Credit: Wikimedia Commons. While the Eastern Roman Empire lasted until the Ottoman conquests of the 15th century, by AD the Western Empire had succumbed to repeated invasions from the Goths, sparking the birth of the medieval era. As per its name, the medieval era spans the middle portion of the two millennia since Christ, neatly bisecting the intervening two thousand years and spanning approximately to AD.
The first period of the era was called the Early Middle Ages and lasted from approximately to AD. During this period agricultural technology and farming techniques improved, and increased food yields supported rapid population growth.
The early Middle Age kingdoms also lived in a very interconnected world and from this sprung many cultural, religious and economic developments. The rise and dominance of the Catholic Church was a hallmark of the medieval epoch, and shaped the next period of the era — the High Middle Ages — in dramatic fashion. Even Chaucerian English, the tongue that seemed so sweet and smooth to Skelton, appeared to his Elizabethan editors to be rather rough and awkward—or so they said.
In part, of course, this was Protestantism talking. Although the philological experiments of the later sixteenth century also played their part, Chaucer's alleged linguistic rudeness was seen primarily as a product of the doctrinal backwardness of his times. A good man in a catholic age, 9 he could achieve only so much before running up against the limitations of his culture, and thus had to wait patiently, like the pious pagans in Limbo, for the light of a later age to redeem his understandable blindness.
The Elizabethan commentators said the same about Skelton and Hawes' own language, then still only sixty years old. What divided Spenser, Sidney, Bale, and Camden from Skelton, Hawes, Chaucer, and Gower was, of course, the Reformation and the cultural revolution that it ushered in during the tumultuous middle third of the sixteenth century.
If by the end of the sixteenth century the central administration was larger, then this was because it was being given more business to do by the Crown, not because it was growing on its own initiative as a counterweight to the monarch in the running of the State.
And most of that increased business was itself a consequence of the Reformation. The Middle Ages, it is now accepted, were not killed of by administrative reforms or the rise of modern, more representative institutions of government. Over the course of a decade, Henry redrew the cultural landscape of the realm by dissolving the English monasteries, priories, abbeys, and nunneries, removing their highly visible denizens—monks, friars, and nuns in their distinctive habits—from the social fabric of towns and countryside alike.
Thus the Ten Articles, the set of religious protocols issued in , while appearing simply to clarify the reasons why it remained laudable to pray to saints, actually cut away the foundations of the culture which prompted folk to do so, declaring,. Thus the kinds of local identification with—and affection for—particular saints or sites of miraculous events that were at the heart of saintly cults and provided the motivation for pilgrimages were quietly but firmly removed, even as the practices themselves were seemingly authorized and commended.
Thus criticism of the notion of patron saints and local cults quickly gave way to criticism of praying to saints more generally. Rather than promote their cults, all preachers should,. Exhort as well their parishioners as other pilgrims, that they do rather apply themselves to the keeping of God's commandments and fulfilling of His works and charity, persuading them that they shall please God more by the true exercising of their bodily labour, travail or occupation, and providing for their families, than if they went about to the said pilgrimages, and that it shall profit more their soul's health if they do bestow that on the poor and needy which they would have bestowed upon the said images or relics.
A second set of Injunctions, issued in , ratcheted up the critical rhetoric a further notch, instructing the clergy to,. These instructions were reiterated in a proclamation of 31 July , one of the first issued on the authority of Edward VI, with the additional injunction that the clergy should now go further and,.
Take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines, covering of shrines, all tables, candlesticks, trundles or rolls of wax, pictures, paintings, and all other monuments and feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition, so that there remain no memory of the same in the walls, glasses, windows or elsewhere within the church or houses, and they shall exhort all their parishioners to do the like within their several houses.
And that the churchwardens, at the common charge of the parishioners, in every church shall provide a comely and honest pulpit to be set in a convenient place within the same, for the wise preaching of God's word. Thus in little over a decade, an official religious culture in which saints might be prayed to with royal approval was replaced by one in which all material traces—all memories—of such practices were ordered to be destroyed. The nation was being asked collectively to forget things that had sustained belief and practice for centuries: effectively to dismantle both the physical and the mental architecture of medieval religious culture and to believe that its existence had been an aberration, built on superstition and ignorance.
Again, the process of reform began with a qualification, but swiftly gave way to outright rejection. A similar process of softening up followed by expropriation brought about the dissolution of the chantries, those chapels founded to provide prayers and masses for individual donors or the members, living and dead, of collective bodies such as the trade and religious guilds and confraternities. In , an Act of Parliament required that a survey be made of all chantries, reporting to the Court of Augmentations, the new body established by the Crown to deal with the property seized for the king from the dissolution of the monasteries, with a view to appropriating the assets of any of them discovered to be guilty of financial malpractice or in the process of being wound up independently by their founders.
Cultural resources that had been directed towards the past, to help the souls of the dead and so to provide for the future of the souls of the living when they themselves came to die, were now redirected to look exclusively forward, toward the young and their education: retrospection would seemingly give way to forward thinking.
What this legislation also engineered, as Wallace and Simpson have argued, was a centralization and simplification of the channels available for religious expression p.
From this point onwards people who had previously provided for their spiritual welfare—and constituted their spiritual identities—through numerous collective associational forms which cut across the traditional boundaries of the parish and diocese, were reduced primarily to a single institutional body the parish which would form the focus of their spiritual identity, and a single diocesan disciplinary structure which would ensure their conformity.
From one perspective, of course, this was progress, a necessary purging of spiritual functions for which as the Articles and Injunctions asserted there was no demonstrable biblical warrant, and their replacement by activities of manifest cultural utility: a tidying up of the doctrinal furniture.
But the spiritual and cultural impact of the loss of the kind of numinous, mutually affective links between the living and the dead attested to not only in such grand literary works as Dante's Divine Comedy but on a more modest scale in texts such as Pearl, St Erkenwald , Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale or The Book of Margery Kempe remains almost impossible to calculate.
This unprecedented intrusion into the thoughts and beliefs of his subjects claimed numerous direct victims among those men and women who were unwilling to subscribe to the legitimacy of his demands—whether because they thought those demands were too radical, as they were for catholic martyrs such as Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher of Rochester, or because they thought they were not radical enough, as they seemed to evangelical martyrs such as Robert Barnes and Anne Askew.
One measure of Henry's tyranny can thus be found in the cartloads of victims p. By comparison, other expeditions into China or India could last two or three years.
By , the Crusades were at an end and the crusading soldiers abandoned the area and returned home. After conquering Jerusalem in , an army was established to keep control of the city. This lead to the establishment of numerous military orders. These were a kind of association, group representation or affiliation to a particular leader, queen or cause; though all orders served the Christian Catholic Church in Rome.
The Age of Chivalry ebbed after several Crusades, in which Jerusalem was won and lost, and its focus was shifted toward vain and selfish pursuits.
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