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Acknowledgements
Were it not for the kindness and expertise of others, this book would have been much the poorer. To Ms Terka Acton and Ms Sonya Barker at Palgrave, I owe thanks for such efficient handling of my questions and for their impressive reserves of patience in waiting for the final text to arrive. To my father, Dr Barry Brown, I owe a good deal of thanks for taking parental duty to heroic lengths by reading a first draft in its entirety, and removing a large number of mistakes (and a superfluity of commas). I am also very grateful for the generosity of several of my colleagues at Edinburgh. Dr Tom Brown gave highly useful advice on Anglo-Saxon England. Dr Cordelia Beattie’s perceptive comments on several chapters, particularly on late medieval England and on matters concerning gender, were invaluable. Professor Tony Goodman’s critical suggestions on the whole text were as useful as his words of encouragement were inspiring. To Dr Gary Dickson – for his advice and questioning comments on almost every page of the entire text – I owe a particular debt for taking so much trouble.
Had I been able to answer all his questions, this book would have been considerably improved. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my wife, Dr Rebecca Reader. Without her the book would never have been finished. I have relied heavily on her historical and literary skills: her keen eye for a nonsensical or ugly sentence often revealed a humbling blindness in mine for either. I have also relied on her for support and encouragement, and for the task – far harder than writing any book – of bringing up two demanding but amazing children, George and Imogen, both born while this book was being written. Andrew Brown
Introduction
So short a book is bound to raise a suspicion: that its themes will not be as all-encompassing as the expansive title suggests. The suspicious will not be disappointed. Discussion of the ‘Church’ as an institution is well served elsewhere1 (although this is the sense in which the term is generally used here). I have chosen instead to concentrate on the ‘community of the faithful’ (which was in any case one contemporary definition of the ‘Church’), and on how the religious practices and attitudes, principally of lay people, changed over the period. The ‘community of the faithful’ in medieval terms was of course ‘society’ itself (or at least ‘Christian society’); so to the crime of raising false expectations, the book’s title risks adding the sin of tautology.
But more modern definitions tend to allow the distinction, and what is attempted here is an overview of the relationship (to some extent two-way) between religious practices and their social setting: how they were affected by status and gender (and by perceptions of them), and by the vast socio-economic changes which took place over the whole period. These themes are broad enough in themselves: the book could have been longer. I have also relied heavily on the expertise of others, perching on ‘shoulders of giants’ (to borrow a medieval ‘apology for shortcomings’) without the pretence (often conceitedly implied by medieval authors) that I have seen any further than they. But the point of taking so long a period is that some of the continuities, as well as changes, might also be discerned. ‘Church and society’ in the Anglo-Saxon period, or even the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is often cut off, historiographically speaking, from the fourteenth and fifteenth; while the latter two centuries used to be treated as a depressing finale to the ‘medieval period’ or as a curtain-raiser to the upheavals of the Reformation in the sixteenth century.
There were indeed continuities over the whole period, and ones which did not lead, as though towards some inexorable conclusion, to the kind of Reformation which happened in England. In the past, Catholicism was viewed from the perspective of a Reformation which was itself judged to have broken a monopoly of religious power wielded by the Church over the laity. A wealth of recent research into the later Middle Ages, especially on the vitality and depth of lay involvement in Catholic practices, has rendered this traditional perspective difficult to sustain (so difficult that it might seem a puzzle now why the Reformation happened at all).2
It is worth looking at this lay involvement from an even longer-term perspective: it forms one of the continuities over the whole period, albeit in changing forms. Another continuity too is that however much the Church changed as an institution – and undoubtedly it became a more powerful and centralized one – its monopoly over ‘religion’ was always limited, partly because ‘society’ changed around it too, and partly because the ‘religion’ it advocated was not a monolithic ideology, and could lead in directions which undermined the very basis of clerical power. Before these themes can be developed, further comment is needed on the variety of approaches to ‘Church’, ‘religion’ and ‘society’.
(i) Church and Religion
Analysis of ‘religion’ tends to proceed along two interrelated lines: what it is and what it does. From a modern rather than a medieval perspective,3 ‘religion’ is defined as an abstraction, a system of prescribed rites, symbols and beliefs, which attempts to structure and explain the nature of the human condition. This may seem uncontroversial (if too reductionist and secularized) a statement, but even this definition brings its own baggage of problematic assumptions. An older tradition of anthropology readily distinguished ‘religion’ from ‘magic’ (and both from ‘rational science’);4 and although modern commentary has tended to dismiss the validity of this approach – not least because all three categories might be described as ‘modes of rationality’ – these distinctions are worth recalling because they have left lingering traces in the historiography of medieval Catholicism.
