond royal palaces, beyond um the king and his succession of queens, that that I was really trying to uncover, I suppose.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: You raise how the Tudor period looms large in the national consciousness, and I think what will stick in the mind of pretty much every school child is when they learn about English history, King Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, that they're always the ones that are mentioned the most.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Most people generally find his six wives stories amusing, and uh if they know anything about the hen Henry-led Reformation at all, it's just that there was a break from Rome, he just wanted to be head of the church.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I genuinely don't really remember any conversation around the monasteries themselves, and if there was anything, if there was anything on it, it was just that monasteries were closed down, but there was no sense of the scale of them.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I I saw a map uh which details where all of these monasteries were, and it's it's like someone has just been given a box of pins and a child has just gone crazy on the United Kingdom map and pinned them everywhere, and you realize just how widespread they were.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's remarkable actually the points you raised that there is this cultural amnesia that we don't even get into the impact that it has culturally, socially, spiritually.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: What do Gon?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna say something.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm something good, yes, you you're quite right.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: It is um, I mean, there's a lot there.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think first and foremost, we do in in Britain, especially, I do think it's a peculiarly British problem, that we have this strangely distorted and skewed timeline um that we build up through our school years and then carry into adult life about our own history.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: That we it's a timeline that um is is relatively well drawn back from our own lifetime to around about World War II.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: Then it becomes strangely uh uh sort of um foreshortened um because we go from that to the Victorian era, and then it becomes even more foreshortened because the past, as perhaps most of us um uh have have presented to us through our school years, leaps back from the Victorian period to the Tudor period, which is sort of presented to us in a kind of strange, hyper-real, um Hollywood style colour and and uh of personal drama and larger-than-life characters.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then beyond that, really, we have almost nothing.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: We probably have uh Egyptians and Aztecs and and possibly a little bit of Normans, and that's it.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, first of all, I think we're we're dealing with this peculiar way that we seem to um uh quite quite tacitly accept this is the timeline that generation after generation of schoolchild will will be given to to make sense of the Britain around them.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then within that we seem to expect accept, despite in our own day, um regarding culture and society and social relations very differently, we accept this sort of um caricature of a of a profoundly hierarchical view of the Tudor era.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: We have a king, we have his um um, as it were, his love interests, we have a sort of pantomime villain of a of a head of government in the shape of Thomas Cromwell.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: And we seem quite satisfied with not actually fleshing out the background at all.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it is it is very, very odd, um, and it is so far removed from the historical experience of the Tudor period as to really be a sort of parallel universe.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's a you know, it's a it's a construction um that um has held a really strong appeal, really, I would have said, since uh popular mainstream histories of Britain started to be reaching a wide readership in the sort of middle years of the 18th century onwards.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then it's just fed its way through as we've ended up with mass education at the end of the 19th century, it becomes part of the syllabus.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um what it uh utterly fails to capture is, as you say, um the um the nationwide presence of um uh monasticism in in these islands, um all the way uh uh from from the early Middle Ages into the sixteenth century.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: And how monasticism was not some um self-contained constituency of a society that was otherwise largely unconnected.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think sometimes it's suggested that that monasticism in in Britain or in the Kingdom of England and uh and Wales um is a bit akin to, I don't know, independent schools in our own day, a sort of self-contained constituency that um is engaged with by another self-contained constituency and and for the vast majority of the population something that they pass by without really having much direct relationship with.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's not the place of monasticism in um in early 16th century England.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um monasticism is is to is to use a very different analogy, they are as close to people's lives as as the nearest um Tesco Metro is.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you you can walk down the street of even a middle-sized provincial town in Henry VIII's England, and you are likely to go past more than one house of vowed religious, just as you're more than likely, even in a provincial town in in today's Britain, to pass by um two branches of one of the leading supermarkets.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: They they won't be more than probably, you know, um a mile and a quarter from one another.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, these are places that were on everybody's horizons.