A churchman living in east London despairs of his flock. “There are many people who do not believe that God exists, nor do they think that the human soul lives on after the death of the body,” he laments. “They consider that the universe has always been as it is now and is ruled by chance rather than providence.”
It’s a complaint many would make about their congregation – but what might be surprising is that Peter of Cornwall, prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, wrote this in 1200.
In the Western mind, history is often seen as linear, one of the strands of which is that there is a continuous trend from ignorance and religiosity towards enlightenment and atheism. It’s assumed that people in the Middle Ages were very Christian. Yet what many of the chroniclers suggest is that men at the time were far less religious than those of the later, early modern period.
