There is a folk history of the Reformation in England which goes roughly as follows: in the years immediately before the break with Rome, the Catholic Church here was moribund and corrupt, its practices and beliefs mired in superstitious and anti-Biblical accretions.
It was struggling to maintain the allegiance of a growing and increasingly literate middle class, and slow to respond to new artistic, intellectual and cultural developments that had emerged from the Renaissance and the invention of the printing press.
