Dissolute

My friend Dr Adrian Pabst sets out how the Dissolution of the Monasteries redistributed wealth to the rich and removed protection for the poor.

Together with the forced expropriation of free peasant proprietors, this process of "primitive accumulation" created the conditions for the first form of capitalism - sixteenth-century agrarian capitalism.

Henry VIII's secular absolutism and his break with the Papacy also separated England from the Continent and permanently divided Europe.

Leaving aside the dubious theological reasons, the political and economic consequences of the English Reformation were disastrous.

The entry of these facts into the mainstream discourse is long, long, long overdue.