A Good Death Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage, Death

CROWS CAW

On the 3rd of November, 1459,

Sir John Fastolf lay close to death at Caister Castle.

Fastolf was an ambitious and successful man,

a soldier who'd made a vast fortune

fighting in England's wars with France.

Fastolf had served kings and princes.

In the process he'd become fabulously wealthy

and built this castle here in Norfolk.

So now, facing his last illness at the age of nearly 80,

he could pay for the best care money could buy.

For Fastolf this didn't mean medicine for his body;

it meant medicine for his soul.

He would die in a room full of priests not doctors,

helped by prayers not prescriptions.

Because death, for the people of the Middle Ages, wasn't the end,

but the doorway to everlasting life.

They say the past is another country.

They do things differently there,

but just how differently did the Medieval world approach

life's great rites of passage, birth, marriage and death.

HE CRIES

The way we handle these fundamental moments of transition in our lives

reveals a lot about how we think and what we believe in.

For the people of the Middle Ages this life mattered

but the next one mattered more.

Heaven and hell were real places,

and the teachings of the Catholic Church

shaped thoughts and beliefs across the whole of Western Europe.

But by the end of the Middle Ages

the Church would find itself in the grip of momentous change,

and the rituals of birth, marriage and death

would never be quite the same again.

Most of the time, we try not to think about death.

But the people of the Middle Ages didn't have that luxury.

Death was always close at hand, for young and old, rich and poor,

even before the horrors of the Black Death, which killed millions

in a few short months.

John Fastolf had managed to live to a ripe old age,

but he was still concerned with the Church's message

that what would happen after his death - an eternity spent in heaven or hell -

was more important than his life's fleeting achievements.

So, in a world where death shaped life,

how did the people of the Middle Ages

deal with the last great rite of passage?

One of the reasons why we know about John Fastolf's death

is because he was a friend of the Paston family.

The Pastons had estates near Fastolf's in north-eastern Norfolk,

as well as a fine townhouse in Norwich.

The Pastons were wealthy and they lived in one of the richest

and most cosmopolitan parts of the country.

Norwich was late-Medieval England's second city.

But they weren't aristocrats.

They were as ordinary, or extraordinary,

as any other well-to-do family.

But what makes them unique, and why we know so much about them,

is that we still have their letters.

It's a remarkable stroke of luck that we have them

because almost no private letters survive from this period.

Most of the Paston letters have ended up here in the British Library

and they form the earliest great collection of private correspondence in the English language.

More than a thousand documents survive,

spanning three generations of the family.

We don't know what the Pastons looked like,

and most of the houses they lived in are long gone;

but, thanks to their letters, we can still hear their voices.

I've been studying these letters for 25 years,

but, because they've been in print for a long time,

I very rarely get to see the real thing.

So this is thrilling, because the Pastons feel like my Medieval family,

and that's because these letters give us glimpses of

a human experience that speaks across the centuries.

The letters capture the everyday lives of the Pastons themselves

and the people they knew, including their wealthy neighbour John Fastolf,

who lived here at Caister Castle.

Fastolf had no children of his own;

and when he died, John Paston claimed to be his heir.

Instead, Fastolf's will, and the fate of his fortune,

became the subject of a lengthy dispute;

and the legal papers from the case

ended up in the archives of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Among them are statements from those who were with Fastolf in his final days.

And they give us an intimate portrait of one Medieval death.

This is one of the witness statements in the case

from a local gentleman who came to visit Fastolf,

and it takes us right to his bedside.

He found him "lying in his bed,

right weak and full feeble in his spirits

as a man ready to die."

And this extraordinary document is

the statement of one of Fastolf's chaplains.

It tells us who was there in Fastolf's last hours.

His servants were waiting on his every need.

Harry Wynstall, his barber, came into his chamber and shaved him;

and John Bernard, his physician looked in from time to time

to check on his condition."

But the most constant presence in Fastolf's bedchamber were his priests.

This chaplain, Thomas Howes, "said mass in the said chamber, and John Davy, another chaplain of his,

said a book of devotions for Fastolf, who was so short in his breath

and so overcome with the pain of his sickness that a man might not hear him speak

but he laid his ear to his mouth."

In Fastolf's last moments, he needed his priests around him

because death in the Middle Ages wasn't so much a physical end

to be managed by doctors as a transition

from the mortal life of the body to the eternal life of the soul.

CHORAL MUSIC

Fastolf's understanding of death, like that of all his contemporaries,

was shaped by the Catholic Church.

