God and Mammon: the Dissolution of the Monasteries and its consequences

The Dissolution of the Monasteries was the single largest transfer of wealth in English history between the Norman Conquest and today. It was immediately preceded by the creation of the Valor Ecclesiasticus, a complete survey of all Church property in England. The first paper uses a stratified sample of the Valor to create a georeferenced dataset that allows an unprecedented view into the English monastic system on the eve of its destruction. The dataset presented in this paper fills the crucial gap between aggregate overviews of the monastic system and case studies of individual monasteries, preserving a high level of detail while providing enough data and geographical coverage to ensure generalizability. Using this dataset, I demonstrate the overwhelmingly local nature of the monastic economy despite their long-distance networks, and show that the monastic system as a whole moved enormous quantities of money from the countryside into cities and suburbs. I also quantitatively confirm many of the assertions of previous historians of monasticism, including the Cistercian order’s focus on land revenue, the dominance of well-connected Benedictine houses, and the tight connections between Carthusian monasteries even over huge distances. The second paper investigates the causes of the largest rebellion ever faced by a Tudor monarch: the Pilgrimage of Grace. By combining a dataset of rebel musters and the seats of rebel gentlemen with the Valor data and a shapefile of Northern roads and shipping routes, I provide the first statistical evidence in the long-running debate over the rebellion’s causes. I find that monastic land is the only variable that consistently predicts rebellion: parishes with more monastic land were more likely to rise in rebellion and rose sooner than parishes with less monastic land. In addition, monastic land likely to contain tenants predicts rebellion much more strongly than monastic land likely to have been farmed with hired labor. This finding bolsters the argument of authors like Michael Bush, who see the Pilgrimage as fundamentally motivated by the economic impacts of the Dissolution, specifically the threat of eviction. Finally, the third paper investigates the long-run impacts of the Dissolution on individuals and the wider economy. Using a set of name lists containing status information and a new dataset created from taxation documents spanning three hundred years, I find that surname groups containing monastic land purchasers maintained a substantial wealth advantage well into the nineteenth century. This advantage is visible across a range of measures, including total family wealth, average individual wealth, the wealth of the richest bearer of each surname, and the total number of individuals with a given surname. On the broader economic effects of the Dissolution, the results are more mixed. I find a small increase in tertiary employment in parishes with more monastic land, but these effects do not scale up to the hundred level, making it unlikely that monastic land is associated with higher productivity.