Casually browsing and reading about the dissolution of the abbeys following England's split with the Catholic Church. Can anyone shed light on the sentiment of the time, specifically on how these grand structures were reduced to the ruins they remain today.
Thank you.
Many abbeys were abandoned, or rather, cleared out. Some were purchased. Sometimes they were rebuilt into private dwellings (all the estates called Something Abbey). Sometimes they were just "delapidated" which means treated as a depot of pre-quarried stone and taken apart piecemeal.
Ruined cathedrals in England are almost always a result of WW2 bombing, in my informal review. They were used by the Church of England, sometimes pillaged by Puritans in the Civil War, but usually restored later.