How did the English Reformation happen?
As this quote from Patrick Collinson (the historian, not the tech entrepreneur) indicates, the Reformation was a truly transformative event.
“England, which at the beginning of the sixteenth century seems to have been one of the most Catholic countries in Europe, became, by the seventeenth century, the most virulently anti-Catholic, and the almost dominant ideology of anti-Catholicism fueled the civil wars that engulfed all parts of the British Isles in mid-century and later provoked the Bloodless Revolution, from which what passes for a British constitution derives” (Collinson, 2004, p 10).
We think that focusing on the Dissolution of the Monasteries provides crucial insights into the political economy of this transformation.
This will be the first of a two posts describing the gist of our argument.
Part (1) below will examine how the allocation of land following the Dissolution created a vested interest opposed to Mary’s policies of restoring Catholicism in the 1550s. Part (2) will demonstrate that the political economy interests created by the Dissolution remained important into the late 17th century and will focus on the Exclusion Crisis of the late 1670s.
