If you know the order the monastery belonged to or the specific name of the foundation, I can speak in more than generalities.

Sure, the English peasants were Catholic. But monasteries were also temporal landholders. Indeed, in many situations they were large landholders, with many peasants renting and farming monastic lands. And the key to your question is the combination between this fact and what was kept in the church records, most likely records of the monastery's land holdings and rights, as well as debts owed. As Peter Classen argued in his massive book Kaiserreskript und Königsurkunde: diplomatische Studien zum Problem der Kontinuität zwischen Altertum und Mittelalter (Thessalonikē: Kentron Vyzantinōn Ereunōn, 1977), in a medieval political context, the diploma or document granting a right or a tract of land was the right or the tract of land. Thus, destroying the documents was a way of disputing the monastery's claim to the peasants' land and labor.

"Riots" are frequently ways by which the "mob" has asserted its rights, or laid claim against lordly unfairness. For some discussions of this phenomenon, see Stephen White's contribution in Dominique Barthélemy and Stephen D. White, “The ‘Feudal Revolution,’” Past & Present, no. 152 (1996): 196–223, and the classic study, E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present, no. 50 (1971): 76–136.