BBC Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives Documentary: Episode 2 - The Monk

BBC Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives Documentary: Episode 2 - The Monk Buy the book: THE MEDIEVAL MONK is an emblem of unworldiness. Shut away in his cloister, he dedicated himself to a life of prayer, hard work, poverty, self-denial and silence. He cut himself off from the temptations of the ordinary world in order to give himself to God. The life of a medieval monk was literally ‘out of this world’. The story of the monastic life should be uneventful from beginning to end. But of course it isn’t. Monks couldn’t totally cut themselves off from the material world, even when they wanted to. And there were times when they didn’t want to. On the morning of Sunday 18 October 1327, for example, the monks in the abbey of Bury St Edmunds ended their prayers, filed out through the abbey’s crenellated gate and proceeded to the parish church. This was full of men, women and children. The monks threw off their habits - revealing that some of them wore armour under th