The Women Henry VIII Forgot: England's Nuns After the Dissolution

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Heather Teysko

History

4.6 • 624 Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2026

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, roughly 2,000 nuns lost everything overnight. Their homes, their communities, their vocations, and in many cases the only life they had ever known. We talk endlessly about the monks and the land transfers. We almost never talk about the nuns. In this episode I'm looking at what actually happened to them after the dissolution. Some went home to families. Some married. Some kept living together informally, maintaining their communities without officially calling it a convent. And some, like the Bridgettines of Syon Abbey, went into exile on the continent and refused to stop existing for the next five centuries. The Syon community, dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539, was still going in Devon in 2011. We'll also look at what the dissolution really meant for women's options in England long-term, because for roughly three hundred years afterward, there was no structure in England that allowed women to lead communities and exercise real authority. That's not a footnote. That's a seismic shift. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	We talk about the disillusion of the monasteries all the time, Thomas Cromwell sending his commissioners out to count the silver,
0:08.1	the abbots who surrendered quietly and the ones who didn't.
0:12.1	The incredible transfer of wealth that basically reshaped who owned England.
0:18.3	We know this story, right?
0:20.1	But there's another side to it that, you know,
0:22.7	honestly, kind of stops you when you start digging into it. At the time that the disillusion
0:28.0	began, there were roughly 2,000 nuns living in around 140 to 150 nunneries convents across
0:35.9	England. Two thousand women. And the question of what actually happened to them, where they went, how they
0:43.3	survived, whether they were okay, gets maybe a paragraph in most accounts of the period before
0:50.0	everyone moves on to talk about the land grants.
0:53.4	So today, that's what we're going to talk about.
0:56.0	Because the more I looked at this, the more I realized that the dissolution didn't just redistribute property and shut down institutions.
1:03.0	For women specifically, it eliminated an entire category of life that had existed for centuries, and that's not a small thing. So today we're going to talk
1:12.8	about who they were and some examples of what happened to them after the dissolution. Let's get
1:18.6	into it.
1:23.6	Hi, friend, welcome back to the Renaissance English History podcast.
1:31.2	I am your host, Heather.
1:32.3	I've been podcasting on Tudor England since 2009 with my show, which makes it the original
1:38.3	Tudor History podcast.
1:40.0	I am, as always, just delighted that you are here with me today.
1:45.2	We did a video a couple of weeks ago on who these women were who were going into convents,
1:52.2	and I think it was called something like the exit hatch for women.
	...

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