What Became of the Abbeys? The Afterlives and Settings of the Religious Houses Closed 1536 to 1540

Between 1536 and 1540 Henry VIII closed every religious house in England and Wales. I assemble 808 of them (763 in England, 45 in Wales) from the English Wikipedia county lists of monastic houses and Wikidata, and ask two questions. First, what stands on each site now? Classifying the lists' notes with fixed rules, 499 houses have a recorded fate. Of these, 24% have a house or hotel on the site, 22% a church still in use, 16% are ruins and 16% have nothing visible; 15 are cathedrals. The orders differ sharply: Benedictine sites most often kept a church, Cistercian sites most often became ruins, and friaries most often vanished. Second, did the Cistercians choose empty places, as is often said? Using the households recorded in Domesday Book (1086) within 5 km of each site, ranked against random points in the same county, the typical Cistercian monastery stood at the 50th percentile: as busy as an ordinary spot in its county, and quieter than the Benedictine monks (66th) or the friars (76th). With county fixed effects, Cistercian sites had about 27% fewer 1086 households nearby than Benedictine sites (95% interval 5% to 44%). They sat on higher, hillier ground. The white monks chose quieter places, not empty ones; the emptiest sites belonged to the Carthusians. Coverage, the classification rules and the limits of Domesday are discussed in full. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/after-the-abbeys/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/after-the-abbeys. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/after-the-abbeys/. Licence note: the record is released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 because the 1086 measures derive from the Hull Domesday Project data (CC BY-NC-SA). The house table (houses.csv), derived from Wikipedia and Wikidata, is also available under CC BY-SA 4.0, as set out in README.md and LICENSE.