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Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to acknowledge all the help I have been given during the writing of this book; all the faults which remain are, of course, my responsibility. The award of a Postdoctoral Fellowship by the British Academy allowed me to begin the research for this book, and the award of a residential fellowship by Gladstone’s Library at St Deiniol’s Hawarden helped provide me with space to think at a crucial point. I should also like to thank the staff of the British Library, the London Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Vatican Library, the Warburg Institute, and the University of Exeter library.
The comments and questions of all my students at Exeter, particularly those in my third-year Special Subject, have helped shape this book. I have benefited immeasurably from discussing specific aspects with various colleagues, several of whom read chapters in draft, in particular Julia Crick, Helen Gittos, Jinty Nelson, Susan Reynolds, Catherine Rider, Alex Walsham, Ian Forrest and Sethina Watson and all the members of the ‘Social Church’ research group.
I should like to thank John Arnold especially for reading the entire text in draft, and also the anonymous reader whose critical comments helped to sharpen my thinking. I have been extremely fortunate to have had such a supportive academic editor in Julia Smith; her encouragement throughout the process and her pertinent and constructive comments on the initial draft ensured its completion. Thanks too to Mari Shullaw at Pearson both for her extreme forbearance as an editor and for all her advice and support.
The support of family and friends has been invaluable, especially that of Matthew and Carol Cragoe; Alice Hamilton and Steven Carden; Anke Holdenried; Naomi Howell; Ruth and Steven Smyth-Bonfield; and Cordelia Warr. My father Bernard Hamilton discussed some of the ideas with me and read several of the chapters in draft. But my greatest debt is to Stephen who has had to live with this book for far too long: this book is dedicated to him as thanks for everything.
Teignmouth, September 2012
Introduction
Since the seventh century this verse has been sung at the beginning of the liturgical celebrations for Easter as part of the Exultet hymn. It avows that the Church is made up of all God’s people, and that they all participate in the celebration of Easter, the most important feast in the Christian calendar. But at the same time as the text calls on everyone to celebrate Christ’s resurrection, we need to note that the singing of this hymn was reserved to a single member of the clergy, the deacon.
On the one hand, clergy recognised that the laity played an important part in the rites of the Church, and on the other they preserved a monopoly over their conduct. It articulates one of the paradoxes of the Church’s relationship with the laity, which was at once all embracing and exclusive. It thus makes a fi tting start to a text in which I explore the various ways in which the institutional Church related to the peoples of Western Europe in the years between c.900 and c.1200. In doing so I will seek to reinterpret the ways in which Christianity was experienced by ordinary men and women, and to redefi ne the nature of the relationships between members of the clergy and the laity across three hundred years.
The focus on these three centuries is a refl ection of the fundamental signifi cance historians of western society attribute to the central Middle Ages.” The religious developments which are the subject of this text took place in a world of changing political, social and economic circumstances. The differences between the Latin world of the early tenth century and that of the early thirteenth century are marked. The collapse of the ninthcentury Carolingian polity in which members of a single family ruled much of Western Europe was followed by one in which authority in many areas became more localised.
Some scholars, particularly those who work on the regions which are now France and Italy, believe a further socio-political change, the ‘feudal transformation’, took place in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries as the authority of the monarch became weakened and usurped by local lords with much smaller spheres of influence.’ Royal law courts ceased to be held in the localities, and instead the jurisdiction of local lords held sway. Local lords took the opportunity to increase the taxes and other dues demanded of their tenants, and the less powerful lost the opportunity to appeal to a higher authority against such demands; consequently a diminution in the rights and incomes of the less well-off accompanied these changes amongst the ruling elite. The poor and less powerful became even poorer and less powerful. The picture is somewhat different elsewhere in Europe.
In the Germanic lands of east Frankia royal power continued to be strong throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries, but overlay that of very powerful regional lords. Although the Carolingians never directly ruled the kingdoms which came, in the course of the tenth century, to make up England, its Church and people had come within their sphere of influence, with exchanges of texts and personnel as well as political alliances. Here too royal power grew over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries at the same time as that of local lords. In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries a growth in the powers of royal and papal governments at the expense of local secular and ecclesiastical autonomies followed these developments.
Demographic and economic change accompanied this socio-political transformation: populations grew, the number of towns mushroomed, the level of trade increased, and the amount of land under cultivation, both within and on the periphery of the heartlands of ninth-century Europe, expanded. Peoples moved out from the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of early medieval Christian Europe in modern day France, northern Italy, the Low Countries, Switzerland, much of Germany and Austria, and England into the newly Christianised areas to the east, in Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, to the north in Scandinavia, and to the south in Spain, Sicily and Palestine; at the same time the peoples living in those areas adopted the culture of the heartlands. All these areas came under the nominal control of the Church of Rome. It is this wider area which comprises the medieval west of this text’s title. Its main focus, however, will centre on developments in Europe’s heartlands, in France, Germany, Italy and England, and on placing them in their broader context.
