The Canterbury Tales: a View of the Medieval Christian Church

In discussing Chaucer's collection of stories called The Canterbury

Tales, an interesting picture

or illustration of the Medieval Christian Church is presented. However,

while people demanded more

voice in the affairs of government, the church became corrupt -- this

corruption also led to a more

crooked society. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as just church

history; This is because the

church can never be studied in isolation, simply because it has always

related to the social, economic

and political context of the day. In history then, there is a two way

process where the church has an

influence on the rest of society and of course, society influences the

church. This is naturally because

it is the people from a society who make up the church....and those same

people became the

personalities that created these tales of a pilgrimage to Canterbury.

The Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England was to take place in a

relatively short period of time,

but this was not because of the success of the Augustinian effort. Indeed,

the early years of this

mission had an ambivalence which shows in the number of people who hedged

their bets by

practicing both Christian and Pagan rites at the same time, and in the

number of people who

promptly apostatized when a Christian king died. There is certainly no

evidence for a large-scale

conversion of the common people to Christianity at this time. Augustine was

not the most diplomatic

of men, and managed to antagonize many people of power and influence in

Britain, not least among

them the native British churchmen, who had never been particularly eager to

save the souls of the

Anglo-Saxons who had brought such bitter times to their people. In their

isolation, the British Church

had maintained older ways of celebrated the major festivals of Christianity,

and Augustine's effort to

compel them to conform to modern Roman usage only angered them. When

Augustine died (some

time between