And the Church taught that, although the physical body died,

the soul was eternal.

And one day God would judge which souls would spend eternity in heaven

and which would spend it in hell.

Few people in the Middle Ages could read;

so wall paintings like this one, in St Thomas's Church in Salisbury,

explained the Church's teaching in pictures rather than words.

Doomsday was the day of judgment, the day at the end of the time when Christ would return in glory

to judge the quick and the dead,

and the people of the Middle Ages couldn't miss the message

of paintings like this on the walls of their parish churches.

On the right hand of Christ the shrouded figures of the saved

rise from their graves and angels help them towards the joys of heaven.

On his left, the souls of the damned are dragged into the mouth of hell.

A jaunty devil presides over this scene of torment,

another hurls the sinners into the fire.

And as they sink into the flames, a painted inscription reminds us that in hell

"Nulla est redemptio", there is no redemption.

The disconcerting problem with this binary system

was that only the saintly, in the literal sense of the word,

people who were actually saints,

could be confident of having sinned so little

that they would definitely be going to heaven.

But did that really mean that a merciful God

would damn most ordinary sinners to hell?

It wasn't easy to tell.

The Bible didn't give a clear explanation of what happened to a soul

between the moment of death and the Last Judgement

at the end of the world.

There was an idea that some sin could perhaps be purged after death;

and in the 12th century,

when the Church went through a powerful movement of reform,

this became a key theological question.

Gradually an answer emerged.

When a person died,

their soul would go to an interim place called purgatory.

Here they would have the chance to atone for the sins

they'd committed in life; and that meant that, by Judgment Day,

their way into heaven would be open.

In 1254, Pope Innocent IV adopted purgatory

as an official doctrine of the Church.

So what could people expect to experience in purgatory?

Carl Watkins is a historian of Medieval religion

who has studied ideas about this middle space between heaven and hell.

Purgatory was characterised by darkness and by fire and by terror.

Because it's the place where the great majority of people

expected to pass, at death, a place where they would be

purged of sins that they'd not expiated in life.

A place where their souls would, if you will, be burnished

before they could make a final passage on into heaven.

How long would someone expect to spend there?

Well, the period of punishment would be proportional

to the sins they'd committed during their lives.

And there's also a sense in which time in purgatory is elastic,

in that, because the pains are so intense and terrible,

the fire is so tormenting,

that even a moment in purgatory felt like an epoch of Earthly time.

And would the punishment fit the sin?

There's a real sense in purgatory that punishments fit the crime.

So if you'd been violent, perhaps you'd been a murderer in the other world,

maybe you might expect to be hewn on a butcher's block.

If you had been avaricious, if you'd been money-minded,

you might discover, in purgatory, molten gold was poured down your throat.

If you were a liar or a back-biter

you might be nailed down by your tongue.

So there's a really strong sense here in which punishments

are conceived as fitting in rather a direct way to the kinds of sins people have committed during life.

This image of purgatory might seem terrifying and gruesome.

In fact, little different from hell.

But there was a fundamental difference.

Purgatory was like hell but it was only temporary;

a staging-post on a sinner's route to heaven.

How long that took, though, depended on how much you had sinned in life.

The first way to make your time in purgatory as short as possible was to be good.

It was the same for everyone, commoner or king,

so a king like Henry VII, who had brutally executed his rivals

and secured the allegiance of his nobles through financial blackmail,

had a lot to worry about.

Henry VII had been a ruthless and paranoid king who'd ruled

through fear and protected his power by any means necessary.

And at the end of his life, he, like all his subjects,

was preoccupied with one question.

If death was a doorway, where was it a doorway to?

For a sinner like Henry there was a chance, even at this late stage,

of helping himself in the afterlife.

This drawing records the scene at his deathbed.

Three doctors, here holding flasks, attended their royal patient.

And members of Henry's privy chamber gathered around the king.

But the attendants to whom Henry looked now were his spiritual advisers,

including John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester,

who later described Henry's last hours.

"For the space of 27 hours together," Fisher said,

"he lay continually abiding the sharp assaults of death.

Henry fixed his gaze on the crucifix that was held in front of him,

lifting up his head and his hands towards it,

and with great devotion kissing it and beating oft his breast,

so that all those that gathered round his bed scarcely might contain themselves from tears and weeping."

Fisher was emphasising that Henry was dying a "good death",

going gladly to meet his maker,

full of contrition for the sins he'd committed.

