MONKS, GENTS AND INDUSTRIALISTS: THE LONG-RUN IMPACT OF THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ENGLISH MONASTERIES

By Leander Heldring, James A. Robinson & Sebastian Vollmer.

"Abstract

We examine the long-run economic impact of the Dissolution of the English monasteries in 1535, which is plausibly linked to the commercialization of agriculture and the location of the Industrial Revolution. Using monastic income at the parish level as our explanatory variable, we show that parishes which the Dissolution impacted more had more textile mills and employed a greater share of population outside agriculture, had more gentry and agricultural patent holders, and were more likely to be enclosed. Our results extend Tawney’s famous ‘rise of the gentry’ thesis by linking social change to the Industrial Revolution."

"Conclusions 

In this paper we conducted what to our knowledge is the first empirical investigation of the long-run eco- nomic impact of the Dissolution of the monasteries in England between 1536 and 1540. Tawney (1941a,b) first proposed that the Dissolution and subsequent sell off of church land, representing around 25-30% of land in England, created a huge shock to the social structure. In particular, he argued that it precipitated the rise of the gentry, a new commercially oriented class of farmers who played a leading role in the political conflicts of 17th century England. Though historians now do not believe that the evidence which Tawney presented supports his original arguments about the connections between the gentry and the Civil War or Glorious Revolution, we argued that nevertheless both theory and case study evidence leads one to hypothesize that there might be a reduced form relationship between the Dissolution, the rise of the gentry and the location of the Industrial Revolution. 

The bulk of this paper investigates precisely this. To measure the impact of the Dissolution at the parish level we digitized the Valor Ecclesiasticus, the survey of church incomes that Henry VIII commissioned just prior to the Dissolution. We showed that the greater was monastic income according to the Valor, the more industrialization there was in 1838 in terms of the presence and number of textile mills and the number of mill employees. We also showed that greater levels of monastic income in 1535 were associated with a smaller proportion of the labor force employed in agriculture according to the 1831 Census, and a larger share of the labor force employed in manufacturing and retail. We further argued that there are grounds for believing that these correlations can be interpreted causally. 

In addition to this reduced form evidence we explored some of the likely channels via which the Disso- lution might have impacted industrialization. We showed that parishes which had higher levels of monastic income had more gentry in 1700, consistent with Tawney’s original thesis. We also showed that they were more likely to have land enclosed, consistent with the notion that the gentry influenced policy via their large influence on Parliament. Finally, we also showed that higher levels of monastic income were associ- ated with a greater number of agricultural patents, suggesting that the rise of the gentry was associated with greater agricultural innovation. 

All in all, our findings support Tawney’s hypothesis that the rise of the gentry was associated with the Dissolution of the monasteries and our evidence further suggests that it was also connected to perhaps an even more momentous event, the Industrial Revolution."

Other history related posts:

Did Tea Drinking Cut Mortality Rates in England?

Both numeracy and literacy were invented in the service of finance and commerce

Pre-market societies could sometimes have alot of violence

Was 1800 (approximately) A Pivotal Year In Human History? Robert Fogel, Francis Fukuyama, And Deirdre McCloskey All Seem To Think So

Some History of Insurance

The surprising link between science fiction and economic history

What happened in some earlier U.S. trade Wars?  

Did the industrial revolution cause children to take on adult roles later and later? 

Were The Pilgrims Capitalists Or Socialists? 

Primitive communism: Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong (plus Ruth Benedict on property rights)  

When workers were paid twice a day and given half-hour shopping breaks (Germany, 1923) 

In 1923, Germany printed money to pay workers who were told to stay at home  

The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it