Religion in the Middle Ages

 Christianity
   

A monk teaches a wealthy boy to read and write.

The Church made sure all were buried properly.

A priest and a nun tend to the sick.

 

 

 


 The Church was very important to everybody in the Middle Ages. It effected how people lived. Every village had at its centre a church. The worship of God was important to everyone. Living a good life and respecting those people above you in society was considered the best way to get to heaven. If you did not live a good life you would go to hell. It was thought that suffering in this life would help you get to heaven after your death.

But we should not get a wrong picture of what the Church did for lots of ordinary people. In the middle ages there was no such thing as social services, education department or old age pensions. The Church helped the poor, old and ill. The monasteries were the obvious place for people who were in need to go for help. Quite often if a person was in trouble with the lord, it was the local priest who would go and speak on his behalf and try to resolve the problem.

In a society that understood very little about the world they lived in, it was little wonder that explanations for such events were found in God. So the plague was a curse from God, famine was God's displeasure and a full harvest was god's doing.  

For people who were not happy to be good because of their love of God they would be frightened into such by the fear of hell. Hell was imagined as a place of fire and great tortures. Fire, was, to people in the middle ages the most frightening way to die. The pain associated with it was the worst thing people could think of and many images in drawings from the time show hell as a furnace.

Showing your devotion or love of God was a great way to get to heaven. So building great churches or cathedrals was a very clear way of doing this. We can still see thousands of these today. They really are very impressive and you don't have to go to a grand cathedral such as Canterbury to see the incredible efforts that were put in.