- Focus on village churches and look at photographs/plans showing the dominant place the church building had in the village.
Did it have a similarly dominant place in village life and the lives of the villagers?
- Introduce the idea of the local parish priest and explain his place in the organisational structure of the Catholic Church.
- Pupils, either individually or in groups, work with a range of sources dealing with areas of the priest's work,
eg baptism, burial, marriage, collecting tithes, working glebe land. Ask pupils to work in groups to find out what advice a father might give his son who has just told him he wants to become a parish priest. This advice could be presented in written form or acted out to the whole class as a role play/dialogue.
- Talk about the way the church influenced how people thought about heaven and hell. Using a surviving doom painting from the chancel arch of a church as a source, emphasise the power of a literal belief in the torments of hell, the sufferings in purgatory, and the promise of paradise if people followed the teachings of the church. Ask pupils to annotate the doom painting appropriately.
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- use sources in order to reach and support conclusions about the work of a parish priest
- demonstrate an understanding of the ways in which doom paintings teach some medieval Christian beliefs
- select and combine information from various sources to produce structured work
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