IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 269

For centuries the monasteries had been among the most important institutions in England. By the 1530s there were some eight hundred religious houses, ranging from great abbeys such as Glastonbury to small priories with a handful of inmates. Their inhabitants were monks, canons, friars and nuns, but the houses also played a part in the everyday life of the country.

They gave hospitality to travellers, distributed alms, kept schools and cared for the sick, and they employed large numbers of servants and craftsmen. Above all they were rich: together they drew an annual income from land, rents and tithes that was later valued at more than £130,000, and their churches were filled with gold and silver plate.

The attack on them came from politics rather than from piety. When the pope refused to annul Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the king broke with Rome, and in 1534 an Act of Supremacy declared him head of the English church. In 1535 he appointed Thomas Cromwell, his chief minister, as vicar-general, with authority to visit religious houses. Henry had spent his inheritance on war and display, and monastic wealth was the most obvious source of funds in the kingdom. Cromwell also believed that the houses were centres of loyalty to the pope which no reformed church could tolerate.

Before acting, the government gathered information. In 1535 commissioners compiled the Valor Ecclesiasticus, a valuation of church wealth which put the monasteries' net annual income at about £136,000. In the same year Cromwell's visitors toured the houses, and their reports dwelt on sexual scandal, forged relics and superstition. Summarised in a document said to have been known as the Black Book, the findings were laid before Parliament. Many historians, however, treat the visitors' reports with caution: the inspectors were seeking evidence of corruption, and their letters were written by men with an interest in securing the property they described.

The first blow fell in 1536, when Parliament passed an act dissolving the smaller houses, those with an income below £200 a year; more than two hundred were closed. Their inmates were allowed to move to larger houses or to leave, and most received small pensions. At first the measure could be presented as reform rather than plunder — the wealth of the closed houses was said to be better used in education and poor relief — and some houses were, in fact, already declining. But the closing of communities that were functioning perfectly well alarmed many people.

That alarm turned into rebellion. In the autumn of 1536 a rising began in Lincolnshire and spread to Yorkshire, where it took the name of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Under a lawyer, Robert Aske, tens of thousands of men demanded the restoration of the monasteries and the removal of Cromwell and other royal advisers. The king appeared to negotiate: he offered pardons and promised to consider the grievances, and the rebels dispersed. Henry then repudiated his promises; the leaders were arrested, and Aske and many others were executed. The rebellion probably hastened the end, by showing the government that the surviving abbeys could become the focus of resistance.

In 1539 a second act gave legal cover to the surrender of the larger houses, which had already begun in the previous year. Abbots and priors were encouraged to hand over their property by deed, in return for pensions and the promise of positions, and most complied. A minority refused, and the heads of three houses, at Glastonbury, Reading and Colchester, were hanged, drawn and quartered. The abbot of Glastonbury, Richard Whiting, was executed on the Tor above his own abbey in November 1539. By the spring of 1540 every religious house had gone, and Cromwell himself was beheaded in July of that year.

A new department, the Court of Augmentations, was set up to administer the confiscated property. Its records show what was freed: land, of course, but also plate, jewels, vestments, bells and the lead that covered the roofs of the greater churches. The shrines of popular saints were stripped, most famously that of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, destroyed in 1538. Manuscripts went too. The antiquary John Leland protested that whole libraries were being dispersed, used to wrap goods or cleaned for their parchment, and his tours of the kingdom remain one of the best records of what was lost.

Most of the land was sold within a generation to the gentry and nobility, and the purchasers became a class with a strong interest in defending the new church. The Crown's initial gain was enormous, but the proceeds were swallowed by war: the money raised from the monasteries barely covered the cost of Henry's later campaigns in France. A few abbeys were given a new life. Several former monastic churches, including those at Gloucester, Peterborough, Bristol and Chester, became cathedrals of new dioceses, and other abbeys were kept on as parish churches.