And when he'd confessed, he would receive forgiveness, absolution,

as part of the Church's sacraments of the Last Rites.

The Last Rites are still used today,

and, in essence, they've changed little since the Middle Ages.

Reverend Colin Simpson is still called upon

to perform the last rites for some of his parishioners.

What does giving the last rites actually involve, what do you do?

It really depends on the stage of death that the individual's in.

But if they're still...

If they're still conscience,

if you like, then we can have a conversation about their life

and the things that they've done that they regret,

and then, with a prayer and laying on of hands,

I can pray for wholeness,

and finally anoint,

anointing, as in the kings of old - and as in the Queen.

When she was crowned she was anointed with oil.

It's a blessing, it's a seal, if you like,

of that love, of that forgiveness.

And if the individual is capable, um,

then they can receive communion.

What has the experience of giving the last rites been like for you?

For me it's been a great privilege.

To be invited into somebody's home

at a point where a life, a loved life, is ending,

and to offer what comfort I can

and to help that process.

Cos dying is not easy.

And I've seen it have a calming effect on the one who's dying,

but also because the family can share the communion,

that's a bridge, if you like,

and a link between the living and dead.

The link between the living and the dead went beyond the last rites.

Because once someone had died there was a funeral to organise.

Once again the Church had an elaborate set of rituals that the funeral should follow,

from what was known as the Placebo - the evensong on the night before the funeral -

to the Requiem Mass which was sung just before the burial.

The richer you were, the more magnificent the ritual you could pay for.

But while a lavish funeral might serve as a demonstration of earthly power and status,

its central focus was the life to come.

Henry VII had made sure he had a good death,

and he was equally determined to have the best possible send off.

This extraordinary object is all that remains of

the elaborate trappings of Henry's funeral.

It's the head of a life-sized effigy of the King,

and the plaster face is taken from a death mask,

so when we look at this face

we're looking at the face of Henry VII himself.

As it is now it's an austere and haunting portrait of the man,

but at the funeral it played a very different role.

The effigy was dressed in sumptuous robes and held an orb and sceptre

in its hands, and on this head was the glittering crown of England.

The effigy lay on cloth of gold cushions on top of the coffin

to symbolise the majesty of an anointed sovereign,

which endured even on his journey to the grave.

And it was an impressive journey.

Once the coffin arrived at Westminster Abbey, masses were sung;

and then - in a scene of startling drama - a nobleman

dressed in the dead king's armour rode a warhorse

through the Abbey's Great West Door and up to the high altar.

There, he was stripped of the armour and weapons,

and these symbols of Henry's earthly power were offered up to God.

The Pastons of Norfolk had only a fraction of the resources of

the Tudors who ruled England;

but a death in the family was just as momentous for them.

And they were equally keen to do what they could

to help the soul of the departed

as it started its journey through purgatory.

The stress of John Paston's involvement in the dispute

over Fastolf's will meant the family had to arrange a funeral

much sooner than they'd expected.

By the autumn of 1465, John's mother Agnes was worrying about him.

"By my counsel," she wrote,

"dispose yourself as much as you may to have less to do in the world."

"Your father said, 'In little business lies much rest.'

This world is but a thoroughfare and full of woe;

and when we depart there from,

right naught we bear with us but our good deeds and ill.

And there knows no man how soon God will call him,

and therefore it is good for every creature to be ready."

The letter makes haunting reading -

because Agnes was right to be worried.

Seven months later, at the age of just 44,

John Paston died, suddenly, in London.

And his widow Margaret poured all her shock,

and her fear for the family's future,

into the most splendid funeral she could devise.

A priest and 12 poor men, bearing torches,

walked beside the coffin for six days as it was carried in procession

more than a hundred miles from London

to the Pastons' parish of St Peter Hungate, here in Norwich.

In the church, 38 priests stood ready to pray over the corpse,

while 20 miles further north, at Bromholm Priory,

just outside Paston village, preparations were underway

for the burial and funeral feast.

At the priory more than 90 servants were paid

to wait on the Pastons' guests,

and so many animals were slaughtered for the feast

that it took two men three days to flay them.

When John was finally laid to rest,

the church was so ablaze with torches

that afterwards the stench of tallow was overwhelming.

A note was made that two panes of glass had to be removed

from a window to let out the reek.

Margaret kept precise notes of the funeral expenses,

and the final total came to almost £250,

a staggering sum, more than a year's income from the Paston estates.