A Protestant tradition was inclined to dismiss late medieval Catholicism in particular as ‘magical’ and ‘superstitious’ to explain why a Reformation was so badly needed by the sixteenth century. Prayers, blessings, holy objects and even the Host were being used by the ‘ignorant’ peasant to secure the health of his crops: such ‘coercion’ (rather than petitioning) of divine power was a gross abuse which the Catholic Church was encouraging and for its own fraudulent purposes.5 But more sensitive readings of Catholic practices have shown how misleading this characterization is. On the one hand, medieval churchmen criticized ‘abuses’, and also used different criteria in assessing their validity. Some practices later dismissed as ‘magical’ were not, even to churchmen, ‘magical’ at all. Prayers which encouraged a good harvest were acceptable if tapping into the God-given potential of nature, but unacceptable if seeking to tap the power of the devil. So if ‘magic’ is supposed to be ‘coercive’ of divine power, it was an integral part of medieval ‘religion’. Historians do best to avoid any implied distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ in describing religious practices.6 On the other hand, medieval ‘peasants’ were a good deal less ‘ignorant’ than some descriptions of their practices would imply.
It is no longer convincing to dismiss the medieval Church, in ‘Protestant’ terms, as a source or purveyor of ‘magic’, but hints that Catholicism, on the eve of the Reformation, was ‘vulnerable’ to a ‘rationalistic critique’ can still inform present debate.7 There is another reason for recalling the traditional distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ or ‘superstition’. Medieval churchmen too could distinguish between the Christian faith, as expounded in councils and sermons, and the ‘superstitions’ of certain lay people. Some of this ‘superstition’ was denounced as little more than ‘paganism’. Once again, it is quite plausible to dismiss these labels used by medieval churchmen as so much polemic, as part of a Catholic rhetoric of reform.8 But the implied distinction between churchmen and laity has also informed another kind of historiographical debate. For some historians, it suggests a difference between clergy and laity, between an ‘elite’ religion developing more systematically especially from the twelfth century onwards, and a ‘popular’ one which, even if increasingly influenced by ‘elite’ ideologies, was still rooted in a pagan (or ‘primitive’) past.9 For others, differences between the two lie more in a distinction between a ritualistic or ‘cultic’ religion of the people and a more internalized creed of an educated elite.10 However, the validity of any such distinction has also been questioned, if not flatly denied.11
The ‘repertoire of inherited beliefs and symbols’ to be found in the liturgy, writes Eamon Duffy, was a ‘reservoir’, certainly by the later Middle Ages, ‘shared’ by priest and ‘peasant’ alike. There was ‘no substantial gulf between the religion of the clergy and the educated elite on the one hand and that of the people at large on the other’. Although religious symbols were ‘capable of enormous flexibility and variety’, it is the homogeneity of late medieval religion, across the social spectrum, which stands out.12 Such an approach has undoubtedly developed a more empathetic understanding of the richness and depth of late medieval religious culture. It has tempted some historians to speak of a ‘Christian’ Middle Ages,13 and to speak of religious practices which struck Protestants as particularly dubious (such as ‘peasant abuse’ of the Host) not as vestigial paganism or superstitious folklore but as ‘lay Christianity’. There are those who are healthily sceptical about the depth of spirituality amongst the majority – preferring to identify a certain ‘comfortable’ air, or ‘complacency’ and ‘lukewarmness’ about the religion of fifteenth-century English people (men in particular).14
Assessing depth of belief, however, is not straightforward. Still at issue too is the extent of the homogeneity of late medieval religion. ‘No substantial gulf’, to use Duffy’s phrase once more, suggests a ‘gulf’ none the less; the ‘flexibility and variety’ may in the end seem more significant than the apparent uniformity of the whole. Diversity rather than uniformity is one of the themes emphasized in this book. From the eleventh century a drive to a more ‘universal’ Church, uniform in doctrine, law and cult, was indeed apparent in the papal curia and beyond. Homogeneity was increasingly encouraged and developed around the liturgy and mass. The Church, it was asserted with greater vigour, was one body, the body of the faithful, in which Christ was ‘priest’ and his body ‘sacrifice’ at the mass. Yet despite vigorous efforts, a ‘universal’ Church was never fully established in practice; and however much the ‘body of Christ’ was developed as a symbol to assert both the unity and hegemony of the Church, it also generated associations and meanings which defied the assertion of either. The articles of faith and the practices required of every Christian were formalized as never before, but ‘religion’ did not become a monolithic system of belief.