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um they were and the preservation of sites, Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire, Glastonbury Abbey in in the southwest, um sites that seem rural or semi-rural, um highly picturesque, they again give us a false impression of the proximity of monasticism to people's lives in the 16th century.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because they they because for us today they are places that we go out to with a picnic basket and a and a blanket and the dog uh for a nice visit.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: We we allow ourselves to think that that's how they must have been for Henry VIII subjects.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: When of course they're not, they are much more like my my supermarket analogy in that they are part of the the warp and weft of everyday life.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: They're not the um Sunday afternoon visiting the country, but they are um part of the of the um the fabric uh of life.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that's why this this episode is so much the central drama of that moment in time that we refer to as as the Tudor Reformation, because it is the unpicking of something that is woven into the life of every one of Henry VIII subjects.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you um because monasteries are not simply places of worship, they're not simply places where people choose to pursue um uh a form of religious life as as members of the clergy, or in in the case of women, as as a sort of paraclerical uh constituency, because you could never visit a monastery, but you would still have your life in Henry VIII's England touched by it, because a monastery may well have been your landlord, whether that was your landlord in your um residential accommodation or your landlord in the business premises that you used uh to generate your livelihood.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um a monastery may well be the um uh custodian of many of the fundamental services that you in your provincial town or or even rural village you um absolutely depend on.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: So the um the water that um reaches your provincial town may well be starting in a um in a cistern that has been created and is be is being maintained by the local monastery.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um you may well be eating bread that is um uh the direct product of grain that is largely being generated as surplus by large monastery estates and then sold into the uh into the commercial market.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: So the indirect points of of connection to these places were manifold, quite apart from people's direct experience of this of this ancient medieval culture that is monasticism.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked about the new amnesia that people suffer when it comes to or cultural amnesia that people suffer when it comes to dissolution.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: When people are able to offer a view of the dissolution, so I I'll I'll offer one as an example, and then perhaps you can tell me commonly how people come to think of them and the truths, the mistruths, the half-truths in there.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Some would say Henry Henry VIII and his heavies came round and and and shuttered them all, and before that they were all they were all thriving, and then it was like a I think you referred to it in the book as like that the authority of the crown comes down and and and fells at a forest, uh, one fell swoop.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um others would um perhaps say that the uh the the monks were corrupt and crooked and skimming on off the top.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then there are others who are more sympathetic who would say that it was uh a spiritual paradise, uh highly productive industrially, uh a place of great learning and um and cultural production, uh, and it was uh it was uh nothing but a a uh a travesty that they were all they're all closed down under the authority of the crown.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think the most common view is uh amongst the people that you rub shoulders with?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what do you think what do you think the the the reality is?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I think today, in the early 21st century, the most common prevailing view uh of those who've given any thought to this is your your first interpretation in in other words that this is a um a centralizing monarchy, a super ambitious uh monarch whose um own material resources, uh whose own um finances are um inadequate to satisfy his ambitions.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh I think it's well understood that that Henry VIII is ambitious um not only to secure his dynasty with a male heir, but ambitious to compete on a European stage as a as a Renaissance monarch.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: He's he's conscious that measured up against Francis I of France, um, and certainly against the Holy Roman Emperor uh Charles V, that England uh and his English monarchy look looks like a poor relation.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um he doesn't have the resources uh of those monarchies um in order to compete um adequately and to be recognized as a major European power, and he's looking to um uh find a means of of um powering towards those those ambitious goals and turns to um the the private wealth of of monastery foundations in order to do that.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's um that's a view not just of of the sort of um general uh interest in in Tudor history, but but of perhaps still um uh some some working historians.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's replaced the view that prevailed, I think, through much of the um eighteenth, nineteenth, and even early twentieth centuries, which is um of the uh The monasteries as essentially a reactionary force, personally, individually corrupt and self-serving, but collectively also a sort of blight on the body politic, a sort of an obstacle to the emergence of a kind of much more modern state, and the early generations of professional historians in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they weren't so preoccupied with the idea of corrupt and depraved monks, but they were entirely sold on the notion of a sort of positivist march through through time that in order for the English kingdom to become what they knew it to be at the end of Victoria's reign, this all-powerful institutionalized state, it needed to get over these old medieval trappings and to shake them off.