How Much Power Did the Catholic Church Have in the Middle Ages?

life in the medieval period looked like lots of different things to lots of different people your place in society could dictate everything from what food you ate where you could go how educated you were and even how long you were likely to live for across this series we'll discover what life was like for those that worked those that earned those that learned and those that played in medieval England receive documentaries and asks with top historians watch on your smart TV or mobile device by downloading the history hit app when we talk about Medieval Europe it's almost impossible to talk about one of the most important subsections of medieval Society those who pray and by that I mean the clergy foreign there's a lot of different ways to be a clergy member in general it means that you've dedicated your life to religion and the church more specifically we have to remember that in medieval Europe when we're talking about Christianity we're actually talking about Catholicism and in many ways the story of medieval Europe is the story about the Catholic Church coming to Primacy probably the most common form of clergy member is just Parish priests Parish priests are responsible for giving sermons to their community in the vernacular language to explain what it is they just heard the other thing that Parish priests do is give sacraments sacraments are particularly important because partaking in them is by definition what makes one a Christian these are things like baptism reconciliation or confession marriage Eucharist and last rights which is what is performed right before somebody dies Parish priests are responsible therefore for all these incredibly important Christian things and Parish priests are very common as a result you need to make sure that there are enough Parish priests that they can actually administer to everyone in their area so in the countryside in peasant communities you'll have one church that will see to oh maybe 50 people or so and they'll be dotted around in the countryside as a whole we are here standing on top of Castle headingham in Essex this is a great example of how parishes work in the countryside as you can see here immediately there's one Parish Church in the towns surrounding hattingham Castle Beyond there you can see another on the horizon if you live three miles away every Sunday you're not going to want to have to walk or take a horse all the way over to another Parish it can be a really long way on a Sunday morning this means that it takes out all of the travel and you have a dedicated priest in your community who knows what's going on with you so parishes work differently in different places in cities there will be many more parishes in a much smaller space that's because there are simply a larger population to see to the guild members in London are going to want to make sure they're getting top-notch pastoral care and so there may be one church every few blocks to make sure that every single person in that area is getting everything that they need [Music] foreign we are here on top of the initial early medieval Tower of St Michael's in the north gate what you can see from up here is how dense the city Oxford actually is obviously it's larger now than it would have been in the medieval period but still this is an outstandingly large place this is because all of the colleges and all the various clergy members who have set up shop here attract more and more people to cater to them and cater to the community as a whole while you can also see up here are the various Steeples that dot the skyline these are all individual Parish churches so they're seeing to the needs of the general Community within Oxford itself they want to have Eucharist given to them they want to have their children baptized they have to be buried somewhere and it's the parish churches that see to that John thank you so much for meeting me and bringing us here to St Michael's at the north gate it's a fantastic church it's the earliest Church in Oxford and I'd be glad to show you what it's like inside foreign I think that it's probably one of the most unique churches in England certainly but I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about its functions as a Parish Church in the medieval period this is one of those towns characteristic of high medieval England where you have a very great number of churches crowded into a very small space in doomsday Oxford that's at the time of Doomsday Book in 1086 there were five named churches in Oxford and uh Michaels was one of them by 1200 there are 20 churches nothing like Norwich which has 61 churches and London which has 200 but given that Oxford is much smaller than any of those places 20 within a small area is quite a lot the parishes are all small and very often have fairly low incomes Saint Michael's had a parish which ran inside the north side of the wall and didn't take in a great deal of commercial property and of course it's commercial property from which the church derives a large part of their income one of the problems about medieval churches is knowing how they were founded and that's something we're very ignorant about but there are various suggestions of which the most likely probably in a town like Oxford is that they were founded by groups of neighbors we can't prove that but it seems to be the case in Continental towns that that's often the case an alternative explanation is they may have been founded by local Lords Lords in the countryside very often had Town property up Underwood found Town churches probably with the object amongst other things perhaps primarily of making a profit above the regular Parish clergy there's a Next Level the Bishops or the princes of the church Bishops are kind of like regional managers they oversee all of the parish priests in their vicinity and they do so specifically within a cathedral the thing about a cathedral is that it doesn't just mean a large church it's a name for the administration that happens underneath a bishop there has to be somewhere for the parish priests to go to learn it's also a place where the bishop might be overseeing Local Schools where anyone local can go and receive a tutelage in Latin I want to say anyone I mean any boys women are usually excluded from this but every Cathedral is also a functioning School Cathedrals are also often sites of worship