Everywhere in England, from Canterbury and Glastonbury in the South, by way of Tintern and Bury St Edmunds in the Midlands, to Fountains, Rievaulx and Whitby in the North, extending even to Lindisfarne, Melrose and Iona in the Far North, one comes upon the ruins of abbeys, priories, and other religious houses, all of them suppressed and largely destroyed by the wrath and greed of one man, King Henry VIII, with the able assistance of his vicar general Thomas Cromwell, in the brief period from 1536 to 1540. Shakespeare recalls them in his Sonnet 73 as "bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." He compares them to the trees in a forest during winter, when only the bare branches remain, while the birds have flown away. Yet even today the ruins remain as a reminder of what England was once, and through them the spirit of the monks still breathes in praise of God.