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so it seemed natural to them to interpret the um the dissolution, not so much about money, not so much about grasping ambition, but rather about a sort of necessary cleansing of uh of the state of its um older and less um less progressive uh elements, a kind of purgative uh process.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um to my mind, neither of these are, of course, are satisfactory.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think the um uh I'd hope that no um working historian today would would buy into such a sort of positivist, what used to be called Whig notion of a kind of march through time of a triumphant English state.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh I also think that we've come, thankfully, um a long way away from what also marked that Victorian view of um corrupt monasticism, which was still touched by a kind of anti-Catholicism, a sort of intolerance of Catholic practice.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think um uh when it comes to um toleration of different faiths, um early 21st century Britain is in a very different position to uh a century and a half ago.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I also think that the um the notion of um Henry VIII setting out on a sort of um uh a plan to deliver um uh a windfall financially that enables him to um uh fulfill his ambitions.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: It it simply is out of step with what the um the documentation reveals to us, that um there's no denying Henry's ambition, but it is a very unfocused, very changeable um agenda.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um Henry is mutable, suggestible.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: All of the people who lived and worked around him, who knew him best, and who have left us comments in personal letters and notes of various kinds.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: The most powerful common thread running through all of that documentation is that um we never quite know where the king's mind is going to go next.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: So um, yes, he wanted to compete on a European stage.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, he was well aware that his ambition um did not match his his his wherewithal, his resources.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: But he is not the personality um capable of setting objectives, devising a strategy, and then working towards it.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um and what I see in reading the documentary record of this period is a constant shifting and changing of plan, of strategy, of direction, quite simply.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um and at the heart of that, and I think one of the main reasons that Henry is such a mutable, suggestible character, is something that possibly goes to the very root of his makeup, his personality, which is a man who is very uncertain about who his allies are.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um a man who has carried into his reign and his adulthood something which must be an inheritance from his father, which is a strong and persisting awareness that the Tudor regime was seized, it wasn't succeeded to peaceably, but it was secured only on the battlefield, and that what his father won could easily be lost, and that the framework that underpins it is potentially quite flimsy.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this is why we see through the later 1520s and into the 1530s and even beyond it to the 1540s, um, these otherwise pretty surprising changes of mood, changes of tone, changes of direction in policy, because Henry never quite arrives at a place where he feels secure about um being able to carry the necessary allies, supporters with him in order to take the next step.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so we don't see him establishing a blueprint and going on uh to implement his plan, but rather we see him almost sort of nudging in one direction and seeing what response it gets and then nudging in another direction.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's um it's very comparable to arguably um a period of British government that we've all just recently lived through, where you have increasingly um the implementation of government um based on a or driven by a real lack of confidence certainty as to what your your electorate really will buy into.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so you have sometimes apparently quite contradictory gestures.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, are we going to um toss something towards business whilst at the same time taking measures that seem to run against the instinctive interests of business, because we are having to broker a base of support, and we're not 100% confident about any of the constituencies from which we can build our support.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's to a great extent what we see in the 1530s.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's um it's amplified by uh a personal awareness in Henry of his father's inheritance, as I say, of a of a regime that is very young, that is only where it is because of success on the battlefield, and which is now, as Henry is entering middle age at the beginning of the 1530s, um, is also looking increasingly um vulnerable because the succession is uncertain as well.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it cannot be, and the documents don't bear it out, it cannot be that he sets out on a plan to take all of this money and achieve what he wants to achieve.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: Equally, of course, this is not a sort of um uh building of a modern state in a in a linear way.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's like so much um in our history, it's it's more unpredictable and more um surprising than either of those two lines of argument.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: You've told us about how Henry was uh trying various different strategies out.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Strategy might be a bit of a grandiose term, but he was he was trying out different ways in which to um uh consolidate influence, perhaps uh diminish influence that he thought was uh negatively affecting him and his regime.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so that's a lot of the top-down stuff going on with the the elite level, our monarchy looking over the the continent going any influence coming from there.