How did the Reformation affect ordinary people?

Answer 1

For the most part the "reformation" was a total disaster for the ordinary folk. The reformation was a movement by princes, mainly, to free themselves from having to send tithes to Rome using the excuse of a few dissident priests who felt like they have good cause to throw over the Church that Jesus founded for their salvation. Thus, completely without their consent or knowledge they lost their priests, their Churches, their sacraments - everything thrown over for the vanity of a few. In England it was much worse:

King Henry VIII of England closed all the monasteries, confiscated or stole (use whichever word you think fits) all of their property and goods, and turned the monks and nuns out into the streets. He taxed his nation that "exceeded the aggregate amount of all the taxes upon record, which had been imposed by his predecessors". David Hume "for all his rejoicing over the dissolution, admits that the English of that age were 'like eastern slaves.' Lingard observes that when

parliament made the king the supreme head of the Church, it exalted his royal power 'above law and equity,' so that he now acted as if 'infallible in matters of policy and religion.' Parliament groveled before him: Whenever the speaker addressed the kind as 'most sacred majesty,' the House of Lords rose (Commons was already standing), and the whole parliament 'bowed profoundly to the demi-god on the throne.'" - from The Curse of Sacrilege" by Dr. Anne Barbeau Gardiner. King Henry distributed the spoils of sacrilege to his nobles in way of reward, yet nearly all of them lost their new found gains: lands and riches, within a generation.

More importantly, with the closing of the monasteries, the endowments and countless services provided by the abbey to the poor including free education and medical services simply vanished with the result that, for the first time since the Middle Ages, the gap between the classes became unbridgeable and the poor were completely left unattended to.

Oxford had 300 halls or private schools, besides the colleges, before the dissolution, after it, there were "not above eight remaining", due to the fact that they had all been supported by religious orders. Also the welfare system of the abbeys gone, the orphans, widows, the infirm, and the aged were reduced to pauperism: "Thousands upon thousands were forced to wander about in misery, after having been constantly fed, clad, and sheltered, as was their right. Every principal monastery had a hospital, with officers and attendants to take care of the sick and dying. Now these places were gone. . . original documents in the Public Record Office show[ed] 'that the plunder of the poor by those in power was a deliberate and premeditated act.'

J.A. Froude, who applauds the dissolution, nevertheless cites, in a footnote, the following manuscript complaint from that era: "'many merchant adventurers, cloth makers, goldsmiths, butchers, tanners, and other artificers and unreasonable covetous persons, which doth encroach daily many farms more than they occupy in tilth of corn; then, twelve, fourteen, or sixteen farms in one man's hands at once so that where there was in a town twenty or thirty dwelling-houses they be now decayed, ploughs and all the people clean gone.' Altogether, Henry executed two queens, one cardinal, twelve dukes, marquesses, earls and earl's sons, eighteen knights and barons, seventy-seven abbots, priors, monks, and priests, and "huge multitudes" of ordinary people. It is credibly reported by Holinshed and others (including David Hume), that 72,000 of the common people were hanged in his reign, mainly for theft and robbery. Cobbett comments that desperate hunger knows no law.

Dr. Gardiner concludes "Thus, England witnessed the end of free education, roads overrun with the sick and destitute, and the start of a new class division.

In addition, Cobbett points out that they didn't even spare the tomb of King Alfred the Great, who reigned from 871 to 899, or that of Saint Grimbald "they sold the very lead of the coffins'" In Canterbury, they attacked the tomb of St. Augustine, as well as the magnificent shrine of St. Thomas a Becket. Besides stealing all the"gold, silver, and jewels" from his shrine, his skull was burned and its ashes scattered.

Please see links below:

William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland

Serenus Cressy, Exomologesis

Charles Dodd, Church History of England

Thomas Fuller, Church History of Britain

Nicholas Harpsfield, Treatis of the Pretended Divorce

Peter Heylyn, Ecclesia Restaurata

Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Life and Reign of King Henry the Eighth

John Lingard, History of England

Henry Spelman, The History and Fate of Sacrilege

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars