The BBC television series “Monastery Farm” concludes with the three main narrators strolling in the gathering twilight amid the ruins of a medieval English monastery. They recapitulate the monasteries’ role: to feed the hungry, care for the ill and aged, and provide for the common welfare as well as to preserve the faith.

Of course, such works required resources and popular loyalty, and the Church had accumulated both. In a chilling sentence, historian Ruth Goodman sums up Henry VIII’s motive in dissolving the monasteries (1536-41): “I want that.”

Did the king realize that he would henceforth have to provide what the Church had done? Or did he know not what he did? After a thousand years, the structure had come full circle, and new empires were beginning to emerge. The narrative of humanity remained and would have to take new forms.