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Let's make sure I I remain the the heads of this nation and we don't have any um agitators as it were.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: But let's start delving into some of the the impacts on those around the monasteries because you mentioned just how embedded the monasteries were within uh public life, and in many cases, as you as you pointed out in your book, is settlements sprung up around the monasteries, and monasteries are often the first thing there, uh or and and people came to live in their shadow, and sometimes that wasn't the case.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: So when you look back at history and you say that what we see 18th, 19th, 20th century anti-Catholic sentiment forming, that clearly couldn't have always been the case, insofar that Henry himself still considered himself Catholic.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: He was a defender of the faith, the Catholic faith, and I would imagine most people in the country were also until such point as later reforms, Church of England, all those things that started to change the national religion.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, how did how did people on the ground respond to the closure of of monasteries and how did it how did it impact their day-to-day lives?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: Ultimately, it impacts uh people enormously.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I do think it needs to be um understood though, that um we we must um step away from that um retrospective position that of course distorts our assessment of how people living through this experience would have understood it.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: That um we know that by the beginning of the 1540s, all of these institutions have gone.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: They have been closed down.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but those living in the 1530s do not.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and even in the early weeks of 1540, when there are still a number of monasteries, um of the most ancient and some of the largest in the country, some of those um uh that are provide the staff for the great cathedrals, they are still functioning in the uh in the first weeks of 1540.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so people's response to dissolution is is as uh um incremental as the process itself.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um that um people by the fifth later 1540s, fifteen fifties are beginning to to process what this means.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: But it is a slow process, I think.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there are in the short term as many continuities as there are discontinuities.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the people of Henry VIII's England, I think, are not in one respect at least, not hugely different from those in in later centuries, in that what tends to affect people first and foremost, of course, are those things most directly connected to their livelihood.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: And some of those things do not change very quickly.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: So if you were a tenant of a monastery property, you're in most cases, in the years immediately following the dissolution, the terms of your tenancy don't change.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: All that's changed is that remote landlord that you may never have had a relationship with anyway.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that landlord is now the crown, not the monastery.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: But what we know from the documentation that survives is that the crown was not um uh, generally speaking, interfering with the terms of tenancies.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, people didn't suddenly find themselves the day after the monks trooped out of the monastery, find themselves paying more rent.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, rents were not raised immediately.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um often the um officials looking after these tenanted properties were the same people who'd been doing it for the monastic landlord, and they're now doing it for the crown.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a great deal of continuity, particularly surrounding those um those aspects that really do affect people's um uh livelihood, where they live, what they do.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: Those most affected in the short term are those who were employed by monasteries.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: And there is no doubt that they are um displaced and um suffer a discontinuity in their um uh in their livelihood in how they um derive income.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: And a good many of them do um uh petition the crown for compensation, for honouring of contracts that seem to have been suddenly broken.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them find themselves um not being adequately compensated because they weren't able to prove what role they had as a domestic servant or some other employee of the monastery.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um they are um a reasonably substantial part of the population.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: We think that um, although we don't have comprehensive records, that for every every monk or nun in a religious house, um there may be as many as three employees.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um so if there are um between 10 and 12,000 um monks and nuns in Henry VIII's England, then there could be easily three times as many people that are employed by them.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh that's um a substantial group of people, although in a population that is rising from around two and a half million, it's not an astonishing number of the population.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: But that's the sort of scale of those who are immediately affected.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: But still, and still there are other immediate continuities.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um the male monastics who come out of monasteries, um a significant proportion of them go on to minister as uh in churches um nearby.