Of the great religious and ecclesiastical changes unfolding between the end of the ninth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, three in particular are worth highlighting here. They are the papal reform movement, the growth in monastic foundations, and the explosion in the popularity of pilgrimage and the cult of the saints. The first factor, and one of the most famous, if contentious, features of the central Middle Ages is the radical renegotiation of the relationship between secular and spiritual authority sought by the ecclesiastical reformers of the eleventh century, the so-called ‘Gregorian’ (after Pope Gregory VII (1073-85)) or papal reforms. Churchmen sought the independence of ecclesiastical personnel and institutions from lay authority, accompanied by attempts to define the clergy as a group separated from the laity with their own codes of dress and behaviour as well as law. This ideological revolution has conventionally been set against wider socio-political developments. Some scholars interpret it as the result of the growth in the authority of both secular and ecclesiastical rulers, kings and popes, whilst others view it as a consequence of the wider social transformation which resulted in an increased emphasis upon defining the different roles played by nobility and peasants, men and women, clerics and lay people.*
Secondly, the establishment of a very large number of new religious institutions transformed the European landscape.° These new ecclesiastical establishments are a product of demographic and political change which altered how and where peasants lived, leading to the establishment of new villages, changes in the location of centres of power, the emergence of powerful local lords, and the establishment of new centres of authority. Numerous local churches were founded in rural settlements, next to manor houses, and in the burgeoning towns; numerous abbeys were established in both existing settlements, and in areas newly opened up to cultivation; new cathedrals were set up to reflect changes in lordship and settlement patterns and the opening up of new areas on the periphery of Europe. Many of these buildings were built or rebuilt in stone, and some still survive today. They are a testament to the investment made by, and demanded of, Christians living at the time; their very existence is a product of the increase in overall wealth.
Finally, against this background of a greater economic prosperity increasing numbers of the laity, drawn from all social levels, began to develop and explore their own religious autonomy within a Christian framework.°® There are increasing numbers of records of ordinary Christians flocking to the shrines of individual saints, travelling to local and more distant shrines in search of intercession. The cult of the saints had long played an important role in Christian life, but new movements also accompanied this growth of lay piety. This period saw the evolution of the idea of crusading, that is, travelling to fight on behalf of Christianity for the atonement of personal sins. At the same time the adoption of a way of life based on that of Christ’s apostles became increasingly popular. Imitating the life of Christ’s apostles as described in the New Testament, men (and occasionally women) chose to follow a life of voluntary poverty whilst living in community, but with a strong emphasis on Christian mission and charity: preaching, and looking after the sick and vulnerable in hospitals. Some scholars have linked the widespread support for those following the apostolic life to the increasing wealth of society in this period: prosperity generated widespread anxiety about salvation and antipathy towards the dominant values of this world.” Recognising the continual interplay between ecclesiastical and religious change, on the one hand, and social and political transformation on the other, is one of the most important developments in recent scholarship, and will be a central premise of this text.
Both the start and end dates of this study represent significant moments when various of these factors came together at what are regarded as key changes in the secular and spiritual spheres. It begins around 900 with the implosion of the Carolingian polity of the ninth century.* The Carolingians’ rule had been marked by a great concern with Christian education, and had produced a considerable body of writings intended to ensure that the practices of both the clergy and the laity conformed to the Christian teachings of the Bible and the Church Fathers. The evidence of surviving episcopal legislation and liturgical and legal collections shows how they set out to train local priests in Christian doctrine and the correct delivery of Christian rites, and admonished them to educate and minister to their own lay flocks so that they lived their lives according to a Christian framework.’ The Carolingians’ successors in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe inherited this bold programme to educate all those living under their rule in Christian doctrine and practice. In this text I will explore the afterlife of the Carolingians’ pastoral ambitions. One of the questions I will consider is how far the churchmen of the tenth and eleventh centuries took up and used the writings of their ninth-century predecessors. How influential were these ideals, composed in a time when rulers and churchmen worked together to promote pastoral care, in the more politically fragmented worlds of the tenth and eleventh centuries?
