John Carter was the first to compare modern universities to monasteries in the 16th century, but the comparison is actually far more apt than his excellent article lets on. The details are remarkable.

Why were the monasteries destroyed? They were rich, but that wasn’t enough. Even kings were restrained by Parliament and popular opinion. Closing hundreds of monasteries requires a large force of people willing to do it, even assuming no resistance.

It appears that modern academics are convinced it was all an evil plot by Henry VIII to satisfy his personal needs and the monks themselves were largely blameless; historical evidence doesn’t support this view, being filled as it is with evidence that the monks were not only hypocritical to absurd extremes but also widely hated and literal fraudsters much of the time. So modern historians are reduced to claiming all the evidence is made up propaganda (it’s just asserted that this is so, not shown).

Yet many years before Henry had any interest in the monks there were independents writing about their terrible behavior, and it was clear that dissatisfaction was widespread amongst the population. In a society where literacy was largely restricted to the clergy themselves we must often infer what people thought from their actions. Perhaps the clearest evidence was the incredible speed with which the monasteries were pillaged by locals the moment the King allowed it. Writing a generation after the dismantling of Roche Abbey, Michael Sherbrook wrote:

All things of value were spoiled, plucked away or utterly defaced … and it seemed that every person was intent upon filching and spoiling what he could. Even those who had been content to permit the monks’ worship and do great reverence at their matins, masses and services two days previously were no less happy to pilfer, which is strange, that they could one day think it to be the house of God and the next the house of the Devil.

In other words people went along with the system out of inertia, but there was no real support for it and much celebration once it was felled by a strong leader.

The reason for this was explained by reports prepared for Parliament, which only approved the dissolution after being presented with extensive physical investigations into what was going on. These reports sometimes praised the rare institutions where the clergy were living up to their vows. But, amongst many other things, the investigators found monks were:

• Not turning up for Church services. Many monasteries were so small they didn’t actually have enough monks to maintain a regular service schedule.

• Taking vows of chastity then having lots of sex. One prior had six children and claimed to have received a license from the pope to keep a whore! Others married, had illegitimate children, kept concubines or were accused of homosexuality. Something like 10% of the monastic inhabitants admitted to having sex and given the investigators had to rely entirely on confessions (there was no torture or coercion), we can assume the true number was much higher. When including masturbation (also a violation of vows) the rate of oath breaking went up much higher still.

• Defrauding the public. Even academics admit that relic fraud was rampant. Gullible peasants were charged fees to see vials of Jesus’ blood, bits of his clothes, etc. One monastery had built an animatronic Christ with hidden controls, which they claimed had been delivered to them via a miraculous event. Fake relics often came with forged documents, religious texts were also tampered with to encourage pilgrimage and relic trading. Such things were used to extract money from the population; hardly needed given that the monks were …

• Extraordinarily rich despite vows of poverty. They owned something like 25% of the best farmland along with vast wealth in the monasteries themselves (which is why the Vikings liked to raid them centuries earlier). Private wealth accumulation was common: one monk was found to have a hidden chest of coins.

The local people were well aware of how corrupt the monasteries were, if not always the exact details. People still joined up, albeit in falling numbers, but in many cases it’s clear this was more because they were centers of wealth and power rather than religious devotion.

The monks also got in trouble by rejecting the authority of the state in favor of ideological authority (Rome).

The parallels with modern universities are obvious. Academics “vow” to pursue truth unbiased by politics or ideology, then publicly violate those vows in the most visible ways possible. They regularly defraud the public with elaborate displays of pseudo-science. They constantly plead poverty despite having massive subsidies, endowments and valuable land grants. They reject state authority in favor of their own. And they fragment their research into dozens, hundreds or even thousands of competing micro-departments, meaning that their research often doesn’t achieve what it set out to even though the resources are there to do so.

The dissolution didn’t start as a dissolution. It started as an apparently genuinely meant series of reforms, focused on better use of resources. Whilst Henry may have secretly always intended to go further from the start, Parliament did legislate to improve the monasteries before finally giving up and authorizing abolition. In particular, small monasteries were folded into bigger ones to ensure adequate staffing and eliminate egregious waste.

It feels like history might rhyme here. If it does then we’re at the start of the process: concern in Congress about academic corruption, anti-authority radicalism and squandering of public wealth leading to minor raids on their finances and some weak attempts to legislatively reform them. But such reforms hardly work and this can escalate rapidly to outright abolition. It doesn’t have to be traumatic: Henry VIII was able to dissolve the monasteries so quickly partly because he bribed the monks with “pensions”. Those not near retirement age were often able to get work in non-monastic religious institutions like local churches. Only a few presented real resistance and they were dealt with, swiftly and harshly. Within a few years of starting, it was all over.