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so if um within the neighborhood there were those who were strongly attached to the forms of religious practice seen in monasteries, uh even there is a kind of continuity because they may now be going to their parish church rather than into the precinct of the monastery to worship in the monastery church.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there at the end of the nave, they will find a minister who is in fact a former monk or a former friar.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: So there are visible changes, um, these precincts with a great monastic church in the middle of them, um, which were places of employment and places of settled residence for employees and so on, they have fallen silent and they have fallen empty.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: But woven around that sudden change and very visible change, and um audible change is a great deal of continuity.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh and very significant change unfolds only only slowly.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: One of the um striking um realizations, I think, of of more recent years of research, archaeological research as much as archival research, has been to show us that the dissolution doesn't mean the immediate demolition of lots of buildings.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um that the ruined broken arches and tumbled buildings that we associate with this process and which we've lovingly preserved in rural settings, um, something that would have only become familiar to most people across the country 50, 80, 100 years after the dissolution.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: A great many of these buildings are in the immediate term maintained.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: They may be empty.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what Henry VIII subjects would have been familiar a bit with was the sort of mothballing of buildings rather than the tearing down of buildings.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I'd make one other point about how this impacts in the short term on the wider population.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think something else that we understandably in our own time um uh perhaps um struggle to to remind ourselves of, is that these are people who were familiar with discontinuity.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's something in perhaps in the modern psyche, perhaps especially for those of us who um, fortunately for us, were born and have lived long after the experiences of the mid-20th century.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that we we are not just unfamiliar, most of us, certainly in Britain, with major and unsettling discontinuity, but we are, I think we perhaps don't acknowledge it, but we're very fearful of it.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we forget that discontinuity change was normal, and that even ancient foundations, ancient institutions shut down.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: People were in Henry VIII's England were familiar with the idea that there might be a church that is abandoned or turned into something else.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: They had seen institutions being recycled repeatedly.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: They were familiar with uh not just institutional buildings such as churches and colleges and schools and almshouses being changed from one thing into another, but they'd seen it with with whole settlements.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and so we have if if we want to understand what this process meant to contemporaries, we in many ways I think that needs to be the starting point.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um that what we understand as as normal, stable life is is shaped and informed by living in the first decades of the 21st century, not by um the standards of the 1530s.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and and we really need to uh to overcome um uh that that gap.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think um uh just as um if we want to understand um the the outlook of of those living in in post-war Britain, um we have to um place ourselves in the perspective of those who for six years became familiar with um bombed-out streets and and and so on.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Henry VIII.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: England is not um living with destruction on that scale, but certainly um change was as familiar to these people as continuity.
• 44:10
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• 44:15
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• 44:24
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• 44:27
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• 44:43
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• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: Talking a little bit further about the internet, and this question might be a bit more ethereal to answer for you as someone who applies historical analysis to documentation or records that you're able to get your hands on, and commentary from the period and following is what do we think the impact on the English, the Welsh, and I suppose the Irish psyche was of these of this dissolution.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: I I guess what I mean by that is spiritually, how do you think it impacted us?
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: So th to throw an example out there, you could argue that we live in a very uh materialistic era, and people could then try and do some genealogy of how we ended up at that point, and they might say, well, you know, industrial revolution uprooted everyone from out in the countryside, and before you know it, we're we're we're producing things, we see ourselves as producers of things, we've got less folk customs and the like.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: And before that period, whilst it was a few hundred centuries or a couple of or a couple of centuries prior, is we had a very well-embedded life and people interacting with the the col the the monastic order, for example, and they were at the centre of the life, and and presumably there was a a very religious worldview.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: What what do you think the dissolution of the monasteries that period then had on the way British people saw God, religion, the world, their place in it?