they'll have very specific relics of saints that people will go and pray to and it might be somewhere that people go on pilgrimage for example the Canterbury Tales one of the most widespread pieces of English medieval literature is all about a group of pilgrims going from London down to Canterbury to pray at the tomb of Thomas a Beckett a very very important medieval Saint we know a lot about what happens from the 13th century onwards because it's in the 13th century that we have a great deal of Episcopal legislation legislation drafted by Bishops Bishops are very keen on seeing that local priests do their job in relation to the congregation and what that involves for example is seeing that Parish priests teach the basic Christian doctrines see that everybody knows the Creed the passenoster the Our Father the Ten Commandments in the vernacular which is interesting how far all this was carried through of course we can't always be sure about but it's in that period rather than in the 12th century that pastoral care really takes off at a local level 12th century I think much less so over and above Bishops there are then what we call archbishops as the name indicates they are more important Bishops and the most important Archbishop in England is the Archbishop of Canterbury so they are the managers to the regional managers that are Bishops and oftentimes they'll be in even more fancy Cathedrals above archbishops are Cardinals and Cardinals are people who work directly in the Roman curia underneath the Pope in order to become a cardinal the pope specifically has to select you to become one Cardinals have a number of specific functions the most important of which is that they are responsible for electing the pope when the last Pope dies oftentimes Cardinals are also intermediaries with people back home a local Cardinal for example who starts off as the Archbishop of Canterbury might be someone who's particularly well suited for translating messages from Rome back to England later and then of course at the top of all of these is the Pope the pope is God's representative on Earth and he is elected by Cardinals to oversee the church as a whole a good way of thinking about the pope is that he's sort of the king of the church he is the person with whom all of the Power eventually stops and he has ultimate say over most religious matters the higher echelons of the church such as Bishops and Cardinals and especially popes don't come from common families while it's theoretically possible for example for someone from a peasant family to become a priest and not uncommon it's extraordinarily unlikely that they are going to rise so far through the echelons of the church that they will one day be Bishop instead we tend to see that Noble or royal families feed to the higher parts of the church it's not uncommon if you're a younger son within a noble family that you will be sent to the Cathedral School to be trained with the understanding that it's possible that you may become someone like a bishop in this way powerful noble families are able to exercise religious power as well as worldly power in their own households outside of the hierarchy are what we call non-regular clergy members the largest group of non-regular clergy members are monks and nuns we've come inside Denny Abbey because I want to talk about the original settlers who are clergy members here the benedictines we have all these Clues and hints about what was here before the initial huge Abbey building one of these Clues is right here in the wall this pillar here and it's from the original Benedictine Church that was founded here in the 12th century the Benedictine monks are really interesting because they're the ones who sort of came up with the initial idea of living in a community outside of the regular World monks refer to this as Aura it's labore or prayer and work and the idea is if you take yourself out of normal society completely you can focus entirely on the Lord monks therefore will join a monastery and they will pray multiple times a day and they will also involve themselves in work that they see as serving God a lot of the time for the Medieval World this specifically means copying out books because remember this is a world without a printing press so they're out there making sure that books stay in circulation and can get to people in order to praise God later in the medieval period though a new type of Monk arises these are called the mendicant orders they start with Saint Francis of Assisi in the 13th century and instead of deciding to leave the world to work behind walls for the glory of God they decide that they are going to go out into the world to administer directly towards the people mendicit technically means beggar and the idea here is that the mendicant orders have devoted themselves to the concept of apostolic poverty they want to live like Jesus and the apostles did and they want to be out in society asking for an exchange of goods for their preaching so they will say to you I will give you a sermon on any number of subjects and in return Please make sure that I eat for the night so in the Medieval World when mendicans came along this was almost like a new form of entertainment people wanted to hear new and exciting religious views that didn't come from the parish priests that they've grown up under and known their entire lives these are people with different experiences who had new things to say about something that was very important in the Medieval World which is religion Parish priests often see this as the mendicants intercepting ties that would rightfully go to the local church as a result of this sometimes Parish priests will attempt to block mendicans from preaching in their own town just to make sure that the money is going to the right place they also might object to what the mendicans have to say if you're a very well to do Parish priest you might not want someone coming in who's preaching Apostolic poverty in the idea that everyone in the clergy should be living in poverty a lot of people were flocking to the prize churches to hear sermons who were of course Very positively minded great preachers would preach in the vernacular the Parish church had somehow to rival the Friars and to provide the sort of services which the Friars could provide you've got to remember of course in the Middle Ages that the service is entirely in Latin um and the priest