... archives, mainly from York, to prove his theories. He wrote to highlight both the power of specific reformers and the overall power or protestantism to convert people from Catholicism. Dickens put forward the argument that England's conversion to Protestantism was a prompt and all but irreversible break from the Church's Roman Catholic past. But J.J Scarisbrick wrote a book, 'The Reformation and the English People' to argue that Catholicism was indeed still alive, strong and uncorrupt in the 15th Century. His views were that historians had exaggerrated the bad state that the Catholic Church was in. I, personally, agree that the Church was extremely corrupt in the early to mid 15th Century, however, not particularly weak. The Catholic Church was very rich and powerful; in England alone it received between £270,000 and £400,000 a year and owned a third of the land. The Pope ruled the Church and received money from most ...

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