Historians continue to argue about what the dissolution meant. For the reformers it was the necessary removal of an outdated institution; for later writers it was an act of vandalism that destroyed the intellectual and charitable life of whole regions. The evidence is mixed. Some houses were well run and greatly valued locally; others were small, poor and lax. What cannot be disputed is the scale of the transfer: the largest redistribution of land since the Norman Conquest, carried out in less than five years.

A Roman legionary was expected to march long distances carrying equipment, build roads and camps, and fight. That work required a great deal of energy, and the army took the business of feeding him seriously. The core of the diet was grain, mostly wheat, which was either baked into bread or cooked into a thick porridge. Alongside it soldiers ate bacon or salted pork, cheese, olive oil, pulses and vegetables, and they drank wine, often diluted or sour, or a cheap vinegar drink. Meat was eaten, but how often, and how large a part it played in the diet, is one of the subjects that archaeologists still argue about.

The grain ration, known as the frumentum, was the foundation of the whole system. Documents from Egypt and from frontier forts suggest that a soldier's allowance was measured in modii, a Roman unit of dry volume, and that it was substantial. Estimates of the daily allowance vary, but all agree that it was large by modern standards. Whether the soldier received this grain in kind or was paid in coin and expected to buy it is disputed. Pay records are fragmentary, and historians disagree about whether the army deducted the value of food and equipment from wages, leaving the soldier with very little cash. What is clear is that the ration, not the coin, was what kept an army alive.

In peacetime the army drew most of its food from the province in which it was stationed. Provincial communities were required to supply grain, animals and other produce, either as a tax in kind or as a compulsory purchase at a fixed price. Some was collected by officials, but much came through contractors, merchants who undertook to deliver a stated quantity of wheat, wine or oil to a depot by an agreed date. The quantities were enormous: a legion of five thousand men needed several tonnes of grain a day. Armies on campaign could not rely on such arrangements and simply took what they needed from the surrounding countryside, a practice that could ruin a region within weeks.

The cost of moving food was the great constraint on the system. Transport by sea was far cheaper than by land, and bulk cargoes of grain, oil and wine travelled in large sailing ships across the Mediterranean and up the great rivers. From the nearest navigable water, supplies went on by ox cart, pack mule or barge. The state owned some ships, but most cargoes were carried by private shipowners who received privileges in return. Diocletian's price edict of 301, which fixed maximum prices across the empire, shows how steeply the cost of a load rose once it left the water. This is why forts were so often built near rivers, and why the army's bread sometimes came from hundreds of miles away.

Keeping the grain dry and safe was as important as moving it. Fort granaries, or horrea, were built with raised stone or timber floors so that air could circulate beneath the grain, and with small openings in the walls for ventilation. Some were divided into bays so that separate consignments could be stored apart; some had buttresses to support the weight of a full store. Excavations at frontier forts have found charred grain, the remains of stores destroyed by fire, which shows both what was kept and how quickly a fort could lose its reserves. An army that ran out of grain had to disperse or starve.

Written evidence for supply is uneven but vivid. The writing tablets from Vindolanda, a fort near Hadrian's Wall, include lists of foodstuffs and requests for supplies sent between units, along with the private letters of officers' families. In the eastern desert of Egypt, broken pottery used as writing material — ostraca — records deliveries of wheat, barley, lentils and oil to workers and soldiers at remote quarry sites. Amphorae, the tall clay jars in which oil and wine were shipped, survive in enormous numbers, and the hill of Monte Testaccio in Rome is made almost entirely of them, a monument to the scale of the trade.

The animal bones found in forts have changed how historians think about the diet. Older accounts assumed that meat was a rare luxury for soldiers, but the bone assemblages from some British and German sites show large quantities of beef, pork and mutton. This may mean that meat was more common than was once believed, though bones survive far better than vegetables and are easier to count. A related debate concerns the effect of the army on the provinces. Some scholars see the legions as engines of economic growth, creating demand for local produce; others see them as a burden that consumed resources and left little behind.

By the later empire the system had changed. Diocletian and Constantine expanded the annona militaris, a regular levy in kind collected for the army and the civil service, and soldiers' rations came to be issued directly rather than bought. As the western provinces were lost, the armies that had been fed from them lost their supply base as well. The study of Roman food supply, therefore, is not marginal: it links taxation, transport, agriculture and politics, and explains much about where the frontiers were drawn.

