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92 THEMES INWORLDH ISTORY Everyone could not become a priest. Serfs were banned, as were the physically challenged. Women could not become priests. Men who became priests could not marry. Bishops were the religious nobility. Like lords who owned vast landed estates, the bishops also had the use of vast estates, and lived in grand palaces. The Church was entitled to a tenth share of whatever the peasants produced from their land over the course of the year, called a ‘tithe’.  Money also came in the form of endowments made by the rich for their own welfare and the welfare of their deceased relatives in the afterlife. Some of the important ceremonies conducted by the Church copied formal customs of the feudal elite. The act of kneeling while praying, with hands clasped and head bowed, was an exact replica of the way in which a knight conducted himself while taking vows of loyalty to his lord. Similarly, the use of the term ‘lord’ for God was another example of feudal culture that found its way into the practices of the Church. Thus, the religious and the lay worlds of feudalism shared many customs and symbols. ACTIVITY 2 Monks Discuss Apart from the Church, devout Christians had another kind of examples of organisation. Some deeply religious people chose to live isolated lives, in contrast to clerics who lived amongst people in towns and villages. expected patterns of They lived in religious communities called abbeys or monasteries, behaviour often in places very far from human habitation. Two of the more between people well-known monasteries were those established by St Benedict in of different Italy in 529 and of Cluny in Burgundy in 910. social levels, in a medieval manor, Monks took vows to remain in the abbey for the rest of their lives and to spend their time in prayer, study and manual labour, a palace and in a like farming. Unlike priesthood, this life was open to both men and place of worship. women – men became monks and women nuns. Except in a few cases, all abbeys were single-sex communities, that is, there were separate abbeys for men and women. Like priests, monks and nuns did not marry. From small communities of 10 or 20 men/women, monasteries The word grew to communities often of several hundred, with large buildings ‘monastery’ is and landed estates, with attached schools or colleges and hospitals. derived from They contributed to the development of the arts. Abbess Hildegard (see p.135) was a gifted musician, and did much to develop the the Greek word ‘monos’, practice of community singing of prayers in church. From the meaning someone thirteenth century, some groups of monks – called friars – chose not who lives alone. to be based in a monastery but to move from place to place, preaching to the people and living on charity. Reprint 2026-27