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 morevoice in the affairs of government, the church became corrupt -- thiscorruption also led to a morecrooked society. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as just churchhistory; This is because thechurch can never be studied in isolation, simply because it has alwaysrelated to the social, economicand political context of the day. In history then, there is a two wayprocess where the church has aninfluence on the rest of society and of course, society influences thechurch. This is naturally becauseit is the people from a society who make up the church....and those samepeople became thepersonalities that created these tales of a pilgrimmage to Canterbury.The Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England was to take place in arelatively short period of time,but this was not because of the success of the Augustinian effort. Indeed,the early years of thismission had an ambivalence which shows in the number of people who hedgedtheir bets bypracticing both Christian and Pagan rites at the same time, and in thenumber of people whopromptly apostatized when a Christian king died. There is certainly noevidence for a large-scaleconversion of the common people to Christianity at this time. Augustine wasnot the most diplomaticof men, and managed to antagonize many people of power and influence inBritain, not least amongthem the native British churchmen, who had never been particularly eager tosave the souls of theAnglo-Saxons who had brought such bitter times to their people. In theirisolation, the British Churchhad maintained older ways of celebrated the major festivals of Christianity,and Augustine's effort tocompel them to conform to modern Roman usage only angered them. WhenAugustine died (sometime between 604 and 609 AD), then, Christianity had only a precarious...
