Where is the dividing line between Medieval and Modern to be drawn? CS Lewis places it at the Industrial Revolution around 1800, while TS Eliot places it some time in the seventeenth century when "a dissociation of sensibility" set in. Neither of them attends to the obvious break between Medieval and Modern at the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Till then England had been one with the union of Christian nations known as Christendom, but with Henry VIII's break with Rome England was left outside Europe and thereupon set out to found a British Empire over the rest of the world.