Margaret had spent a fortune, not just to show that the Pastons

were a force to be reckoned with in this life,

but because she believed that she was giving her dead husband

the best start she could in purgatory.

For the Pastons, like all Medieval families,

purgatory was a real place of physical torment.

And the ways in which the living tried to equip the dead to face it

could be surprisingly practical.

Archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist has explored evidence of

this practical help from burial excavations,

including one remarkable skeleton, now housed, among many others,

in the Museum of London.

It's an extraordinary feeling, surrounded by all these boxes of human remains, isn't it?

-17,000 people.

-17,000?

And here's the one person we're coming to visit.

The most basic burial for someone who'd died a good Christian death

would be to be prepared for your burial,

and that means the washing of the body, stripping away of clothes,

and placing them within a white shroud.

And inside the shroud, the body would be naked?

That's the theory, but there's increasing archaeological evidence

for a clothed burial.

And we have things like medical items being placed with the dead as well.

And this is a mature man, so a man in his mid-forties or older,

but we have the remarkable survival, in this case,

that the man was actually buried wearing a hernia truss.

-That's a hernia truss?

-Yes.

So around his pelvis he's got a textile item,

and you can see these buckles that are used

to hold the textile onto his body,

so there would have been something else around the back of him,

like a sort of linen strap or something holding it.

Obviously, in the Middle Ages, a hernia wouldn't have been operated on.

They've found a way of trying to make him more comfortable.

-To hold it in place.

-To hold it in place.

-Physically.

He has died, literally, holding it in place.

-It's so moving...

-It is...

-to see his hands,

you can almost see him in life, holding on.

Now the question is, why wouldn't this have been removed when he died?

Medieval people believed that when you were resurrected

at Judgement Day, you were resurrected perfect,

at the age of 33, no matter what age you died.

Whether you were an infant or you were 110,

you would be resurrected in perfect condition at the age of 33.

33 the perfect age because?

The age at which Christ died on the cross.

So, the assumption is not that he needs this for resurrection,

he needs this for the journey through purgatory.

What we find with these medical items is what they particularly leave on the body

are the ones that are to do with mobility, and allowing the body to walk.

They thought it was a real physical place, and although they knew the body was in the grave rotting,

they thought their loved ones were physically experiencing purgatory

and, literally, walking.

And so if they died with an impairment,

which would make mobility difficult,

they were leaving objects on the corpse to assist them.

The idea the living could help the dead through purgatory

didn't stop at equipping them with physical support for the suffering they would endure,

because the Church taught that, that suffering could be shortened

if the living offered spiritual help to the departed soul.

Praying for the dead, or hearing masses for them,

could actually reduce time spent in purgatory.

So when people in the Middle Ages wrote a will,

they were concerned, above all,

to make sure they'd be remembered with prayers and masses.

We think of wills as a way for the dead to bequeath property,

things they can no longer use,

to those they leave behind. But for the people of the Middle Ages,

wills were also a way for the dead to keep a hold on the living.

To make sure they couldn't simply be forgotten.

And that was certainly true for Margaret Paston.

In 1482, Margaret was 60 years old.

Since the death of her husband, John, 16 years earlier,

she'd been a wealthy widow, the matriarch of the Paston family.

Now her thoughts were turning to her own approaching end.

Margaret was a very practical person,

and hers was a practical will,

dividing up the contents of her house,

beds, bed linen, kitchen equipment and her best clothes,

between her children and her servants.

But the main purpose of Margaret's will was to direct the ways

in which she'd be remembered.

She left detailed instructions about her funeral,

and the candles that were to burn around her grave

here in the church at Mautby.

And she described the elaborate marble stone, engraved with the arms

of her Mautby ancestors, that was to mark her tomb.

But this wasn't just about leaving a memorial of her wealth and status.

The inscription round the stone

would also remind all those who saw it

to pray for her by asking God to have mercy on her soul.

The Church taught that the best way to shorten the departed's time

in purgatory was to leave money for Masses.

So Margaret left money to pay a priest to sing Mass in Mautby church

every day for seven years.

HE SAYS MASS

A Mass was the greatest help a soul could have

because it was the holiest and most sacred act of worship,

a repetition of Christ's sacrifice on Earth,

because when the priest consecrated the bread and wine,

it became the body and blood of Christ.

BELL RINGS

It wasn't clear by how much a Mass would shorten the pains of purgatory,

but what was clear was that the heaping up of Masses

would do a soul a great deal of good.