The text ends in the early thirteenth century with the Fourth Lateran Council held in Rome in November 1215. The most widely attended of all the Church councils held in the medieval west, it is a testament to the successful realisation of the pope’s claims to authority over the clergy of the western Church, and the separation of clerical from lay authority. The seventy-one decrees published at its conclusion are thus a product of a very different time to the writings produced by the Carolingian Church, and reflect the growing independence of the Church as a political body.'® Yet the agenda they set out has much in common with that of ninth-century churchmen. Fourth Lateran prescribed a programme to educate and train local priests, and thus their lay flocks, in Christian discipline and doctrine with the aim of ensuring a minimum level of observance of Christian knowledge and practice amongst all those living in Western Europe. The ways in which local bishops working with the new mendicant clergy, the friars, quickly set out to implement this programme across the medieval west have been described as a pastoral revolution.'’ The investigation of its earlier roots thus draws on, and emerges from, tracing the aftermath of the Carolingian reforms and is another of the central aims of this text.
Moreover, thirteenth-century churchmen, like their ninth-century counterparts, were not particularly ambitious. They were content to try to ensure that Christian practice was followed and the authority of Church doctrine accepted. They were not especially concerned to investigate the extent to which people believed, or did not believe, the tenets of the Christian faith as long as they acknowledged them. Some modern historians have sought to explore the extent of belief, and unbelief, in the medieval world.” This text has no such objective. Instead, following the lead given by the sources, its focus is on Christian practice rather than spirituality.
The three centuries which separated the pastoral ambitions of thirteenthcentury churchmen from their ninth-century predecessors have not commonly been treated as a whole by ecclesiastical historians.'* Like their counterparts in the social and political realms, they are often guilty of considering change in rigid ‘blocks’ and do so at the price of the ability to understand religious transformations across rather longer periods of time. This is particularly true for scholars of the changes within ecclesiastical institutions who have tended to see the period of the Gregorian ‘reforms’ of the mid-eleventh century as an important and unbridgeable caesura. That is, they argue that up to c.1000 the world is that of the Carolingians, in which the representatives of Church and state were united in a common endeavour to ensure Christianity was adopted and practised correctly, whereas from c.1000 leading churchmen sought to separate the Church from lay authority. The eleventh century therefore becomes either the end point or start point for ecclesiastical history in this period.'* But this periodization is the product of a teleological approach which views the relationship between the spiritual and secular powers as the central paradigm for understanding ecclesiastical history. This text rejects such teleology and suggests there is much to be gained by approaching the history of this period from a wider perspective.
The dominance of this existing chronological framework can be explained by the fact that up to the mid-twentieth century most scholars studied the development of ecclesiastical institutions, that is, the histories of particular monastic houses, local churches, dioceses, or that of the papacy itself. Such an institutional approach explains why the separation of spiritual from secular authority promoted by the eleventh-century reformers figures so largely in modern accounts: it was an issue of great concern both in the development of particular ecclesiastical establishments and of wider institutional consciousness.'° This bias towards institutional history led scholars working in the second half of the twentieth century to react against this approach by investigating the popular movements which sprang up in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, choosing to view them as autonomous from developments amongst the clergy. Historians now acknowledge the importance of these movements’ connections with the institutional Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries but their earlier roots remain neglected.'® When historians began to investigate the religious history of the laity in this period they therefore did so within the existing chronological framework constructed by earlier historians of ecclesiastical institutions, and this pattern has been perpetuated into the later scholarship.
Work on lay piety is also circumscribed by a second narrative, that of Christianisation. Scholars of the early Middle Ages (up to ¢.900) have mostly focused their attention on the success of the efforts made by churchmen (and women) to evangelise and convert the laity.'7 Their focus has been on the extent of paganism and pagan survivals, and thus on the success of the delivery of pastoral care. In contrast, scholars of the central Middle Ages have ignored pastoral care, preferring to follow their sources which were written by clergy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries who were, in the words of Colin Morris, ‘not much interested in ordinary people’, but rather in correcting the behaviour of the clerical elite, both secular priests and bishops, and monks.'* The nature and extent of the laity’s involvement with the Church only then becomes the focus of scholarly attention with the emergence of the pastoral concerns of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries epitomised by the emergence of a new movement, the evangelising friars, and the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 which stimulated a renewed interest amongst bishops in lay education and belief. They not only drew up a programme of very basic instruction to ensure a minimum level of observance amongst all Christians but set out to implement it through more effective education of local priests, wide-scale and regular preaching, and detailed guidance on how to hear the confessions of the laity.”
These institutional and chronological barriers to the study of religious change means there has been little systematic attempt to consider the ecclesiastical history across the years 900 to 1200; this is a situation which this text seeks to rectify. Turning away from the conventional narratives imposed by earlier periodizations, it seeks a new understanding of change in these formative centuries, through a thematic investigation of religious developments throughout this period. It will argue that there is much to be gained by treating these three hundred years as a coherent period in its own right. Looking across the years 900 to 1200, rather than stopping or starting in the eleventh century, allows us to explore both the continuities and changes across the period.