Differences over interpretation of doctrine developed, even around one so central as the Eucharist.15 One line of ‘postmodernist’ thought takes this line of argument much further. The culturally relative nature of any form of ‘language’ prevents fixed meaning: religious beliefs and actions are thus inherently open to reinterpretation. So, for instance, it is possible for different audiences to take different meanings from their readings of saints’ lives; or for different pilgrims to find alternative meanings at the shrine to which they journeyed.16 Such an approach is helpful, although its logical extreme – that any belief or action can have any meaning imposed on them – seems too nihilistic: within a particular social context the range of plausible meanings might be limited, or a consensus of views might seem to prevail. But at the very least, a certain sensitivity is required to the variety of ways in which religious doctrines or attitudes could be reinterpreted. The ‘religion’ of the Church, moreover, was not just about the prescription of formal doctrine and beliefs. It was also about the expression of spiritual ideals and standards of holy living which were often more difficult to define and institutionalize.
Some of these ideals even worked against the Church as an institutional structure. The ‘imitation of Christ’ (especially His ‘poverty’) was an inspiration for reform and renewal within the Church throughout the period, but an inspiration too for enthusiasms it could not always contain, and for denunciations of the whole apparatus of ecclesiastical organization (see Chapter 6: iv). It is difficult to see religion, even in the late medieval period, as homogeneous; but the extent to which greater homogeneity had been achieved by then raises other questions. If it existed, how was it engineered, and if so, how and by whom? Did communal ideals serve the good of ‘society’ as a whole or the interests of particular groups within in it?17 And what did expressions of communal ideals – whether at mass or other liturgical occasions – mean within a contemporary context? These questions lead to a wider debate about the social dimension of religion, in which discussion tends to shift away from what religion ‘is’ to what it ‘does’.
(ii) Religion and Society
There is a long tradition of anthropological and social theory which categorizes religion, in some form or other, as a mirror of social aspirations. Durkheim classically defined religion as the projection of the social order onto the divine, a system of ideas with which individuals represent to themselves, often in ‘ritual’ activity, the society of which they are members. Religion thus functions as a force for social cohesion and control: participation in sacred acts and rituals was a means by which members would experience the meaning and moral power of their society.18 Although this has seemed too crude a formulation of both ‘religion’ and ‘society’ (and Durkheim’s ideas are often more subtle than this), it is undeniable that social relations affected perceptions of the supernatural order and the structures of religious practices.19
Thus historians (whether Durkheimian or not) have characterized, for instance, the relationship between saint and client as an extension of existing ‘social relations beyond human society’; or have illuminatingly described certain liturgical processions as the sacramental embodiment of social reality.20 Take the Corpus Christi processions in late medieval towns, during which the mayor was stationed closest to the paraded Host, and craft guilds were strung out in front: the carefully calibrated hierarchy allowed different groups to display their standing within the urban ‘community’. Even historians with an empathetic eye for ‘pious’ motives and spiritual ideals recognize the force of social pressures on religious belief and practice. As Duffy writes, the liturgy and the service of mass with its emphasis on the need for ‘charity’ among those attending, might well allow its participants a means through which to ‘articulate their experience of community’.
But what was this ‘experience of community’ and why did it need articulating? Durkheim tended (although not always) to regard ‘society’ as an organic totality; but historians who regard ‘society’ as an arena of conflicting interest groups (especially those drawing upon Marx or Weber), reach different conclusions about the function of ‘religion’ within it. Rather than the projection of ‘society’ as a whole, ‘religion’ is the instrument by which one group asserts control over another, as justification of social hierarchy and hegemony.22 There are indeed occasions when certain religious practices appear to function in just this way. The adaption of the feast of Corpus Christi within the late medieval towns enshrined a corporate but also hierarchical vision of urban society. Perhaps, then, a ‘sense of community’ was articulated in the interests of hierarchy. But before characterizing medieval society any further, it needs emphasizing that if ‘religion’ articulated anything, it did not do so in straightforward ways. Weber himself had a good deal more to say about the relationship between religion and particular social groups; and on how the ‘charisma’ of individuals might transcend the established order and generate religious change. In any case, rituals, symbols and beliefs could not be appropriated at will by those in power.
