I won’t have a chance to listen to it right now, but I point you to this week’s In Our Time, centered on Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.  Available for download for the next week, still accessible on the Web, just not for download, after that.

When he was an old man, Michael Sherbrook remembered in writing the momentous events of his youth: “All things of price were either spoiled, plucked away or defaced to the uttermost…it seemed that every person bent himself to filch and spoil what he could. Nothing was spared but the ox-houses and swincotes…”

He was talking about the destruction of Roche Abbey, but it could have been Lewes or Fountains, Glastonbury, Tintern or Walsingham, names that haunt the religious past as their ruins haunt the landscape.
These were the monasteries, suddenly and for many shockingly, destroyed during the reign of Henry VIII. But was the destruction of monastic culture in this country an overdue religious reform or the grandest of larcenies?
Contributors
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University
Diane Purkiss, Fellow and Tutor at Keble College, Oxford
George Bernard, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton