tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31069882.post3793670109025293847..comments2023-12-16T16:17:43.886+00:00Comments on Fr Ray Blake's Blog: Inflation and the bitterness of the ReformationFr Ray Blakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05584140126211527252noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31069882.post-65177508643436144612008-01-31T17:45:00.000+00:002008-01-31T17:45:00.000+00:00Auricularis, I am glad you won't let me get away w...Auricularis, <BR/>I am glad you won't let me get away with any specious arguement. I am merely suggesting that the closure of monasteries had an economic affect. <BR/>However the movement to the towns seems a direct result of the closing of the monasteries. What happened to all those Northern sheep farming lay brothers, what seems very apparent was that they were not assumed into the local peasant population. The same, which is less well documented, I presume happened to dispossessed female religious, choir nuns genereally returned home, the others tended not to do so.<BR/>Rock, if I remember, elesewhere actually quotes the price of honey from 1535-50 and its steep rise in price, it suggests that quite graphically not just the dissolution of the monasteries but the apiaries as well!<BR/>I think post Duffey there has been a rethink of men like Elton, though I am no expert in the matter.Fr Ray Blakehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05584140126211527252noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31069882.post-66644792122090874722008-01-31T16:06:00.000+00:002008-01-31T16:06:00.000+00:00Sorry, but I can’t allow you to get away with the ...Sorry, but I can’t allow you to get away with the suggestion that inflation and capitalism are nasty Protestant phenomena and that, but for Luther and Calvin, they would not have occurred. <BR/><BR/>The link between Protestantism and Capitalism was actually one of the many fatuous suggestions of Marx in Das Kapital, but it has also been put forward by both Max Weber (1904) and R H Tawney (1926). However, more recent historians (e.g. Sir Geoffrey Elton, one of the most eminent authorities on Tudor England) have argued that Marx, Weber and Tawney were all wrong. In Reformation Europe (1963), Elton argues that inflation and capitalism were the consequence of the population shift from urban to rural area, which gave rise to increased demand, and hence inflation and which allowed wages and rent to stay low because of the easy availability of labour. In other words, it was demographics that gave rise to capitalism, not religion. Of course, these theories are not mutually exclusive. As always, the truth lies somewhere in between. But I must admit that I get very irritated by Belloc’s romantic “1532 and all that” view of English Catholic History, which makes history a department of apologetics and only holds water by ignoring the facts.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com