There is little agreement on how rituals actually work and what they do (or even what they are), beyond a sense that they can be complicated processes which are often ambiguous in meaning and indeterminate in result.23 They may even be self-defeating of the authority who promote them: the effect of projecting social structures on to the unseen world or on to visible rituals may have the more subtle effect, deliberate or otherwise, of questioning the nature and validity of those structures. Moreover, the interplay in ritualized activity between agents and participants is often more dynamic than any simple imposition of ‘social control’ by the one over the other. So the late medieval Corpus Christi procession might be viewed not as an assertion of social dominance but as a vision of the social order itself under dispute, or a site of negotiation between the civic elite and lower ranks resistant to domination.24
And again, the occasions when rituals fail to work, or become appropriated to subvert rather than support social hierarchy, tend to demonstrate the potential instability of the ritual process. Just as ‘religion’ was not a monolithic system of belief, so religious rituals were not simple mechanisms of ‘social control’. But there were certainly religious ideas which were used to support hierarchy and which constructed categories of social groups in certain ways; and there were also social reasons why those in authority might have cause to assert them. How did contemporaries perceive ‘society’ and how do these perceptions square with modern historical analysis?
(iii) Medieval Perceptions of Society
For medieval churchmen, ‘society’ meant the community of Christians, but there were several ways in which people were categorized within it. One model conceptualized society as a ‘body’, the different members of society, like limbs and organs, making up the functioning whole. But a more dominant model, already emerging in England by the ninth century, was to place people in one of three estates or orders – those who prayed, fought or worked. Although a bipartite theory of division was also used (between clergy and laity), the tripartite division began to dominate from the twelfth century, and was emphasized even more strongly in the later Middle Ages.25 Schematic views like these did not mean that other more practical kinds of criteria were ignored.
For legal or fiscal purposes, people were arranged according to hierarchies of social or economic status: within records of landlords’ properties by tenure, or in taxation surveys by wealth.26 As society became more complex (see Introduction: iv) these categories received more attention, but without bringing about a significant reassessment of ‘estates’ theory. Diversification of occupations and professions did not lead to a multiplication of ‘estates’: new groups were usually placed (although sometimes awkwardly) within the tripartite framework. So too, generally, were women. Occasionally they appear as a separate group, almost a ‘fourth estate’, with their own subdivisions, but usually they were integrated (if discussed at all) within the categories of ‘those who prayed’, ‘those who worked’, and in association with ‘those who fought’. Such theorizing undoubtedly tended to reinforce hierarchy and inequality within society: as part of a ‘body’ or within an ‘estate’ everyone had a natural and fixed place. It could also reinforce patriarchy.
The occlusion of women in much theorizing about estates is telling in itself, but so too is the tendency, when women are explicitly placed within the three orders, to categorize them differently from men. In the late twelfthcentury estates handbook of Cicely, countess of Hereford, men are listed by occupation, women by moral criteria – in which the faithful wife is held up as the morally desirable model for lay women.27 The subordination in ‘estates’ theory of women to men, or of ‘labourer’ to lord, makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ‘three orders’ were the ‘projections of dominant groups’ used to enforce their dominance. Yet there were ambiguities even within so hierarchic a scheme. Authority also meant responsibility, and if peasants were morally reprehensible for rebelling, their masters also deserved to be called to account.
Clerical writers were almost unanimous in condemning as unnatural the most serious rebellion against lordship in late medieval England, the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381; yet according to John Gower part of the blame was to be laid at the feet of lords whose moral turpitude had allowed the brutish anarchy of the rebellion to erupt.28 Such commentary did not justify revolt, but it points to alternative perceptions of society which were much more equivocal about hierarchies within it. A strong line of Christian thought regarded mankind as inherently sinful and the world inherently corrupt. Although such a perspective was concentrated within the monastic tradition, it was also one that influenced the Church as a whole during this period. Pastoral effort had the salvation of mankind as its ultimate mission; the offices of the Church were to assist in the process of combatting sin, and during an intense period of pastoral reform in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, discussion and definition of sin and the need for penance received unprecedented attention (see Chapter 2: iii). In the growing quantity of penitential literature which assisted priests in the administering of confession, great emphasis was placed on the need to look behind the outer facade to locate the nature of sin within. Moreover, incorporated within penitential literature was also another kind of ‘estates’ theory, different from three orders, and with its own alternative hierarchy.
