Historians typically mark the transition from the medieval age to the modern age around the year 1500. Many pivotal events cluster here: Gutenberg’s invention of a printing press with movable type (c. 1440); Greek scholars carrying classical texts into Italy after the fall of Constantinople (1453); Columbus’ arrival in the Americas (1492); Luther’s 95-Theses broadside against the Catholic Church (1517); Copernicus’ publication of his theory that all planets, including Earth, revolve around the sun (1543).
In England, a key moment came in 1534 with the passage of the Supremacy Act, stipulating that the head of the Church of England was not the Pope but Henry VIII. This declaration was motivated by considerations as political as religious. Since 1399, when Richard II was deposed by Henry Bolingbroke, who then reigned as Henry IV, the English king’s right to his crown kept being contested, with various cousins competing for it. The War of the Roses broke out in 1455 and was resolved only 30 years later, when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III and took the throne as Henry VII.
The Tudors were eager to prevent any recurrence of this chaos. But Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, bore only one child who survived—a girl named Mary—and succession to a female was not a sure bet. Henry had sought annulment of his marriage to Catherine, hoping another wife might produce a male heir, but the Pope refused. So Henry split from Rome, and the Archbishop of Canterbury granted his divorce from Catherine.
Along with his political concerns, Henry had financial ones. He liked to spend—on wars, pageantry, houses—and he was deeply in debt. At this time, religious houses owned a third of the land in England. He sent out commissioners to investigate the finances and conduct of all the monasteries. Not surprisingly, the commissioners claimed to find a lot of corruption, which helped justify a huge grab. Henry appropriated the smaller monasteries by legislative fiat and used threat and intimidation to pressure the larger ones into simply surrendering their lands and wealth to the crown. By 1540, all monasteries in England had been dissolved and their buildings made uninhabitable. Roofs were ripped off and windows knocked out, leaving what Shakespeare called “bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”