THE FEAR OF DEATH 31
heriot on these occasions.1 Then there were the Mass pennies to
be paid, and the Peter's pence to be found from time to time,
while the light-scot and the church-scot recalled to the peasant -
other of his obligations to Holy Church.
And, as if this were not sufficient, in the majority of villages
the priest strove with the serf to win a living from the products of
the earth. He was priest first, but agriculturist after; or, as an
early Parson Trulliber, he might even be primarily an agri-
culturist. His beasts fed side by side with those of his
parishioners on the commons, and he bargained at the neigh-
bouring market against his fellows in the hope of making a good
purchase, or of effecting a profitable exchange.
So it was not easy for the peasant to forget his Church with
these things set visibly about him and backed up by even more
powerful, though invisible, forces constantly at work upon his
conscience and his imagination. It is scarcely too much to say
that medieval life was haunted by the all-important fact that it
was a man's last moments which mattered. " In the place where
the tree falleth, there shall it lie" (Ecclesiastes xi. 3); as he died,
so would he live again. Nothing could overcome the fact of
death and its concomitants—judgment and doom. Not only in
those fearful paintings which covered the walls of many a church,
but in those more permanent "Last Judgments", carved in
stone on the fagade of cathedral and abbey church, were to be
seen the sufferings of the damned arid the joys of the faithful.
And since the Church taught that a soul, even in the article of
death, could be saved or lost, the idea of death and of preparation
for death was constantly brought before men's minds by these
things. And all this was emphasised by sermons and exhorta-
tions such as were to find their later and more artistic counter-
parts in Sir Thomas More's The Four Last Things, or in the
sombre eloquence of Donne. Well indeed might medieval men
have forestalled MarvelTs cry:
Yet at my back I alwaies hear
Times winged Charriot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lye
Desarts of vast Eternity.
1 See below, p. 143.