At the entrance to almost any famous ancient site in Asia, Africa or Latin America, a visitor from abroad will meet a price list with two or three columns. Foreigners pay the most; citizens of the country pay a fraction of that, sometimes nothing at all. The practice is common at the pyramids of Egypt, at Angkor in Cambodia, at Machu Picchu and at the Taj Mahal, where the difference between the two rates is many times over. Defenders call this differential pricing; critics call it a passport tax. The question worth asking is not whether the sums are large, but whether the principle behind them is just.

The case for charging outsiders more begins with money. Great monuments are expensive to keep standing: stone erodes, foundations shift, and the crowds that make a site famous also wear it away. The citizens of the country, moreover, have usually paid for the site twice — once through the taxes that fund excavation, policing and repair, and once by living with the restrictions that protection brings. A foreign visitor, by contrast, arrives, enjoys the result and leaves, contributing nothing to the state that maintains it. A higher ticket is, on this view, simply a fair contribution.

The revenue also matters internationally. Most of the world's most visited ancient sites stand in countries where the need for schools and hospitals is urgent, and where the money that tourism generates does not always stay. Hotels and airlines are often foreign-owned, and many visitors buy their tours from companies based abroad. A charge at the gate is one of the few ways in which a poor country can capture some of the value of a monument that the world has come to see. Without it, the argument runs, the site is either neglected or handed over to commercial development.

The counter-argument is about fairness. A passport is not a measure of need. To charge one person ten times what another pays for the same view is to treat them differently for a reason they cannot change. No restaurant, railway or hotel would be permitted to do the same. The practice also depends on an intrusive check of identity at the entrance, which invites bureaucracy and the informal arrangement of the borrowed identity card. And the claim that the money protects the monument is only as strong as the accounting behind it. In several countries, critics have shown that a large share of ticket income has gone to the state treasury, to private concession-holders or to general spending, rather than to conservation.

Comparisons with museums are illuminating. Britain's national museums, including the British Museum, admit everyone free of charge, on the principle that collections held in trust should be open to all, and the cost is met from taxation. A French or Japanese visitor to London therefore pays nothing at the door, while a British visitor to Agra pays many times the Indian rate. But the contrast shows that the decision to charge foreigners more is a policy choice, not a law of nature.

The deeper weakness of nationality-based pricing is that it uses the wrong category. Tourists from rich countries are usually better off than the people among whom they travel, but not always: a student from Bolivia visiting Peru may have less money than a doctor from Lima. Meanwhile, a citizen who has emigrated, or the child of emigrants returning with a foreign passport, is charged as an outsider in the country of their family. Income, age and student status are all imperfect measures of ability to pay, but they are at least connected to it; the colour of a passport is connected only by habit.

Other mechanisms exist. Cities can levy a small tax on hotel nights, as several European cities do, spreading the burden across all visitors while leaving entry to monuments cheap or free. Sites can charge more in the peak season, when the pressure on them is greatest, and offer residents free days. Donations, though unreliable, avoid compulsion altogether. Each of these raises money without asking a guard to judge a visitor's nationality.

My own view is that differential pricing can be defended, but only on conditions that are rarely met. The gap should be moderate: two or three times the domestic rate is one thing, twenty times is another, and the effect of the largest multiples is to turn a shared inheritance into a luxury product. The two rates should be published plainly, so that no visitor feels cheated at the gate. Most important, the money should be ring-fenced for the site itself, with accounts open to public scrutiny. Where those conditions hold, charging those who travel furthest is not unjust.

It helps, finally, to be clear about what the ticket is for. A visitor is not buying a spectacle but contributing to the survival of something that cannot be replaced. Once that is understood, the argument becomes easier. It is reasonable to ask more of those who have travelled far and can afford the journey. The site should remain free or cheap for the people whose inheritance it is, and should never be closed to anyone altogether. Heritage is not a commodity, but neither is it free.