His brief was to close a considerable number of small monasteries and nunneries, one of the more dramatic proofs of Wolsey’s willingness to exploit his powers as papal legate over the Church in England in the name of what he could claim was reform. There had been dissolutions of such small religious houses before, particularly during the long fourteenth- and fifteenth-century wars with France, when the Crown confiscated priories with mother houses across the Channel. Just as Wolsey did now, the monarchy had used the monastic estates for new religious purposes: Henry VI’s colleges at King’s
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