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Like virtually everything else of value and consequence, whether physical or spiritual, destroyed over the course of history, we can thank our pathetic collective subservience to the political parasites of the day. Until and unless we find our collective spine, they will continue their rampage.

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Definitely a point of view!

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Negative much? This was a fun, informative read, thanks Ned.

These Monk's world was then, this is now. They had King Henry VIII. We have this generation of leaders. Some well meaning and some parasitic.

On the positive side;

We have dentistry (& a million other comforts) over the monks.

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Thanks!

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The protestant reformation in England was a truly devastating time, but in some perverse ways we were lucky. On the continent, a lot of important monastic institutions were thoroughly smashed by the Napoleonic wars. Ironically, the collegiate echo of monasteries (i.e. Oxbridge colleges) have survived in England where the collegiate universities of Europe have been de-collegiated by foreign powers (also Napoleon: Salamanca and Coimbra) or by internal strife (the University of Paris, multiple times). On a similar theme, a substantial slice of monastic knowledge/ book art was saved by Archbish Matthew Parker and deposited in Corpus Christi College Cambridge.

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