The three ‘estates’ of the flesh (‘virginity’, ‘chastity’ and ‘marriage’) categorized individuals not by social function but according to a sliding scale based on levels of holy living and sin.29 These alternative perceptions could still bear the impression of hierarchical divisions of society. Manuals of confession increasingly targeted the vices of particular social groups, subliminally underpinning social and patriarchal hierarchies: peasants, for instance, might be questioned on whether they had paid their dues to their manorial lord; women on their obedience to husbands.30 Yet an emphasis on sin and the sinfulness of society also had the powerful effect of cutting across social hierarchies; and the discourse of penitential reform provided a commentary on society which was inherently critical of worldly values. Part of this discourse too, was that these values could infect the Church itself.
Confessors were to consider the particular sins of the clergy as well as the laity. In this respect, ‘religion’ was anything but supportive of the social order and of the Church’s place within it. Contemporary views of society, then, were both hierarchical and equivocal of social hierarchy. But what of the views of modern historians, and how do these views change an understanding of the function of religion within medieval society? It is important to set Church and religion firmly within the context of English society as it changed during the period.
(iv) Medieval Society from a Modern Perspective
Up to a point, the categories of the ‘three orders’ did correspond, roughly speaking, to social ‘realities’.31 It makes a good deal of sense to distinguish ‘those who fought’ from ‘those who worked’, and to place the landed aristocracy in the first category and the landless serf in the second. Throughout the period, landowning remained the key determinant in the exercise of power, even if trade and money increasingly offered alternative avenues of social advancement. Yet medieval estates theory, from a modern standpoint, distorts social ‘reality’ in two fundamental ways. On the one hand, it is a model of implied stasis which obscures the enormous social changes that took place over the period; on the other, it is also a model which, in its supposition of harmony and mutual interdependence amongst its members, hides antagonisms between and within the estates.
So much has been written on the changes in medieval society, so much too on regional differences and anomalies, that a brief summary of them all will be inadequate.32 But a few features of these changes are worth stressing because they can cast significant light on the nature of religious practices within England. Society was becoming more complex and diversified. At the beginning of our period a fundamental divide existed between the great landlord and the slave who worked his land; but even in the eleventh century, an expanding number of ‘thegns’ between the great landowner and the family farmer was complicating distinctions between ‘those who worked’ and ‘those who fought’. More urbanized settlements or proto-towns made for different social set-ups from the countryside. The rapid increase in population from this period, the increasing cultivation and production of land, the expansion of trade, and the growing commercialization of the economy accelerated social change still further. All had an effect on the character of Church and religion in late Anglo-Saxon society (see Chapter 1). The demand for goods and services stimulated markets and occupational specialization.
By the end of the thirteenth century, town life was less localized and exceptional, although English towns (outside London) never became as heavily capitalized as those in the Low Countries or Northern Italy. This may have a bearing on the character of religious life in England compared with these other regions (see Chapters 3: ii–v; 6: iv). Even so, the political and economic privileges that English towns accumulated and the plethora of crafts they came to contain, made them distinctive and socially diverse environments. In more rural regions, great landlords were able to profit from expanding markets and control their labour force on their manors: although ‘slaves’ disappear, a distinction between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ still remained at the end of the thirteenth century. But between these two extremes, an expanding diversity of other groups is evident: ‘knights’ appear below the rank of aristocrats, but below them there are free tenant-farmers, with ‘franklins’ at their head, and below them poorer groups of ‘peasants’ amongst whom a thriving land market is already apparent. It is not insignificant that this growing diversity took place at a time when the Church too was in the process of expansion, in its system of government, and in developing doctrines and forms of religious life which were applicable to social changes (see Chapter 2).
Whether the Church was able to harness these changes and control all forms of religious practice is a recurring theme of this book. Changes in economy and society did not reduce social inequality. Lordship may have become less arbitrary, but coercion could be replaced by more legalistic devices of control. Connected with a rapidly expanding economy was a developing need to use written records to formalize and document economic transactions and social arrangements.33 At the highest level, royal authority was extended through bureaucratic, legalistic and administrative means. Indeed, one of the striking features of English society, already evident in the Anglo-Saxon period, is the relative strength of royal control even over religious life. Such control may well have made aspects of religious practice in England different from many other parts of Europe – although the limitations of this control and the extent of regional diversity must also be emphasized (see Chapters 1: ii; 3: ii; 4: ii; 5: ii; 6: iv–ix). Other kinds of lordship exerted powerful influences.