So it's no surprise that the richer you were

the more Masses you would pay for,

and if you were a king you would leave as many as possible.

Just as Henry VII had had a magnificent and elaborate funeral,

so his will, now kept in the National Archives,

is no less excessive.

In fact, it's the longest of any English king.

In life, Henry had a reputation as a miser,

but he was clearly prepared to spend in death.

Henry begins with a long paragraph giving his soul not only into "the most merciful hands of Him

that redeemed and made it,

but also to the Virgin and all the holy company of Heaven,

that is to say angels, archangels,

patriarchs, prophets, apostles,

evangelists, martyrs,

confessors and virgins."

He leaves money for the chapel he's building in Westminster Abbey,

which is to contain a tomb for himself and "our dearest late wife the Queen,

and upon the same, one image of our figure, and another of hers,

either of them of copper and gilt."

Crucially, in this chapel, priests will say Masses

for the good of his soul.

These Masses were so crucial for Henry's prospects in purgatory

that they were to go on forever.

Henry was leaving what was known as a chantry,

funding for a priest, or a college of priests, to say Masses -

in this case, until the end of time.

But even perpetual Masses weren't enough for Henry.

As extra insurance he left detailed instructions

for a huge number of special Masses to be sung as soon as possible

after his death, giving his soul a turbo-charged start

to its journey through purgatory.

Here you can see, in Roman numerals, "10,000 Masses,

to be said forthwith and immediately after our decease."

And Henry knows exactly what he wants.

"1,500 of those Masses are to be said in the honour of the Trinity;

2,500 in the honour of the five wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ;

2,500 in honour of the five joys of our Lady;

450 in the honour of the nine orders of angels;

150 in honour of the patriarchs;

600 in honour of the 12 apostles;

and 2,300, which maketh up the whole number of the said 10,000 masses,

in the honour of All Saints."

The willingness of those who could afford it to pay for spiritual help

for their souls meant that money poured into Church coffers.

Endowments for chantries didn't just pay for priests to sing Masses,

but also for the buildings in which they were sung.

As Henry's will specified,

his chantry was housed here in his exquisite chapel

in Westminster Abbey.

It's a particularly regal and expensive example,

but all over the country the building of new chantries

shaped the later Medieval Church physically

as well as spiritually.

CHORAL MUSIC

But churches weren't the only buildings that could help a rich sinner through purgatory.

Another good way of helping your soul in the next life

was by helping others in this one,

through the foundation of charitable institutions,

and the results could be remarkably long-lasting.

This is Norwich Great Hospital,

which was founded in 1249 by Bishop Walter Suffield.

In the Middle Ages, hospitals like this one not only received the sick

but fed the poor, and its primary aim was to give the needy

a Christian community in which they could die well.

This was an impressive act of Christian charity.

But, as historian Carole Rawcliffe explains,

there was a great deal in it for Bishop Suffield too.

What are these documents?

They both relate to Walter Suffield, Bishop of Norwich, and to this hospital.

Because founding a hospital is one of the very best things you could do

to ensure you have a quick trip through purgatory

and your soul is saved. And this is his will of 1256,

which has got his seal, and the seals of the witnesses, on it.

It's a spectacular document.

So this is a very personal document. It's all about looking after Bishop Walter's soul.

Immensely so. This is his passport to paradise, if you like.

So there's money for Masses, there's money for poor relief,

there's money to his servants.

He's particularly investing in institutional charity,

and particularly in this hospital here.

So it's a very cohesive system. Bishop Walter's not just doing

a good work by looking after the poor,

but the poor are also looking after him.

Yes, it's mutually supportive. You could argue that the poor are doing more than the rich,

because although the rich are very successful and happy in this life,

it's the life to come that really matters. People are very aware of

the Biblical parable of Dives and Lazarus, which is a very powerful story.

And it's about a rich man who has everything,

and this poor beggar, who's sick, comes to his door

and asks for charity - and he sends him packing.

And this poor, diseased man dies in a ditch.

But he goes to heaven, whereas Dives goes to hell.

And Lazarus begs God to release him,

but God refuses, because Dives has been so cruel to the poor.

And people took this to heart, especially the rich.

And it's interesting to note that this hospital, where we are now,

is actually on the Bishop's doorstep. Because his palace is just across the road.

So what he's saying is, I'm not Dives.

I'm taking care of the sick and the poor.

They matter to me, because they will take care of him in the next life.

And their prayers at the Masses that are said here

will ensure his place in heaven.

