The dissolution of the monasteries, occasionally referred to as the suppression of the monasteries, was the set of administrative and legal processes between 1536 and 1541, by which Henry VIII disbanded all Catholic monasteries, priories, convents, and friaries in England, Wales, and Ireland; seized their wealth; disposed of their assets; destroyed buildings and relics; dispersed or destroyed libraries; and provided for their former personnel and functions.

Though the policy was originally envisioned as a way to increase the regular income of the Crown, much former monastic property was sold off to fund Henry's military campaigns in the 1540s. Henry did this under the Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in 1534, which made him Supreme Head of the Church in England. He had broken from Rome's papal authority the previous year. The monasteries were dissolved by two Acts of Parliament, those being the First Suppression Act in 1535 and the Second Suppression Act in 1539.

It has been described as "the greatest dislocation of people, property and daily life since the Norman Conquest" in Britain. Historian George W. Bernard argues that:

The dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s was one of the most revolutionary events in English history. There were nearly 900 religious houses in England, around 260 for monks, 300 for regular canons, 142 nunneries and 183 friaries; some 12,000 people in total, 4,000 monks, 3,000 canons, 3,000 friars and 2,000 nuns. If the adult male population was 500,000, that meant that one adult man in fifty was in religious orders.

At the time of their suppression, only some English and Welsh religious houses could trace their origins to Anglo-Saxon or Celtic foundations before the Norman Conquest of 1066. The overwhelming majority of the 625 monastic communities dissolved by Henry VIII had developed in the wave of monastic enthusiasm that swept western Christendom in the 11th and 12th centuries. Few had been founded later than the end of the 13th century; the youngest was the Bridgettine nunnery of Syon Abbey, founded in 1415.

Typically, 11th and 12th-century founders endowed monastic houses with revenue from landed estates and tithes appropriated from parish churches under the founder's patronage. As a consequence, religious houses in the 16th century controlled appointment to about two-fifths of all parish benefices in England, disposed of about half of all ecclesiastical income, and owned around a quarter of the nation's landed wealth. An English medieval proverb said that if the abbot of Glastonbury married the abbess of Shaftesbury, their heir would have more land than the king of England.

200 more houses of friars in England and Wales constituted a second distinct wave of monastic zeal in the 13th century. Friaries, for the most part, were concentrated in urban areas. Unlike monasteries, friaries had no income-bearing endowments; the friars, as mendicants, were supported financially by donations from the faithful, while ideally being self-sufficient and raising extensive urban kitchen gardens.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries took place in the political context of other attacks on the ecclesiastical institutions of Western Catholicism. Many of these were related to the Reformation in Continental Europe. By the end of the 16th century, monasticism had almost entirely disappeared from those European states whose rulers had adopted Lutheran or Reformed confessions of faith (Ireland being the only major exception). They continued in states that remained Catholic, and new community orders such as the Jesuits and Capuchins emerged alongside the older orders.