Medieval Church/Dante

2 Pages 473 Words

The Medieval Church played a far greater role in every person's life than it does today.
Medieval people believed that God, Heaven and Hell all existed and from the very earliest
of ages, they were taught that the only way they could get to Heaven was if the Roman
Catholic Church let them. Everybody would have been terrified of Hell and the people
would have been told of the sheer horrors awaiting for them in Hell in the weekly services
they attended.

The control the Church had over the people was total. Peasants worked for free on
Church land. This proved difficult for peasants as the time they spent working on Church
land, could have been better spent working on their own plots of land producing food for
their families.

They paid 10% of what they earned in a year to the Church (this tax was called tithes).
Tithes could be paid in either money or in goods produced by the peasant farmers. As
peasants had little money, they almost always had to pay in seeds, harvested grain, animals
etc. This usually caused a peasant a lot of hardship as seeds, for example, would be needed
to feed a family the following year. What the Church got in tithes was kept in huge tithe
barns; a lot of the stored grain would have been eaten by rats or poisoned by their urine.
A failure to pay tithes, so the peasants were told by the Church, would lead to their souls
going to Hell after they had died.

This is one reason why the Church was so wealthy. Henry VIII dissolved the Church to
get hold of the Catholic Church's money. People were too scared not to pay tithes despite
the difficulties it meant for them.

You also had to pay for baptisms (if you were not baptised you could not go to Heaven
when you died), marriages (there were no couples living together in Medieval times as the
Church taught that this equaled sin) and burials - you had to be buried on holy land if your
soul was to get to heaven. Whichever way you looked, ...