Corruption in Church and Society Reflected in The Canterbury Tales In discussing Chaucer's collection of short stories entitled The Canterbury Tales, an interesting image or illustration of medieval Christian Church. However, as people demanded more say in government affairs, the church became corrupt, and this corruption also led to a more dishonest society. However, there is not only the history of the Church; This is because the Church can never be studied in isolation, simply because it has always been connected to the social, economic and political context of the moment. In history, therefore, there is a two-way process in which the church has an influence on the rest of society and, of course, society influences the church. This is of course because it is the people of a society who form the church… and those same people became the personalities who created these tales of pilgrimage to Canterbury. The Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England was to occur in a relatively short period of time, but this was not due to the success of the Augustinian effort. Indeed, the early years of this mission were characterized by an ambivalence reflected in the number of people who sought to gamble while simultaneously practicing Christian and pagan rites, and in the number of people who immediately apostatized upon the death of a Christian king. There is certainly no evidence of a large-scale conversion of ordinary people to Christianity at this time. Augustine was not the most diplomatic of men, and he managed to antagonize many powerful and influential people in Britain, not least among them the native British clergymen, who had never been particularly keen to save the souls of the Anglo-Saxons who had brought such bitter times for their people. In their isolation, the British Church had retained the older ways of celebrating the major festivals of Christianity, and Augustine's effort to force them to conform to modern Roman usage only irritated them. When Augustine died (between 604 and 609 AD), therefore, Christianity had only a precarious hold on Anglo-Saxon England, a hold that was limited largely to a few members of the aristocracy. Christianity would only become firmly established as a result of Irish efforts, which from the centers of Scotland and Northumbria made the common people Christian and established the English Church on a solid foundation. At all levels of society, belief in a god or gods was not a matter of choice, it was a fact.