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Huge question.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: Appreciate that is not an easy one to answer.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, um certainly a huge question.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm I think the the accurate answer is perhaps not the one that we would expect.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think first first of all, um attitudes to um to the spiritual are throughout the the medieval period and into the sixteenth century in England are constantly evolving.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so um what um spiritual stimulus people take from monasteries in Henry VIII's reign is different from um what their uh predecessors, perhaps even their grandparents, had taken from them, because um the um the spiritual life inside these places and and the um the performance of religious rituals in them um is is constantly developing, taking on different influences, different focal points, uh, and so on.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um in that sense, um monasteries are as much on a kind of continuum as the wider population's own patterns of worship.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's much debate, and it depends to some extent on what perspective you have on it, um, as to whether the monastic orders had um retained such a sort of um uh hermetically sealed religious culture that um there was something distinctively Benedictine or Franciscan or Cistercian about their worship that um uh even in the sixteenth century.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um my feeling and my reading of the documentation is that whilst they retained some of those characteristics of their respective traditions, in many ways they had come to reflect this constantly evolving collective religious culture, that aspects of their um their rituals, the music that was performed, the um the liturgy, the the texts that were uttered, the processions that they took, all of the uh local customs, seasonal customs that were observed reflected some um common features.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, as a consequence, um for many people, most people, I think, the the disappearance of these places may mean more the loss of additional facilities in which spirituality is or environments in which spirituality is expressed, rather than taking away some distinctive ingredient, if that if that makes sense.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so your the the canvas on which you um express your your spirituality has foreshortened.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh and maybe the to continue with the uh the metaphor, maybe the the colour palette is now missing a few elements, but much of what you're doing in expressing that spirituality hasn't profoundly changed at this point, and I think that's um that's what seems to emerge most from the the documentation that people recognise um undoubtedly recognize loss, but not loss that somehow um really dissolves the the central um spiritual um uh expressions that they'd known previously in their life.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um I do think that at the heart of what people in in religion um come to to think about the the institutions that have been lost is also something that tells us quite a lot about the um the nature of of religion in in England and it may be distinctively English, and that is that I think a lot of uh Henry VIII subjects, um their spirituality is sort of shot through with things that are not in themselves spiritual, but are about um local identity, are about um a rather amorphous sense of nostalgia that is associated with place, that is associated with a sort of um legendary mythic sense of the past.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and monasteries were um repositories of those of those sensibilities.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: They seemed to contain them, um, and um they curated them, that a sense that um oh there's a uh there's a saint whose name everybody remembers, and um in that monastery over there they still have his um uh staff or a book that's associated with him, or a fragment of his um his vestment, or whatever it it it might be.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um but those the power of those things, yes, they were seen to be an intimation of that of that holy person's sanctity, but they were as much, if not more, an intimation of something, as I say, that was less to do with spirituality and much more to do with this is one of the sort of um ties that binds us to this place.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is our identity in this village or in this um valley or in this town.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's that that unsettles people, and that's where feelings of loss begin to cohere around.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's why we get this situation that you've referred to earlier, where those who absolutely buy into a state church, a reformed church, um, to the Protestant practice that Elizabeth's regime um uh really cements in England, um, why they nonetheless have prepared to go into print and to speak out about a sense of loss, because what they are coming together over is a sense of um that identity that is um has been endangered um by the loss of these these places.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: So it it's something that we um we need to finally shed, I think, as as historians, um, the the sort of bipartisan, you've got Catholics over here, you've got Protestants over there, where do people stand on this battle line?
