Religion

• Church and Churchmen


  • 8,000 parish churches
  • Erastian relationship
  • Festivals, religious ceremonies, guilds and confraternities (charity)
  • Maintained social order
  • Gave employment opportunities
  • 2 provincies (canterbury and york). They were ran by archbishops and 17 diocese which were overlooked by bishops
  • Diocese like Winchester thrived
  • Senior clergymen both worked for the church and for the state
  • They were elected off of their legal training
  • Abbots were head of the wealthy religious households
• Community and belief


  • Provided the outward structure for society's life
  • Transubstantiation
• The laymen refused to eat the bread
• Church values


  • Baptism, confirmation, marriage, penance, anointing the sick
  • Mass had two reasons: sacrifice and sacred ritual
  • Corpus Christi
  • Holy communion
• Church role


  • A lot of men funded the lavish building of churches
  • Benefactors (left their money to the parish when they died in order to give people a better religious experience. Foundation for chantries)
  • Confraternities (men who paid for others funerals, make charitable donation and make church fabric)
  • Guilds could be wealthy and a source of patronage
  • Events like ale-house festivals increased the revenue going to the church
  • Pilgrimages
• Pilgrimages


  • Thomas Becket Cantenbury
  • Virgin Mary
• 'Beating the bounds' of the Parish
• Religious experience was emphasised by the writing of mystics
• Religious orders


  • 1% of the male population were monks
  • Over 900 communities
  • Orders were Benedictines, Carthusians
  • Monasteries were in more remote, rural areas
  • Friars (Dominicans - Franciscans- Augstians)
  • Left their wealth to the church (bequeath property)
• Nunneries


  • A lot of nunneries were poor except Syon, near Ipswich
• Lollards


  • Founded by Wycliffe
  • Favoured english translation of the bible and it was sceptical about transubstantiation
  • Lollard uprising in 1414
  • Known as Heretics
• Anticlericlaism was widespread but there was rarely a burst of outburst