The
English Reformation was a series of events in 16th-century England by which the
Church of England broke away from the authority of the Pope and the
Roman Catholic Church. These events were, in part, associated with the wider process of the European
Protestant Reformation, a religious and political movement that affected the practice of Christianity across all of Europe during this period. Many factors contributed to the process: the decline of
feudalism and the rise of nationalism, the rise of the
common law, the invention of the
printing press and increased circulation of the Bible, the transmission of new knowledge and ideas among scholars, the upper and middle classes and readers in general. However, the various phases of the English Reformation, which also covered
Wales and Ireland, were largely driven by changes in government policy, to which public opinion gradually accommodated itself.