Another interesting question might be: what happened to all of the people who lived and worked in the monasteries at the time of the break?

The classic study that answers these questions is Eamon Duffy's The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, a microhistory based on a remarkable set of surviving records from the Devon parish of Morebath. These are sets of parochial accounts compiled over a period of 50 years by a single village priest, Sir Christopher Trychay. As Duffy explains, the Morebath records are highly unusual in that they were composed by Trychay (pronounced "Trickey") not as a dry series of numbers, but in the form of a commentary on recent events intended to be read aloud each year to the partly literate parishoners who were his churchwardens.

Trychay was a remarkable character, evidently, and he imbued the accounts with what Duffy calls "the personality, opinions, and prejudices of the most vivid country clergyman of the 16th century." What follows is based on Duffy's book and these records, and it comes with two caveats. First, Duffy himself (Professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge, so a a solid source) is a practising Catholic, and in this and his great companion work, the macrohistory The Stripping of the Altars, he is concerned to show that 16th century Catholicism - far from being the backward, superstitious, abuse-ridden religion depicted in most Protestant histories, a religion ripe for reformation whose supercession by Anglicanism was overdue and widely welcomed - was in fact a vibrant, progressive and much-loved central pillar of most village communities. This interpretation has been widely welcomed as a corrective to the pro-Protestant histories that preceded it, but it is not universally accepted by other historians of the period. Second, Trychay himself was such an extraordinary character that it would be most unwise suppose he was typical of all English parish priests in the Reformation period. He remained, in fact, a crypto-Catholic throughout the entire process, and while it is true that Morebath never disobeyed a single order from central government (whether Protestant or, briefly, Catholic again under Mary I), Duffy shows that the parish equipped several men to fight in the Western Rebellion of 1549, which had as its central aim the recall of the new Protestant Book of Common Prayer that was being imposed on all parishes, and its replacement with the old Catholic liturgy. This was far from typical behaviour for a parish priest in Reformation-era England.

Duffy's study makes clear that the Reformation was a relatively gradual process. There was no one shattering moment of change for many parishes. Technically, the break with Rome had been announced in a set of royal injunctions issued by Henry VIII in 1536, but in the diocese of Exeter, which Morebath belonged to, the bishop, Veysey, continued to grant (Catholic) indulgences as late as Christmas that year, which Duffy sarcastically observes showed "a certain lack of grip on the direction of official religious policy." The dismantling of the Catholic shrines and pilgrimage sites of Devon took most of 1537 to complete and in that same year the new Protestant church sent one of its most effective preachers, Dr Simon Heynes of the University of Cambridge, to bring word of the changes implemented by the king to the parishes of the region. Heynes reported back to London that the canons of Exeter cathedral had "utterly ignored the injunctions of 1536, of which there was no copy to be found in the cathedral." It's clear from his report that he detected actual opposition, not merely religious inertia, to the new religion in Devon.

What this meant for people such as Sir Christopher Trychay was that the process of reformation was not only slow; it seemed it might be possible to resist it, in whole or in part, for years after it was officially announced. His policy, and that of other Catholic priests, was thus to resist mutely, by failing to implement change; they dared not actively dissent, but in a remote parish such as Morebath, visited only intermittently by emissaries from Exeter, and never by men sent from London, a priest who was not actively rebellious would be left largely to his own devices.

Duffy traces Trychay's resistance through the years - he continued to promote the local cult of Saint Sidwell, for example, and to badger his parishioners for contributions towards the magnificent new set of black clerical vestments (most un-Protestant) that he had set his heart on; he resisted efforts to force the parish to remove religious images and icons from the church. Duffy makes it clear that overall Trychay's position was steadily weakened; he had to yield ground gradually, and it's clear that state "directives against images were so many arrows aimed at [his] heart". By the end of 1538 most of the offending images, and much of the cult of St Sidwell, had been set aside (but not, it seems, actually destroyed - much of the Catholic imagery present in Morebath survived and was rapidly restored during Mary I's reign, only to vanish again on her death.) In many important ways, however, Morebath remained essentially a Catholic parish, with only a light dusting of Protestantism, when Mary Tudor ascended the throne in 1553.

Much more could be said of Morebath and I highly recommend Duffy's book; it's vivid and a great example of a fine historical imagination at work. But the tl;dr here is: if you're Sir Christopher, you learn of the break with Rome within a few weeks of its occurrence, but you hope it's not as serious as it appears to be, and may be reversed or at least that it may not affect the day to day life of your parish. It takes a couple of years for its effects to be really felt, and, even then, you're able to moderate them by masterly inaction.

Source: Eamon Duffy. The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and rebellion in an English Village. Yale University Press, 2001, esp. pp.89-101

I am waiting for an answer and have refreshed this page several times in waiting and I have a follow up questions which might be answered when the first one is, but:

What was the reaction towards the priests themselves from Rome? Could a priest have left England and traveled to a Catholic area and remained a part of the Catholic Church or was this prohibited / blocked?

Secondary Followup Question: When Henry VIII expanded his break from Rome and Dissolved the Monestaries in 1536, what happened to all the Monks and Nuns?

Were the Monks forced to become Parish Priests, or were they freed from their vows?

How long did the process actually took? Weeks? The entire reign of Henry VIII?

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