This enquiry helps students to know that although religious devotion was a primary motivation for going on pilgrimage, there were diverse and underlying personal reasons too.  Therefore this helps with causal reasoning.

Using Google as a way in you ask the class what Google’s most popular results for a search on why people went on medieval pilgrimages’ was. The answer is because they were religious.

You now get them to see that this was, of course, one highly motivating factor, but others were important too.

The main task is either a role play ‘scavenger hunt’, or a more traditional ‘treasure hunt’ for the more quiet class. Your students will meet a whole host of characters from this period and record their diverse reasons for going on pilgrimage.

You draw all of this together by getting them to correct google’s search results and write a summary for the results page with a more nuanced explanation.

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