is facing the Altar for most of the time so facing away from the congregation so how much direct contact there was between priest and congregation is difficult to say just behind me here we have some really great examples of the varying kinds of arches you can get across medieval architecture you'll notice here on the right there's the really big rounded Arch we know that dates to the 12th century and that's what we call a Roman escarch it's called Romanesque specifically because they're trying to make it look Roman that's why you have the big pillars on either side and the roundedness is supposed to bring to mind and conjure images of Rome and the greatness of the Empire medieval people loved Rome and they like connecting themselves to that idea on this side of the Abbey we have some really new and exciting architecture and this is all established when the poor Claires take over the area in the 14th century this land is given to a local Countess who uses it to establish one of her favorite orders the poor Claire's as part of this the poor Claires build some wonderful new Gothic architecture general rule of thumb if it has a peak in the arch that means it's Gothic another great rule of thumb with arches like this is you can kind of tell when they were built based on how many fingers you can fit in the arch more or less this Arch tells you that it's 14th century because it more or less follows the peak of four fingers on a hand so here at St Barts in London we can see an example of a 15th century Arch you can fit all five fingers of your hand inside of it but it's still got a tiny little bit of a Gothic peek to it [Music] another great little detail here are these floor tiles which are still extant in the Abbey and this is a nice reminder because a lot of the time when we see medieval Abbeys they're in states of disrepair and that can make us think that the people within them were walking around on dirt floors because well we're walking around on dirt floors when we visit them but that's not always the case specifically within churches we would often see really great ornate terracotta tiles and this is a reminder of exactly what was here before the last kind of non-regular clergy who you might not expect are actually Scholars and students anyone who works at a university is necessarily a member of clergy and crucially so were all University students just like now University students in the medieval period were notoriously rowdy they would get in trouble with local communities for things like running out on their bar tabs not respecting the locals flirting too much with the girls and being a member of the clergy meant that when they did so they wouldn't be seen in local courts instead the clergy would look after other members of the clergy so if you don't pay your bar tab and you get in trouble with a local Innkeeper it's much better for you to go in front of a clergy Court who will give you a slap on the wrist and send you back to class than it is for you to go in front of the city constabulary where you'll be fined and possibly thrown in jail the fact that students are clergy members is actually an origin of an interesting phrase that we still use now to talk about relationships between universities and the cities that they're in and this is Town gown relations town of course means anybody within the town but gown refers to these students who are members of the clergy who are wearing clergy gowns with all these different types of clergy it's really common for them to also be overlapping in different ways this is especially true of places like University towns here in England of course the two University towns are Oxford and Cambridge both of which were established in the medieval period this is because universities themselves were established during the medieval period more specifically universities come into being in the high medieval period And in the 11th century the way that many universities work is that the individual colleges within them will be connected to a particular order of monks this is true for example of Canterbury College in Oxford which we want to talk about particularly today Canterbury College started out specifically connected to Benedictine monasteries so benedictines from all over England would send their brightest pupils to Canterbury to study at the University of Oxford one such Benedictine was a man called Thomas Wycliffe who will become very very important within Oxford generally and Europe as a whole we're here on the Oxford streets to enjoy a beautiful spring day but also to have a look specifically at Merton College here because it's here that Wycliffe starts his career in 1356 he writes a thesis that's called the last age of the church and it's particularly interesting for a 14th century document because it talks about what he perceives to be the cause of the Black Death now there are a lot of sermons and plenty of pamphlets around in the 14th century blaming specifically the average person for the plague these preachers say the average person is too lustful the average person is too lazy and gluttonous and for these reasons God has visited the plague upon the Earth this isn't how Wycliffe sees it why Cliff sees the plague as a sort of divine retribution and justice for sinful clergy members as far as he's concerned these people are meant to be looking after their flocks living a life of apostolic poverty and in general devoting themselves to God one of wycliffe's overarching concerns with religion in general was what he saw as the undue wealth of the church writ large but he also had specific objections to parishes themselves he thought that parishes were too interested in what he called pomp in celebration he thought they were spending too much money on festivals and they were bringing in too much money from their parishioners of course what Wycliffe says is very catchy and it definitely speaks to people who feel quite under the thumb if you're tithing a large percentage of your money every year to a church you might not want to see your priests living particularly wealthfully but it wasn't just Parish churches that Wycliffe had a fundamental problem with overall most of his complaints were reserved for the mendican orders or the Friars in 1380 he writes a pamphlet called objections to the Friars in it Wycliffe refers to the mendican orders as the pests of society the enemies of religion and the