The greatest land redistribution in England since the Norman

Conquest and the largest windfall of cash to the Crown in history. It was nothing less than the wholesale destruction of monasticism.

I'm Cisanna Lipscomb and in this edition of Not Just The Tudors we are very much talking about the Tudors.

Writer and historian Matthew Lyons joins me to discuss the dissolution of the monasteries and its unintended consequences on pregnant women, the poor and the libraries of England.

Matthew is a wonderful writer and historian. His books include Impossible Journeys which is a collection of travellers tales about journeys to places that didn't exist and the favourite which explores the love of fair between water, rally or rally and Elizabeth I.

He is working on a book about the dissolution of the monasteries which I'm very excited about and which we're talking about today.

If my recommendation is not sufficient, Impossible Journeys is a gorgeous folio book which you must add to your collection now and obviously being printed by folio is the imprimature itself of quality.

It's very exciting to talk about the dissolution of the monasteries because I think it's arguably the most significant change that any English or British monarch has made.

If you think about the number of people put out of those monasteries every abbey in Convents and Priory and Monastery, Nunnery closed all the lands moving into the King's possession, we can't overestimate it, can we?

Yes, absolutely. The amount of money involved is phenomenal. In 1535, Cromwell sent around agents to value the estates of the Church of the Monasteries. Cromwell was very fond of making lists of things and there's a great phrase about getting a value of a jewel in every monastery in the country.

That's essentially what his agents did and the value of the monastic lands were something like twice the amount of the royal estate revenue was a period.

So you can see the immediate attraction for Henry and Cromwell just from a financial point of view aside from the politics and aside from many theological issues they may have heard with Catholic Church.

I really want to know what you think about the balance of finance versus theology but just to fill us in. Obviously we're talking about Henry VIII and we're talking about Thomas Cromwell because I know it's easy to confuse our Cromwells and this is after the break with Rome which we could sort of pin at about 1534.

But I suppose we should perhaps even backtrack further and talk about what monasteries were and what they did and what their function was.

Yeah, essentially there's two kind of monastic house in England in the period. There were monasteries and there were friaries.

The central difference between those two monks and nuns in the monasteries lived in communities that were in principal in seclusion, whereas the friaries were a 13th century innovation and they were teaching and preaching orders.

So they lived in communities and they're a big part of the educational reform in the medieval period and also another key difference is that whereas monasteries were allowed to keep some kind of possessions and in fact actually mean the whole business model as it were of Islam, ownership and friaries were very proud about their poverty.

They raised their money from begging or from cast donations from the wealthy and they sort of looked down on the monastic orders being second class and not really sincere in their vows.

And not sufficiently austere to really count.

If you become a monk or a nun you are devoting yourself to God, to prayer, you undertake to obey an austere set of spiritual practices aimed at falling away bodily imperatives and devoting yourself and your soul to the worship of God.

Part of the daily cycle of prayers was about intercession on behalf of the dead primarily to saints to speed your loved ones way through perigotry.

So in some ways they are a fundamental part of a belief system as salvation theology that involves perigotry. If you think after death you're going to go to this place between heaven and hell you're going to be there for tens of thousands of years unless people pray you through it more quickly then you need to have monks to do that for you.

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