What if you didn't have enough money to set up a foundation on this lavish scale?

Were there another ways you could make sure your soul would be remembered?

You could do it very easily, as we can see from this remarkable,

and now unique, document,

which is a register of all the people who gave money, or land,

or perhaps a pair of sheets,

to a leper hospital outside King's Lynn, the Gaywood Hospital,

dedicated to St Mary Magdalene.

And most of these people are very ordinary. Weavers, carpenters,

cloth workers. People who would probably only be able to afford a few pence.

And it is a sort of snapshot of a list of people who supported

the hospital and whose names are written down in the book of life, as it were,

so they will be remembered whenever Mass is celebrated.

Each entry starts with pro anima, meaning "for the soul of",

and then the names come and come. It feels so personal, doesn't it, these little snapshots?

-Piers Woodhouse I can see here, and his wife Anastasia.

-Yes.

And it would be put on the altar during the Mass

so that these people are next to the body and blood of Christ, it was believed.

And the names would probably be said once a year.

The book would be read out from start to finish,

to actually say the name as an act of commemoration.

So death was absolutely central to the experience of living.

Unfortunately yes, because life is transitory.

Someone compared it to a sparrow flying through a baronial hall,

it's just over like that,

and it's the next life that you must concentrate on.

Because, all round you, the people you know, the members of your family, are dying young.

So you must make provision for what comes next.

Preparation was all very well,

but what if death found you suddenly and unexpectedly?

To the people of the Middle Ages, an unprepared death was a terrifying prospect.

The Church urged its congregations to be constantly ready for death,

by following Church teaching and leading a good Christian life.

But heavenly help was also at hand, thanks to St Christopher,

more commonly known as the patron saint of travellers,

but in the Middle Ages it was believed that no one who looked at an image of St Christopher

would die a "bad" death that day.

And that's why more paintings of St Christopher survive on the walls

of Medieval churches in England than of any other saint.

This is the painting of St Christopher at Paston Church.

Now only delicate traces are left.

But when the Paston family came to worship here,

it was newly painted, in vivid colours.

It shows the giant figure of St Christopher crossing a river.

Balanced in his palm is the Christ child,

carrying the weight of the world in his left hand,

and raising his right to bless the saint.

This unmissable image was painted opposite the door

so that people would see it when they came in,

and so ward off an unexpected death - for that day at least.

Death wasn't only in people's thoughts;

it was also part of the fabric of their daily lives.

Every Sunday they walked through graveyards into churches filled with tombs.

And some churches even housed skeletons within their walls.

The Bone Crypt at Holy Trinity Church

in Rothwell, Northamptonshire,

contains the remains of 1,500 people.

No one knows exactly why they are here,

but the fact they were gathered into the church tells us how powerful a sense of community

there was between the living and the dead.

This physical presence of the dead among the living

was a graphic reminder of what lay ahead for all mortal bodies,

and the need to pray for the souls of the departed.

But what happened when bodies piled up so quickly and so high

that the dead threatened to overwhelm the living?

That's exactly what happened when England was visited by

an apocalyptic plague that we know as the Black Death,

though contemporaries called it simply the "Pestilence",

or the "Great Mortality".

The plague reached the south coast of England in the summer of 1348.

By the end of the following year, almost half of the country's people,

perhaps three million men, women and children, were dead.

It was a cataclysm on a scale so vast

that it seemed the world might be ending.

And its horror was intensified by the fact that a good death,

in these brutal circumstances, was no longer possible.

With millions dying so suddenly, the comforts of a good death were gone.

Families were ripped apart,

and the priests who should have ministered to the dying were dying themselves.

Special measures were needed.

The Bishop of Bath and Wells gave instructions to his flock that...

"If they are on the point of death

and cannot secure the services of a priest,

then they should make confession to each other,

or, if no man is present, then even to a woman."

There was little comfort in that idea;

and less in the likelihood that sin was the cause of all this suffering.

In the autumn of 1348, William Edendon,

the bishop whose tomb lies here in Winchester,

had no doubt of the diagnosis.

"It is to be feared that the most likely explanation

is that human sensuality,

the fire which blazed up as a result of Adam's sin,

has now plumbed greater depths of evil,

producing a multitude of sins which have provoked the divine anger,

by a just judgment, to this revenge."

Bishop Edendon urged his congregation

to pray for their souls and confess their sins.

Every Friday, he said, the clergy and people of Winchester

should process around the marketplace with bowed heads

and bare feet, reverently saying the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary.

