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’.

Other countries had embarked on national programmes of monastic closure before Thomas Cromwell realised that was a way to make his king rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

Indeed,earlier monarchs were in the habit of temporarily seizing the assets of priories tied to French mother houses whenever England was at war with France, and Henry V finally ‘nationalised’ all these ‘alien priories’ by act of Parliament in 1414. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge, not to mention Eton College, were great beneficiaries of the closure of monasteries whose wealth was diverted into education.

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