A thousand years of monastic life in Britain was brought suddenly to an end in the reign of Henry VIII.

Over four years, some 800 houses were closed. Something like 12,000 monks, nuns and friars were redeployed.

It was the greatest dislocation of people, property and daily life since the Norman Conquest.

And yet, it can be remarkably difficult to trace what happened next.

The ruins on our landscape today create the impression of dramatic change.

And yet the buildings, their contents and their residents were not suddenly swept away.

Drawing on the scattered evidence of the archive, today's guest has another story to tell about the end of monasticism and its immediate effects.

He is Professor James G. Clarke, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, who has published widely on monasteries, religious life and culture in medieval and reformation England.

He has been a historical consultant on TV documentaries and dramas like Tudor Monastery Farm and The White Queen and his masterpiece.

The dissolution of the monasteries and new history was published in 2021 by Yale University Press.

Professor Clarke, it is a great pleasure to welcome you to not just the Tudors.

I loved your book, which is an extraordinary piece of writing. It is based on such an impressive amount of work and it is a very, very good read.

I recommend it to everybody. I think I first want to ask you, however did you achieve a piece of research of this scale?

Thank you, first of all, but by spending an inordinate amount of time working on it, as they say in my household, I've been kicking the habit for a very long time.

And my daughters were still being pushed around in push chairs when I started work.

One of them is in her first year of undergraduate study now. So yes, that's how you write a long book by taking a very long time, I think.

But it's a reflection of the scale of the subject, the scale of the transformation that I'm trying to trace here, because we have a thousand years of monastic history in England.

And it's the last moments of that history that is the least well documented.

So it becomes a kind of archaeological task.

I've found having to think really laterally about what might, two or three or more degrees of separation, be conjured up into a source that might provide a distance sort of echo for what's happening.

And I think that's what made it not just a trial, but a really rewarding journey, because quite a lot of what I think I brought out was pretty hard, what I'm actually.

I particularly would like to focus on something you mentioned, which is the transformation, the effects and impact of the dissolution.

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