The Age Of Plunder The England Of Henry Viii 150047 W G Hoskins by W. G. Hoskins 9781913518127, 1913518124 instant download after payment.

It is curious that the social and economic history of Henry’s reign has never before been studied as a whole. The immense literature of his reign has been mainly concerned with Henry’s marital and political disasters and his religious manoeuvrings; but on the social and economic side nearly every important book and essay begins at 1540, an odd date in many ways which is mainly attributable to the great Tawney, though he never intended it so. Thus Henry’s reign, all but the last seven years, has been relatively neglected. Yet it is Tawney’s magisterial work, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, published in 1912, that stands as the one great exception to this statement.

The choice of the title The Age of Plunder may seem to call for some explanation. In one sense the whole of English history, certainly since 1066, has been a history of plunder by the governing class and its officials and other hangers-on. The Norman Conquest was itself a plunder of the whole country by adventurers from across the Channel and resulted in the almost complete turnover of landed property in the country from English to foreign landlords. The sixteenth century was the greatest act of plunder since that time, carried out by the native governing class: it produced the biggest changeover in land-ownership for nearly five hundred years, mainly arising from the systematic plunder of the Church at all levels and later the plunder of the Crown itself by the magnates of the realm.