And he granted all those who did so an indulgence of 40 days,

that is, the time they would eventually spend in purgatory

would be 40 days shorter.

Norwich, the home of the Paston family,

was one of the worst-hit cities in England.

Probably two-thirds of its population died.

And now, for already devastated families,

the plague became a recurrent fact of life.

Epidemics continued to sweep the country, at unpredictable intervals,

for more than a century to come.

The plague of 1479 was particularly virulent.

Yet again, Norwich was badly hit,

and among the families struck by tragedy were the Pastons.

Margaret Paston's son Walter had just graduated from Oxford

and his mother had high hopes for his future;

but he died at home, here in Norwich, that August.

The family were in church to hear Mass for his soul

when news came that his grandmother Agnes had died.

And these losses were weighing on the mind of Margaret's eldest son,

John, when he wrote to her from London that autumn.

"I was in such fear of the sickness," he said.

A couple of weeks later he, too, was dead.

No wonder the subject of death looms so large

not only in the Paston letters but also in the art and literature

of the later Middle Ages.

Cadaver tombs like this one, with a sculpted corpse

instead of a fine effigy, began to insist on the reality of death

rather than the splendour of life.

And the message was spelled out in the story of the Three Living and the Three Dead,

which was once told with urgent drama in this now faded painting

at Paston church.

It was a popular tale

told in paintings and manuscripts across Europe.

Three young kings are out enjoying the hunt

when they're confronted by a dreadful apparition,

three skeletons, who tell them, "As you are, we once were;

as we are, so shall you be."

It's a ghastly vision of their own future -

and a reminder that power and riches meant nothing in the face of death.

It's not surprising that death haunted the Medieval imagination,

and that anxiety about it manifested itself in unusual ways.

In about 1400, a monk from Byland Abbey in Yorkshire

recorded some local ghost stories.

These featured poor wandering souls

who had not even made it to purgatory -

perhaps because they'd been excommunicated,

or died too soon to be baptised a Christian.

They are chilling stories - but strangely offer some comfort too.

Why were ghost stories written down here at Byland?

It wasn't unusual in the late to Middle Ages for monks to write down ghost stories.

Ghost stories were a good way of teaching people about

the pains of purgatory and the suffering of the dead,

and the need to remember the dead and pray for them.

But what makes the Byland ghost stories rather unusual

is that the monk seems to have been collecting stories

that were being told by local people,

which have all sorts of rough edges and strange folkloric elements

that don't really fit with orthodox theology.

It seems that a number of the ghosts are actually struggling

to get into purgatory in the first place.

One of the ghosts is unbaptised,

and so he's caught in a kind of limbo condition.

The story begins with a man who is travelling on a pilgrimage

to the shrine of St James in Compostela,

and at night he takes his turn keeping watch against night fears,

so the story says. And while he's keeping watch he sees a procession approaching.

And it's a procession not of the living but a procession of the dead.

And these souls of the dead are riding on animals.

Animals, which it turns out, are their mortuaries.

Beasts that were given to the Church as a kind of death duty when they expired.

But at the end of this procession, a child is crawling.

And the man conjures the child to tell him what it is,

and the child says you ought not to conjure me because I am your son

who died unbaptised.

And so, at this point, the man is able to, if not baptise the child,

at least name the child.

And this clearly is enough to transform its state,

because, at this point, the child jumps up, rejoins the procession, but walking erect.

How strictly did these stories follow Church teaching,

or is there a sense of beliefs that go beyond that?

The Byland stories are treading an interesting line.

They are full of terror and fear,

they are full of stories about terrible torment of some of the dead who have committed grievous sins.

But balancing that, there is a softening of

some of the edges of hard theology,

allowing some of the dead that have committed sins, or died outside the faith in some sense,

to have a second chance, almost,

in death, to be readmitted to the other world

and to make progress there.

Stories like this showed how much souls

could still be helped after death,

but what the dead couldn't do was help themselves.

Their fate now depended on the living they had left behind.

But what if you had an uncaring family, or no family or friends;

or if you were so poor that you left this life without the means to pay for the Masses and prayers

that would help you in the next?

Belief in purgatory was so universal

that the Church had a special feast day to make sure

that no one was left to face it totally alone.

All Souls' Day fell on the 2nd of November,

and it was a chance to do exactly what it said.

To remember all the souls in purgatory,

in God's prison, explained a 14th century priest named John Myrk,

who have great need to be helped.

