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The Black death, which started the previous year, must have been so sad. It also made a big change to how people thought
about religion. Until now, the church had been the centre of all life. You were baptized in the church, you went to church every Sunday, you were married in
the church and, when you died, the church had a service for you and you were buried in church grounds. People even used the Sunday service as a social event
and a time to exchange gossip.
There were also many monks and nuns who lived in England at
this time, maybe as many as 100,000. This is about 2% of the whole population. They lived in monasteries and spent all their days writing and praying. Within
the monasteries there would be people called lay brothers. These people weren’t proper monks and many of them were actually craftsmen. They would be fed by
the monks and would have a large room where they all could sleep and in return they would do work around the monasteries. The only major rule was that they
couldn’t bring their families with them so they just abandoned them.
The monasteries were the wealthiest of places in England. They produced far more food and goods than they needed so they sold it, making a large
profit. They had no salaries to pay, the lay brothers didn’t get paid, so almost everything was a profit. They also developed a complex trading system with
merchants in Europe. Fountains Abbey, shown in the picture, possibly had an income, in today's money, of over £1 million a year. That's a lot.
However, when the Black Death came, despite all their praying, the monks, the priests, the clergy, the nuns couldn’t stop it. They were just as
likely to die as the ordinary peasants and people began to wonder if a life spent praying and being good actually made any difference.
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