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The Dissolution of the Monasteries: heritage in ruins
Apart from his red hair, beard, giant girth and his equally gargantuan appetite for wives, the one thing we all associate with Henry VIII is the event that the authors of 1066 and All That called, with an eye for a memorable spelling mistake, ‘the Disillusion of the Monasteries’.
Politicians who are fond of the idea of ‘Britishness’ no doubt think this was an event unique to these islands. In fact, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland had all embarked on national programmes of monastic closure before Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister, realised that was a way to make his king rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Roche Abbey’s twin transept towers were spared: dating from the 1170s, they are early examples in England of Gothic structural principles, using pointed arches to create large windows filled with plain glass, symbolic of the simplicity and clarity fundamental to Cistercian life.
Indeed, earlier monarchs were in the habit of temporari
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