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because I actually think that um that religious culture is is so much more both complex and actually arguably interesting than that.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just about doctrine, it's about um the way that people respond to place and to um their physical environment and to what they inherit from in those places that they live from previous generations.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think um some people may be familiar with this analogy that um it's it's um it's directly connected to something that we still see today.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: We we have uh old parish churches up and down the country, which today probably only very tiny handfuls of people are regularly attending and worshipping in.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: But if you in many of those places, particularly in smaller provincial places, not in big cities where there's a turnover of population, but in in smaller places in England and Wales, um, if you dare to suggest that that poorly attended parish church no longer has its um 11th of November remembrance service, or um isn't available for um the next generation to have a wedding in, or doesn't have its Christmas Eve carol service, then people react.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: And suddenly a place that only gets eight very elderly people every fourth Sunday, suddenly it becomes a focus for expressions of community identity, neighborhood, um uh a shared sense of a sort of not very well-defined but but palpable inherited history.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's that's what emerges from the dissolution, that people realize that that their practice of religion no has lost a facility, but it hasn't lost its substance.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: But they do recognize that there was something that that stood in that space between religious practice and community identity, which has been lost.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's a fascinating response, James.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_00: Got much more than I bargained for than I felt it personally myself, actually.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I mean, I grew up not in a religious household, and um, whilst I definitely had a grasp of local history because my grandfathers didn't meet, but they were archaeologists up in Hadrid's Wall country in Northumberland, so I'm from Hexham originally.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I I learned quite a lot about that period, but without being in a religious household, I didn't know too much other than a little bit about the abbey in the town.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: But something that I did do when I got older and left London after a few years living there, and I'd lived all over the place having left home.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_00: And when the lockdowns hit, I found myself back in Northumberland because I thought, well, that'd be better to be around this wide open space than being in my health share in London at the time.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I went back and fell in love with it.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: And fell in not for the not for the second time, but for the first time.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when you're growing up, you can find places a bit boring and sortifying.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I went back and threw myself into it.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_00: But before I got up to that point and found myself drawn to the history, I felt like I was quite rootless insofar as I knew I had a regional identity, but I didn't really feel like it was connected to too much, I guess, because we're not really, as you've touched on, we get a very um disparate view of history, and there are various things that might block our uh regional cultural identities being there rather than dig into Anglo-Saxon history and learning all about Sinkov, but before and everise that I can see all these things, but place names everywhere, and just how much you still lose quite large in the in the memory, um, whether whether you choose to see it or not, which is I think what it comes down to.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I but I see uh I mean I'm a church go myself, but I see amongst my friends who aren't here, um, and I haven't always been, is that many of them still choose to get married in those parish churches, as you say.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: They seem very um um impressed upon by uh having a ceremony in those places, and not just because it's in a a church that's Instagrammable, but because there's a a sense that there's something more there, and that they're whether they're from that area or it's a place that they moved to, like Kent from Northumberland, is they end up with this sense of stewardship without even being regular church goers.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, that that that gives me some hope that uh we will steward some of these things into the next generation, even whilst religiosity, at least amongst British natives, is is pretty low.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um James, I've I've kept you for for long enough, and uh we could probably do many more hours because we've we've touched on a rather large topic here.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I've found this an unbelievably gratifying discussion, and it's you know one that I've wanted to have for some time.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: Before I let you go then, I'd like to ask all of my guests what what is one thing, and there may have been many things, but what is one thing that you've changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: Something that was perhaps set in stone with regards to how you viewed it, and what was it that caused you to change your mind on that?
