The age was, like our own, one of swift change in which the landmarks, social, intellectual, and economic, which had been familiar for centuries, suddenly shifted or vanished. … Something of the same change took place with the religious orders in the sixty years with which we are now to be concerned. In the past historians have often assumed that while all else remained steady, the monks fell rapidly into moral and pecuniary bankruptcy. It would be a truer view to see the world changing around them while they, for their part, were unable either to accompany that change or to adapt themselves to the demands and necessities of a different world. In that world both they and their neighbours round them were without any anchor save their ancestral and often now vestigial sense of spiritual realities, and a new sentiment of loyalty and obedience to the sovereign. They were to find every new influence a hostile one, in a grasping and acquisitive society which had as its characteristic quality a keen appreciation of the main chance.1 … Monks and clergy alike were children of their age and country; it was this that made the Dissolution, and indeed many of the religious changes of the reign, not only possible but relatively easy of accomplishment.2