Act of Dissipation, 1536

Modernity must have become official—I do not say that it began, but that it took office—at least by the dissolution of the English monasteries in 1536 and 1539. The causes and conditions of modernity are better understood by the historians than I, for we did not become modern overnight, nor do I say such a vast movement was isolated in time and place. But it does not take much reading to understand what a vast alteration in mindset must have prevailed upon the ruling class in order for them even to countenance the Acts of Dissolution.

Not so long before, the affairs of a "king" and the demands of "national" affairs must have seemed quite removed from life. Knights may have marched through the towns on way from one war to another, but their affairs were not of a piece with those who lived by the land. Even news probably could not permeate, for there was no printing press, except through the chief organizing institution of the day: the religious house. These controversial institutions were what Henry VIII despoiled. Most of them had admittedly ceased to be primarily religious institutions, though it would be incorrect to say that they were secular. They were a surrogate for what we might now call a network of NGOs, substitutes for a weak central government (even a weak sense of "nation").

The houses were not perfect, but active local governance probably had its advantages too. In any case I do not know enough to speak about the costs and benefits, but I do have enough wisdom to suspect that their presence was in some sense a response to the needs of the people. Suffice to say, when the charterhouses were swept and their sometimes swollen stores of wealth appropriated by an innovation in governance and allegiance, it could only have swept away locality in the old sense of the word. The peasants ceased to be members of a Christian order and enrolled in one secular, transferring allegiance out of a system that (however imperfectly) directed them to look beyond life to one focused primarily on the here below. As a secondary consequence, people who were first Londoners, Yorkshiremen or East Anglians began now to be English in identity, for the order was no longer local in character but "national."

As a corollary, Protestantism is therefore one of the necessary conditions of Western modernity, for only an individualistic ecclesiology would permit a mere king to wreck the church.