Manorial lords could exploit markets by commuting labour rents for cash or enforcing control over tenants in manorial courts. But the pressure of lordship had other effects on society. Also apparent by the thirteenth century is the growing capacity among other social groups for collective action. The acquisition of ‘borough’ privileges by towns was often the result of lordly initiative, but townsmen with their own economic interests, could assert themselves against seigneurial control. Within a rural setting, manorial records demonstrate ‘communal’ responses of tenants to landlord demands. In any case, increasing pressure on land with the continuing rise in population made collective arrangements over ‘common’ fields essential. Regional diversity however makes these generalizations unsound. We find lordship rather lighter in East Anglia than in ‘champion’ regions of England where nucleated villages were often more tightly bound to lordly manors. But such variation does not alter the general picture of a society increasingly diverse in its hierarchical structure.
How social hierarchy and diversity impacted upon religious practice (and a sense of ‘community’) is another question to be pursued (see especially Chapters 4: ix; 5: v, viii; 6: ii, viii). But a preliminary exploration of the nature of divisions within society is required. Whether social groups were fundamentally antagonistic towards each other is a matter of vigorous debate.34 A stratified society need not have meant a fractured one: a sense of mutual interdependence or deference may well have promoted consensus across unequal social groups. Perhaps the stratas in society should be seen as gradations on a sliding scale of hierarchy, based on status, rather than as separate ‘classes’ polarized against each other (as a Marxist would have it) because of economic division. Conflict between them, when it did occur, was thus sporadic rather than fundamental. And yet extremes of wealth and power were so great that it is difficult to escape the conclusion (whether we adopt a Marxist perspective or not), that if conflicts were few, it was because resistance was suppressed by the strong hand of lordship.
A Marxist model would also categorize the contrast between great landowners and ‘peasants’ as the fundamental divide in this society, and attribute each group with their own ‘class’ consciousness; and although it is easier to detect such a consciousness within the former, bound by a ‘chivalric’ culture and buoyed up by its economic power, the cooperative efforts of the latter make it possible to discern common interests among the ‘peasantry’ too. Not all historians would agree. The ‘dominant elite’ was divided within itself: there were great contrasts in wealth and outlook among the clergy, for instance between bishop and parish priest; there were potentially great conflicts of interest between churchman (however lordly and powerful) and secular aristocrat. In any case, the penumbra of social groups which seem to straddle ‘classes’ of ‘lord’ and ‘peasant’ blurs distinctions between them. Amongst the ‘peasantry’, differences between a village elite and poorer groups, or within towns between ‘guilds merchant’, craft guilds and journeymen, may seem more important than any collective antipathy amongst them against seigneurial lordship.
Nevertheless, on balance it is more convincing to argue that antagonism towards lordship among these lesser groups was stronger than tensions within them; but it is worth bearing in mind (when discussing corporate religious practices) that significant antagonisms could develop within groups which intrinsically had more to unite them than divide. The nature of divisions within society is made more complicated by issues of gender. Perhaps women should be seen as a separate social group; perhaps they had concerns which linked them across any social divide. A powerful tradition of misogyny, reaching back to a classical past, may have encouraged a sense of female gender identity. Certainly this tradition usually prevented women from wielding significant political or economic power. Socio-economic changes may also have affected women in particular ways or at particular moments of the life-cycle more than was the case for men. On the other hand, there may be a stronger case for arguing that women in this period were more divided by their social status than united by their gender.35
Discussion about the existence of any shared sense of womanhood among women also raises related but different questions about the nature of ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’, male and female. Much recent debate has tended to highlight the complexity of these issues especially if the gender of an individual is seen as a matter of ‘performance’ rather than biological essence.36 Commentary on norms or attitudes about ‘gender’ has also emphasized complexity within apparently straightforward stereotyping: ideologies which at first glance appear irredeemably misogynistic were open to alternative interpretation, while assertions of gender difference could hide other kinds of agenda. These issues will need further discussion because ‘gender’ could have a significant impact both on choices and on perceptions of religious behaviour, ideal as well as practical (see Chapters 4: ix; 6: ii, viii, ix). Suffice it to note here that gender (whether we mean the biological differences between men and women or the gendered identities and norms that men or women could adopt) could cut across social status, as well as vice versa: divisions within society cannot be seen simply as socio-economic ones. In the later Middle Ages, the potential for social mobility and tension was increased37 – with some significant implications, as we shall see, for religious practices. Some of the conditions which had previously promoted social change were reversed. Population levels were already declining in the early fourteenth century, and were severely reduced after the Black Death in 1348–49 which killed off at least a third of the population.
