During the Tudor period the Reformation produced a gradual shift to Protestantism, with much of London passing from church to private ownership.[56] The traffic in woollen cloths shipped undyed and undressed from London to the nearby shores of the Low Countries, for use by well-to-do wearers chiefly in the interior of the continent.[clarification needed] But the tentacles of English maritime enterprise hardly extended beyond the seas of north-west Europe. The commercial route to Italy and the Mediterranean Sea normally lay through Antwerp and over...
