At first a man was sufficiently fortified by the last offices ordered by the Church itself: he died in hope when he had received extreme unction. Presently, however, people became a little doubtful; the fear arose that the service of the Church for the dying might prove by itself insufficient to ensure for the soul entrance into purgatory. Accordingly, therefore, new precautions were invented. Men thought that it would be safer for them if they were buried in consecrated ground within, not outside, the walls of the church: again, it would certainly be safer to be laid as near the high altar as possible. Then again, it was discovered that the church of the monastery was more sacred, and therefore still safer than the parish church. After this, it was believed that some monasteries were even safer than others. Thus the Greyfriars Church in London was esteemed a much more desirable place of interment than St. Paul’s: it was therefore crammed from east to west with monuments of kings and princes, great lords and great ladies. Here they all lay buried in the habit of a Franciscan, hoping either to step into Heaven in the guise of a Friar, or at least, being in such a guise, to get off at the Last Day with a shorter allowance of purgatory than that due to them, or even without any purgatory at all. It seems to us, with our ideas of equality, a most monstrous belief that a rich man should be able to buy himself out of purgatory, while a poor man must endure the full weight and penalty of his sins. I do not think that the poor man considered the matter in this way at all. On the contrary, it was one of the attributes of wealth and rank that they should make the conquest of Heaven more easy. The poor accepted the situation. Their poverty was imposed upon them with all its consequences. They could not, however they tried, rise out of it: between nobility and villeinhood there was an impassable gulf: well for them that the Lord had left open a way even after many thousand years of purgatory. As regards the doctrines of the Church, the great mass of the people knew very little, and questioned not at all. The history of the Saints and of the Old and New Testaments they partially understood, because on the walls and in the windows of their parish churches were everywhere represented the acts of Christ and of the Apostles and those of the Saints. Moreover, as we have seen, in the mysteries or sacred plays, the scenes from the Old Testament were performed with grotesque, and even burlesque, imitations in the open air for all the world to see.