in this video we're going to continue learning about norman conquest in this series of videos we are looking at anglo-saxon england in the last video we looked at anglo-saxon society and who were the anglo-saxons in this video we're going to look at anglo-saxon religion and in particular i would like to look at the question how strong was the anglo-saxon church one of the best ways of finding out about the strength of the anglo-saxon church is to look at the artifacts they left behind this is the gospel book the bible of countess judith who was the wife of tostig who was the brother of harold godvinson one of the most powerful anglo-saxons at the time you can see it is covered in gold and jewels and in the middle of this uh bible is a depiction of christ this tells us loads about anglo-saxon religion it tells us how important religion was to the anglo-saxons it shows you that they wanted to show off their religious beliefs it shows you how important and how central religion was to them however religion under any anglo-saxon england was a little odd and it's the oddness of it that i would like to look at in the rest of this video and we're going to look at different facts about the anglo-saxon church and i want you to consider with each of these facts whether this shows that the church was strong or whether it was not strong so firstly the character of the church in england the church was on the whole at catholic church as it was christianity was across europe however this was a different form of catholicism a different form of catholic church than it was in other parts of europe because the character of the church in england blended that idea of european catholics and it blended in some celtic ideas from ireland so this was not the same as the church as it was in the rest of europe and the biggest difference of how the church was different from the rest of europe was the use of language all of europe used latin in their religious services the english church was different and it actually used the english language in parts of it now this was forbidden by the pope and it wasn't allowed in other countries but the english church mostly kind of thought soda and did it anyway so there was a very big difference in terms of language their beliefs and their behaviors were also quite odd some of their sermons the things that the priests spoke about in church were quite normal so they criticized people's behavior that they saw as sinful but at the same time some of those sermons also criticized spells and witchcraft showing that people at the time had still had some pagan beliefs and those pagan beliefs were quite widespread in anglo-saxon england so people genuinely believed in elves and goblins and they believed in witches and they believed in magic and there were actually from this time there are magical there are rings that have been found with spells that are written on the insides of them or the outsides so the anglo-saxons in terms of their religious beliefs definitely did believe in christianity but they also had this idea of pagan beliefs at the same time now there were some incredibly religious strong people in the anglo-saxon church and one of those really religious people was saint dunstan and saint dunstan became the archbishop of canterbury in 960 a.d so this is just when england has become now a central single kingdom and he was a very talented and very religious man and he sought to end corruption in the church and he wanted to improve the education of monks and nuns and he went on a vast campaign of rebuilding churches and abbeys and monasteries and monasteries are really throughout this time and dunstan as a result of this is declared a saint and saint to something that we're going to come back to in now worship was also quite odd in anglo-saxon church the worship was a little bit odd um there were not as many permanent church buildings as we have now lots of those big stone church buildings that we hold very famous in our towns and our cities for example bristol cathedral are actually norman buildings so we didn't have church buildings in the same way and anglo-saxons often rather than worshipping in a church often worshipped around things like large stone crosses instead so churches were there but they were very different and again very different from the rest of europe the other thing that really distinguished the anglo-saxon church from the rest of europe was the number of saints and there were huge huge numbers of saints saint circle of holy people who after they've died have performed miracles and the english strongly believed in saints and at this time officially the pope was the only one who could make somebody a saint the english ignored it and they created their own states and there were hundreds and hundreds of local english saints now we've got the remnants of those still left over in our towns and our cities and often regions or places are named after some of those early english anglo-saxon saints one of those is saint werburg's in bristol now it's interesting to look at the king and the king as we found out in the last video was called edward the confessor the last anglo-saxon king was edward a confessor and edward had very very strong religious beliefs he's he's took the moniker the confessor because he wanted to confess his sins all the time because he was so strongly religious and edward took his religious views actually from the normans because he was brought up in normandy and he brought some of those views back to england and he wanted to make the church in england much more religious and much more strong he was stopped in doing that he was stopped in doing that because the earls actually stopped him and pushed through their own archbishop of canterbury and this is the last person i want to look at today and the last key figure that you need to look at when we're looking at the anglo-saxon church is stigand now stigand is really the opposite of dunstan who we looked at before and stigand is the archbishop who is really the last archbishop in england at this point under the anglo-saxons and stigand was not particularly religious which is interesting given that the archbishop is the highest kind of place and role in the church at this time he was actually arguably really quite corrupt he would sell off church jobs to whoever gave him the money and he was really basically after making money now the pope hated him and the pope um asked him to visit him in rome and stigan just completely ignored him and stigand really was in the hands of the earls he was all about making money because you could make a lot of money from the church and stigand allowed english priests who were poorly educated to be married and to live their lives this was very different so the key thing you need to understand about the anglo-saxon church is yes it is very religious and there are some people who are trying to make it better and strong religious ideas but at the same time it is quite odd there are unique features of the anglo-saxon church that make it very different from the rest of europe and arguably not that strong because arguably they're a little bit corrupt and that is where i'm going to leave you today