The greatest help they could have would be the Masses said on All Souls' Day.

But other customs developed too.

In old time, Myrk explained,

good men and women would this day buy bread

and deal it, give it to the poor, hoping with each loaf

to get a soul out of purgatory,

and during the night before, church bells were rung in the darkness

to comfort the souls in their suffering

that they were not forgotten.

BELL TOLLS

We tend to assume that we have to choose between helping others

and helping ourselves, between altruism and self-interest,

but the huge strength of Medieval beliefs about the dead

was that no one had to make that choice.

The rich had money to spend for the good of their souls

but their wealth in this life meant they had to work harder

to reach heaven in the next,

so they needed the prayers of the poor who were already, as Jesus had said,

closer to God.

So the rich could help the poor with money,

and the poor could help the rich with prayers.

And by doing these works of charity, everyone, rich and poor,

would also be helping themselves.

In theory, then, this was a system of death

that seemed to work well for everyone.

But it gradually became clear that it might also be open to abuse.

By the end of the Middle Ages, the Church found itself accused of corruption,

of feeding on the fear of its congregations to enrich itself.

Money flowed into the Church's coffers

as people paid not just for ever more

complex combinations of Masses, but for "indulgences";

pardons offered by the Church to shorten time spent in Purgatory

by anything from 40 days to 40,000 years.

Across Europe, reformers known as Protestants began to demand change.

But in England, reformation came about in a different way.

Like his subjects, King Henry VIII was a Catholic

who believed in heaven, hell, and purgatory.

He didn't set out to change the way his people thought about death;

but, through two other rites of passage, a new marriage

and the birth of a new heir, that's what he did.

Henry wanted to divorce his queen, Katherine of Aragon,

in order to marry Anne Boleyn.

But when the Pope refused to grant Henry an annulment of his marriage,

he rejected the Pope, and, with him, the Church of Rome.

For those who saw the Church as corrupt, this was an opportunity.

Protestant reformers wanted to sweep away

far more than simply the Pope.

One of their chief targets was the doctrine of purgatory.

They wanted to know why purgatory seemed to be a way

for the Church to collect money from the faithful.

Money for Masses and indulgences, to buy a way out of a place that wasn't even mentioned in scripture.

So, piece by piece, they set about dismantling the apparatus

of what they now called a "vain imagination".

The first crushing change to the physical apparatus of the Church

came in 1536 with the dissolution of the monasteries,

the great power-houses of prayer for the dead.

In parish churches everywhere, including here in Paston,

images of the Last Judgment, of the Three Living and the Three Dead,

and of the comforting figure of St Christopher,

disappeared under layers of whitewash.

But, keen though Henry was to appropriate the vast wealth of the Church in England,

he wasn't trying to uproot the most fundamental doctrines of the faith.

So when Henry died in 1547, he died a Catholic,

and, like so many of his subjects,

he left money for Masses to help his soul in purgatory.

But the reformation he'd set in motion

couldn't so easily be stopped halfway,

and under his son and heir, Edward VI,

England became a Protestant country.

And one of the first Acts passed by the boy king and his Council

was the dissolution of the chantries.

All those priests who'd been employed to say Masses for the dead

until the end of time were now out of a job.

Edward ruled for only six years,

but in that time he did his best to change the faith of his kingdom.

The enormity of that change couldn't have been clearer when, in 1553,

Edward himself lay dying at Greenwich Palace

on the river Thames, at the age of just 15.

His grandfather, Henry VII,

had been surrounded on his deathbed by a team of spiritual experts.

Priests who would guide his soul, via the pains of purgatory,

to heaven.

Now, purgatory had gone, and chantries too.

For protestant Edward, salvation came by faith alone;

and that was how he chose to face his death.

Edward wasn't physically alone. He was attended in his last hours

by his doctors, and by his childhood friend, Henry Sidney.

Sidney took the dying boy in his arms; but spiritually,

Edward was moving beyond the help of the living.

He made an exemplary protestant end.

"I am faint," he said. "Lord have mercy upon me, and take my spirit.'

Death in England would never be the same again.

For the people of the Middle Ages,

the rites of passage of birth, marriage and death

were defined and shaped by the Catholic Church.

Rituals which could be both a constraint and a comfort.

Five centuries later, we face the same moments of

transition in our lives.

What we lack is the same certainty and structure,

so we have to search for our own meanings to define them.

And, as the people of the Middle Ages would have recognised,

that is no easy task.

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