It may still be debated whether plague was the root cause of subsequent changes, and whether it was continuing visitations of plague which prevented demographic recovery until late into the fifteenth century.38 But the changes which did occur made for significant alterations in social structures and attitudes. Late medieval society was certainly more fluid. Depressed population levels meant an overall decline in production; yet some regions (particularly in the south and around London), and some industries (such as the cloth trade) were able to thrive; commercial opportunities allowed some individuals to increase per capita wealth; labour shortages meant a potential rise in income for the agricultural labourer or urban artisan who could command higher wages, and may even have allowed women a greater economic freedom;39 and such was the need for landlords to adjust to new ‘market-forces’ that serfdom had virtually disappeared by the end of the fifteenth century. It is not surprising to find greater social diversity: new gradations of ‘gentlemen’ and ‘esquires’ below aristocrats; and below them, ‘yeomen’ and ‘husbandmen’ whose exploitation of the land market lifted them above other ‘peasants’ in rural society; or to find, within towns, merchants whose wealth placed them on a par with gentry.
It was also a period in which levels of literacy and opportunities for education, especially in the larger towns, were increasing, with potentially far-reaching social implications: for one thing, the traditional distinction made between orders of clergy and laity – the one ‘literate’, the other ‘illiterate’ – was a distinction increasingly difficult to make, and one (in the minds of some churchmen) which had alarming implications (see Chapter 6: iii, iv).
Fluidity created opportunity, but tension too. Some changes did not come without delay or without reaction. Landlords in the 1350s and 1360s sought to prevent serfs or labourers profiting from changing conditions with statutory legislation. A fundamental rift between great landlord and ‘peasant’ is still observable in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381: even if short-term events (not least the imposition of the Poll Tax) helped trigger the uprising, it is inexplicable without reference to the effects of lordly repression on both the ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ within rural society.40 The revolt was put down with further repression, and although it may have finally forced landlords to relax manorial restrictions, the frightening spectacle of revolt continued to haunt the imagination of the seigneurial elite. Conversely the Revolt perhaps contributed to a tradition of dissent among ‘peasants’.41
But although there are moments, especially in 1381, when a ‘class consciousness’ is apparent among social groups united by a common sense of oppression, solidarity within rural ‘communities’ is hard to find. Village elites may have joined in with the rebellion in 1381, but their attitudes to repression were ambivalent, not least because as employers themselves they might welcome and enforce the Statute of Labourers. There were other ways, after the mid-fourteenth century, that social cohesion within villages tended to become eroded, especially in areas (notably around London) where new markets offered opportunity for individual enterprise. Manorial court records seem to show greater evidence of insistence on individual rights at the expense of communal ones.42 Urban society from the late fourteenth century was also affected by social divisions. Post-plague conditions caused some towns to ‘decline’ and enabled others to prosper, while the retreat of seigneurial authority allowed more towns to acquire borough privileges. But within most, antagonisms seem to have increased.
Town governments had good reason to fret about the problems of labour shortage and artisanal behaviour, especially after the Peasants’ Revolt which had involved urban as well as rural unrest. Opportunities for a mercantile elite to accumulate capital also contributed to an increase in oligarchic control within many towns. Oligarchies were themselves subject to faction: the uprising at York during the Peasants’ Revolt was as much a result of dissension among the mercantile elite as it was an artisanal rebellion against the city rulers.43 But the sense of collective urgency among the urban elite is evident in attempts to enforce labour legislation to control the distribution of wealth within towns and to weaken the potential for corporate identity among artisans as a whole. In York, the town council institutionalized craft guilds in 1363–64 and restricted individual membership to one trade. A parliamentary statute of 1436 required registration of all guilds with town councils (or local JPs), making them subject to closer authoritarian scrutiny.44 At a national and local level, regulation attempting to control social mobility of all kinds was increasing.
It appears in sumptuary legislation which denounced the idle luxury of parvenus who had the audacity to ape the sartorial and dietary habits of their social superiors. It appears in legislation and literature denouncing the ‘idle’ poor and ‘vagrants’ who disguised their indigency as holy poverty. It appears too in attitudes to women: from the sharper segregation of prostitutes in towns, to the ‘protective’ moralizing on respectable female behaviour evident in certain ‘courtesy’ texts. Social unrest and social mobility from the late fourteenth century provoked a reaction, amongst those in authority, of a repressive and moralizing kind. Demographic recovery (and in some places economic contraction) by the later fifteenth century did not soften such attitudes; indeed by then concern in some towns with moral and sexual misbehaviour was sharper than before.45 All these developments made an impact on late medieval religious practices both of a corporate and more personal nature, and have a significant bearing on how we might characterize those practices (see Chapters 5: vii, viii; 6: viii, ix).
