If you are in the Black Books you’re out of favour or disgraced. Originally, a black book held the names of those to be punished. Henry VIII, during his fight against the Pope in the 16th century, put together a black book listing monasteries he regarded as promoting “manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living”. Using the Black Book as evidence, the King managed to persuade Parliament to dissolve the monasteries and assign their wealth to the Crown. Henry VIII liked burning at the stake and public disembowelment and so it paid not to be in his Black Book, and it was Henry's purges that give rise to the idiom we use. Later in the same century merchants used black books to list people who failed to pay for goods and of those who had been made bankrupt.