patrons and promoters of every crime what he's interested in here is what he sees as the undue wealth of the mendicant orders he considers that the preaching orders were founded on a consideration of apostolic poverty that means they should be living in poverty by the 14th century however they'd amassed great fortunes and so Wycliffe felt that they were living contrary to the very reasons that they were founded but why were they found it well in parishes like this we're not exactly sure whether or not the parishioners would have been getting access to the sermons that they wanted to what Friars offer is a sort of traveling sermon service if you want to hear a religious speech and medieval people did that was very interesting for them you could get one while you were walking to Market what why cliff and the lollards do is they train their own preachers so they're doing the same thing that The Mending kids would be doing out in society they're giving sermons to the lay people of Oxford and preaching about the things that they think are important this is in one way to counter the Friars who they think shouldn't be bringing in as much money but it's also to put out their vision of religion to the world it's actually a form of mass communication in the medieval period and a really great way to argue your corner so there can be huge clashes theologically or about money within the church itself there are also often clashes between the clergy and the laity in general a lot of these also have to do with money as we've already seen when we talked about peasants clergy are often landlords primarily it's the local Lord who founds Parish churches and this is part of a wholesale reorganization of the countryside which happens in the ninth but more probably more particularly in the 10th century when Villages are formed peasants are brought in to particular centers and part of that process of nucleation is the foundation of a Parish church for the new community partly for religious reasons but as in towns also as a piece of property the Lord would expect to take a share in the offering oftentimes lady resent the clergy because of this they feel that the clergy should devote themselves to God and should not be accumulating so much wealth on Earth some members of the laity especially poorer lady also resent the clergy because of their direct links to people like the nobility if a noble family wants to make sure that there's someone praying for their souls after death they can set up a community of monks and nuns on some of their own land that creates a new landlord where there wasn't one before and a new opportunity for resentment between peasants and the clergy if you are wondering why an organization called the poor Claires is living in a building like this which is you know obviously pretty fancy you wouldn't be the only one the answer in the specific instance of Denny Abbey is that the Countess who endows the Abbey also lived here the Countess really likes the poor Claires that's part of it the other part is that she like many other members of the nobility wanted to retire here and be a part of the religious order a countess is going to want to live in some style so she made sure that the Abbey here as well stylish enough it's things like this that really get under the skin of individuals like John Wycliffe the poor Claires are a member of the medical orders they're specifically the women's arm of The Franciscan movement so they're supposed to be living in Apostolic poverty technically the hint is in the poor part so for him taking money from a countess setting yourself up as a fancy enough place for a countess to live is the exact opposite of what religious orders should be doing St Michaels is an excellent example of the competing interests of various religious institutions in the medieval period it's overseen by the bishop in Lincoln but it's connected to the college here in Oxford and it oversees and administers to the various lay people within Oxford itself this means its job is to see to the pastoral care of an average person in Oxford takes their money and kicks it up to the college itself there can also be disputes between the clergy and local nobility about who owns what land where who exactly owns Which peasants when you yourself are not working the land that you depend on for your money it very much matters who is doing the work in order to get food to your table the clergy are capable of creating entire cities like Oxford which initially exists specifically to serve the religious people there when you have a lot of students someone needs to cook for them someone needs to clean for them people move to the local area to service the clergy and then you have a city the complicated relationship with the clergy and the laity in the medieval period can also lead to Serious scrapes with major powers like the king the fact that the clergy controls so much land and has so much money here is actually a huge part of their downfall in the early modern period when Henry VIII is on the throne sure Henry VIII wants to be able to get divorced without anyone telling him what to do but he doesn't mind taking all of the land that the monasteries own as well one of the ways that you know we're talking about the medieval period is that the clergy are still balancing on this knife's Edge very successfully that can be major religious players and major landowners without it being called into question you can tell that something is modern when people like the nobility who will hear more about in The Next Episode are able to counter the church and sometimes take some of that control back thanks for watching this video on the history YouTube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated History Channel historyhit.tv you're gonna love it

Channel: History Hit

Views: 238,348

Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, medieval church history, medieval church documentary, medieval church architecture, medieval church choir, roman catholic church history, church medieval europe, medieval monks, medieval pope, pope medieval, pope vs monarchy, pope vs king middle ages, king vs pope, eleanor janega history hit, eleanor janega going medieval, eleanor janega documentary, eleanor janega medieval, eleanor janega the middle ages, catholic church history

Id: ZsfmKOkw5mU

Length: 26min 21sec (1581 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023