(v) The Social Dimension of Religion
The changes within English society obviously cast a different light on medieval perceptions of society. The fractured nature of relations between different social groups makes the harmonious model of the three orders an even more specious one: emphasis on the model in the twelfth century already seems a response to social mobility, and renewed emphasis on its divine purpose from the mid-fourteenth seems even more a rearguard reaction to rapid change.46 For the purposes of this book, however, there are more significant reasons why the nature of society needs emphasis. After all, religious practices were rooted in a social context. Since ‘society’ itself was cast as ‘Christian’, social regulation inevitably had a moralizing edge, and religious behaviour a social dimension. Going to church was not simply a matter of personal piety. It might have a gendered aspect: church-going is made a particular female virtue in ‘courtesy’ texts. It also had other social implications.
The parish church was not just an arena of communal worship but a space in which lordship or other local hierarchies could assert themselves.47 In the climate of fear at popular unrest in the late fourteenth century, attendance at church might be perceived as part of social discipline. One petition to Parliament in 1390 connected a fear of social mobility with concern about communal worship: it claimed that ‘low persons’ on holy days went hunting – an aristocratic pursuit – when ‘good Christians’ were at church.48 So how ‘homogeneous’, in the end, was medieval religion in this kind of society? In the late medieval period, when evidence for religious practices at a local level is much more abundant, an emphasis on ‘community’ is indeed striking. The elaboration of the liturgy and setting for mass, the most important of all services, seems testimony to the depth of Christian culture within late medieval society and to strong collective desire for religious and social harmony. Such a view seems predicated on an assumption that common bonds outweighed any antagonisms between different groups.49 It also suggests that religion functioned as some kind of benign social cement between these groups.
But to regard late medieval society as essentially fractured offers alternative perspectives on contemporary religion: it alerts us to the ways in which the desire for harmony might be the product of social anxiety, the expression of ‘community’ the assertion of hierarchy, and communal practices the sites of contention.50 None of this need imply that religious beliefs and practices should be fitted neatly into social categories, as though predetermined by social context, or imply that every mass attended was an occasion for fraught dispute. We should stop short too of regarding ‘religion’ as a whole as the instrument of dominant social groups.51 These groups had their own conflicts of interest which divided them internally. Certain religious ideas and practices were undoubtedly exploited in the interests of hierarchy and authority, but if ‘dominant’ social groups used religion in this fashion it was because they did not always feel dominant.
And for all its core doctrines, beliefs and rituals, medieval Catholicism was too diverse in the way these were interpreted and practised to be viewed as a simple adjunct of power and social relations. We should also stop short of regarding individuals as social automata, as though their piety was merely the unconscious product of their place in society. To penetrate the inner beliefs of most people in this period may be impossible, but it is a mistake to assume that beliefs did not matter, and that these beliefs might not lead an individual to question the nature of his or her values and place in society. What is possible for the historian to observe, without ignoring the importance of beliefs, is the social implications of religious ideas and actions and how these in their turn might condition social behaviour; and the ways in which choices of religious behaviour were shaped (rather than determined) by a great variety of influences. Doctrines preached from the pulpit or enjoined at confession; moral prescriptions of religious and secular authorities; patterns of piety practised locally; perceptions and habits conditioned by status, gender and social change: all played a part in the ‘religion of the laity’.
The social dimension of religion in England and the social forces that shaped it are, then, the particular concerns of this book. Chapter 1 looks at ‘Church and society’ as a whole, taking as a starting point the late Anglo-Saxon period; from then on the chapters deal with issues more thematically from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. Chapter 2 concentrates on the development of a universal Church and the pastoral efforts to instruct the laity. In subsequent chapters, the responses of lay people to prescription, their religious activities, beliefs and attitudes, are the focus of attention. Chapter 3 looks at manifestations of the ‘holy’ – the appearance of saints and cults, lay and clerical perceptions of them, and at potential tensions between the universal Church and local churches. Chapter 4 concentrates on the more corporate forms of lay religious activity, especially within the parish; Chapter 5 on how these were affected by attitudes to death. The final chapter examines more ‘personal’ forms of devotion, and the effects of literacy, nonconformity and heresy on the ideals and practice of living a ‘holy’ life within the world.
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