Faithzone Videos - Church & Landscape


	Presenter Simon Thurley, Director of the Museum of London, presents Britain from the air: an overview of Christian history. - Pagan worship sites become Christian. - The Normans build churches and cathedrals. - The Reformation destroys monasteries. - Clues from archaeology. - The influence of the Non-Conformists. - Victorian church buildings and social service. - World War II - destruction and reconstruction. - Today's multi-faith landscape.

	Download all the documents for this section in Acrobat PDF format. This document includes the transcript of the video, the activities and the collective worship.

	Some eighteen hundred years have passed since the message of Jesus first reached the British Isles. In that time, its impact has been enormous, transforming not just how we live but where we live. Today, whether you look at it from the air or the ground, you'll find the story of Christianity in Britain is all around us. But for the missionary monks of the sixth and seventh centuries it was a very different world. Stone crosses marked their meeting places, often placed near centres of political or religious power. Like right here, on an ancient pagan site, churches soon replaced crosses and Christians often used traditional sacred places as centres from where to spread their new faith. The success can be seen in the sheer number of communities they founded, indicated in 'llan' 'kirk' 'eccles' and 'minster', all ancient words for 'church' or 'sacred place'. By the time William the Conqueror landed in Hastings in 1066, Christianity had spread right across the country. Norman Christians sparked a mediaeval building boom that went on to produce many of our great cathedrals and a vast number of churches, ten thousand of which still survive. Back then, the church would have been the focus of your life. Your day would have been marked by the bell in its tower. A tenth of all your produce would have gone to the church in taxes. It would have been stored in tithe barns - some of the largest buildings to survive from that time. And the priest would have had his own farmland, the glebe, the origin of many village greens. But in the mid sixteenth century, everything changed. Ruined monasteries, abbeys and priories, once a vital part of medieval life, show how this era came to an abrupt end. Their destruction was a product of the Reformation, when Henry VIII broke the church's traditional ties with the pope and over eight thousand monastic institutions were closed - many plundered, burnt and left in ruins. But their legacy lives on and not just in street names. Here archaeologists excavating in Spitalfields, in London, are revealing how the layout of a mediaeval monastery buried deep beneath the surface still influences the plan of the streets today. As the Reformation swept much of the mediaeval world away, a very different landscape emerged, often marked by chapels like these, places of worship for Christian groups like Quakers and Baptists who, from the seventeenth century onwards, split away from the Anglican church. Their buildings reflect a simpler, more bible-focused faith.