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: Goodness.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think there are uh so many uh things that I I have changed my mind on.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: I I I think the the more experienced I've become, the the less um fixed uh I've been um uh about um about most things.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think I there are so many areas of of of life that I um I I had I I I was brought up to be passionate about history with the the sort of traditional um uh view uh traditional sort of childhood of being taken to historic places and uh and so on.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it in some ways it's it's no surprise that I've ended up doing what I do.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um I must admit um that I've I for a long time assumed that that was um quite a common uh experience and outlook.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um something that's become clear to me quite uh quite recently, I think, is how um how a kind of um, if there is such a word, a a kind of contemporaneity is is really um strong um currently that um there's there's perhaps a sense in which um for some people living in a sort of continuous present is is satisfactory, is sufficient.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and that troubles me.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think historical awareness, consciousness, sensibility um is important and um helps us to respond to contemporary experience.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I give a lot of talks in in schools um where I meet that contemporary preoccupation very conspicuously.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I do try to unsettle it by because um with uh it's always great to have good interaction with um uh with the students, um, and the more uh confident, outspoken will say, well, you know, uh your preoccupation with history, it's got nothing for me.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: I want to live in the present, I want to look to the future.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_01: I try and unsettle it by reminding them that as they're um endlessly scrolling on their phone, they're actually much closer to my perspective than they realize because everything that they do is framed by a timeline.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I I feel increasingly the need to unpack that for them because I I fear contemporaneity, that the sense that we can cut loose, um, and that and there's a I I think I I had a rather as a as a as a young person, I had a sort of rather cosy view that surely we all want to um absorb, understand, build up knowledge of this shared past, um, and and we will always do that that what's changed in me is is to realize that that's a complacency and that actually there is a an urgency to ensure that um the rising generation who if they have an instinct at all, it might be too um isolated contemporary uh focus detached from uh a wider consciousness.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_01: That we we it is quite urgent to uh to challenge that and and to encourage a different perspective.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_00: That is definitely a call to action if ever I've heard one.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think green sheets of hope that I've seen amongst people who you would say are in Gen Z.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there seem to be some really thoughtful commentators who have found themselves, having grown up as digital natives, to be really dissatisfied with that that life and realizing that there's more to it.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then their curiosity finds them breaking out of it, and before you know it, they're renouncing these these um these tools which we've found in our hands and our pockets uh in perpetuity, it seems.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: But the the only hope I try to hold every day is that as I um find myself trying to run away from that life as fast as I can and not get sucked into it, is that even amongst those who've known nothing else, that the curiosity within humanity will always be there.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: For those that start to get to that depth, they'll plumb those depths so they realize that there's more to this.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully, they'll find themselves jumping on that train.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I would hope so.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the challenge with with digital media is that it places self at the center of everything.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_01: That um these are timelines, um, as I glibly remind them, but they are personal timelines.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that's the challenge, that everything um begins with self, and um there's a danger in that degree of personal relativity.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um because if we're going to continue collectively to understand the world and deploy that knowledge um constructively, um we have to accept that there is more to it than our personal timeline.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we uh so it's not necessarily a matter of putting down the phone, um it's more a matter of adjusting the um the center of focus that it isn't always self, that the the um and there's a real danger um, you know, that the the infant lives in uh a self-centered universe, um, but we mature.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um we we need to um remind ourselves of that.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think running in parallel is something that's much less to do with digital media and and and more to do with um the challenges and tensions of the the contemporary world, and that is that I hear from a lot of students when I talk to them quite rightly that the challenge of history is that it has been commandeered by those who willfully distort that um historical dick discourse uh you know we only have to listen to a a brief glossing of one of Mr.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_01: Putin's uh addresses to see how toxic it can be.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_01: And um that is um another reason that young people um coming to adulthood right now, we we need to show that um historical discourse is not only um uh capable of powering profound harm like the invasion of Ukraine, and that that there are other ways in which it can be deployed, and and um uh because it's being modelled in front of the current generation in such appalling ways.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, James, I'm sure that is quite the fine you've got on your hands there, but genuine genuinely from the discussion that I've had with you today, it has been much more than I could have anticipated.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you've seriously brought a lot of depth to not just the conversation of the dissolution, but what it means on a human level.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_00: And if your students get to interact with you each day, then I'm I'm confident that if you keep finding a good fight, you'll change some hearts and minds at least.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you from the bottom of my heart for coming on the show.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I I'll be keeping an eye out for whatever else it is that you're up to, and I'd love to be able to invite you back on in the future.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for coming on.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you very much indeed.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's been hugely enjoyable, and uh yes, I look forward to another conversation.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, James.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, all the best.
• 1:10:06
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• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:10:22
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• 1:10:32
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