Rethinking religious change 900-1200
Existing periodizations pose one difficulty to the study of religious change in the central Middle Ages. But the three main prevailing scholarly narratives for change in these centuries also each provide their own challenges. These are, first, the importance of clerical purity and reform as an idea, spreading outwards from monasteries in the tenth century into the secular clergy in the eleventh century; secondly, the idea, which we have already alluded to briefly, that the delivery of pastoral care only came to prominence as a concern of the higher clergy in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, leading to the pastoral revolution generated by Fourth Lateran; and thirdly, that the most important development in this period was the separation of the laity from the clergy, the Church from the State, spiritual from secular power. As we shall see, all three narratives are worth investigating in more detail, in order to reflect upon the problems and consequent challenges they pose for scholars of religious change in this period. We will start with those raised by the use of the word ‘reform’ to describe religious changes in this period.
Reform
‘Reform’ as a label is applied indiscriminately by scholars to an enormously broad range of movements in this period. They include the various attempts in the tenth century to return to the purity of monastic rule (the tenthcentury reform movement), as well as the changes in the eleventh century lumped together by modern scholars as the papal reform movement or ‘Gregorian reform’ after Pope Gregory VII, one of its main protagonists. The latter include the attempts by senior clergy to promote the purity of the clergy’s lifestyle, removing it from the worldly contamination of marriage and/or sexual relations with women (and men) (nicolaitism) and payment for promotion (simony); to separate ecclesiastical appointments and therefore Church property from lay control (lay investiture); and the popular protests against the corrupt clergy which occurred at the same time. The same label has also been applied to the various movements to return (again) to the purity of the Benedictine Rule or to follow the active life of poverty and preaching of the apostles (the apostolic life or vita apostolica) which emerged c.1100, that is, the twelfth-century reforms or the medieval reformation.
The very use of the word ‘reform’ has conditioned historians, influenced by the model of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, to look for ruptures and sudden change affecting the whole of society. But the word reform (in Latin reformatio or the verb reformare) was not widely employed in this period.”° Reformare tended only to be used to refer to the personal transformation of the individual into the likeness of God; here medieval writers followed the sense in which the word was used in the Latin Vulgate version of the Pauline Epistles.*? Some central medieval writers utilised it when referring to the reform of individual monastic houses or individual churches, but it was not used in its modern sense of the transformation of the universal Church for the better until the early thirteenth century, and not widely until the fourteenth century.”” Medieval writers instead chose a different vocabulary to describe the change and improvement of religious institutions. Ninth-century Carolingian writers sought to correct, emend,
or admonish negligence, fault and scandal.”*
The tenth-century monastic reformers favoured images of cleansing, removing the filthiness left by neglect under the previous regime.** The eleventh-century reformers similarly preferred the language of purity, whilst the twelfth-century reformers often used the language of regrowth and renewal, alongside that of reconstruction.”
To describe one, or any, of the movements in this period as a reform movement is therefore anachronistic. Moreover, it is often hard to establish a certain set of features which characterises such medieval reform movements; as Gerd Tellenbach has pointed out with respect to the eleventhcentury ‘reform’ movement, it is virtually impossible to find a way in which the term has been used systematically by modern authors to apply to a consistent set of ideals.”° This value-laden term, normally used to denote improvement for the better, turns out to obscure the varied results and aspirations of these movements. It also sidelines the importance of the relationship between professional members of the institutions being reformed and the wider Christian population. By adopting an institutional perspective on change — whether it be in abbeys, convents, cathedrals or dioceses — the significance of the laity’s role in religious change risks being underplayed.
By choosing to study not the history of reform but rather the rhetoric and reality of the various movements for religious change which occurred in this period, this text has therefore consciously sought to steer a different course from other accounts which focus much more on institutional change. Exploring the various roles played by the laity in the religious changes of these years, especially those which took place within ecclesiastical institutions, and the impact which these developments, in turn, had on their own lives, will allow us to offer a fresh perspective on religious developments in this period.
Pastoral care
But before we do so, we need to examine the second paradigm which underlies much of the scholarship in this period, that is the current grand narrative for the Christianisation of medieval peoples in the central Middle Ages. How and to what extent were people in this period Christian, that is, how far did they understand Christian doctrine and live their lives according to the rites and calendar of the Church? By investigating how interested medieval churchmen were in delivering pastoral care to the laity, in educating local priests in how to administer rites to the laity and preach to them, we can begin to answer the question as to how far members of the laity at every level of society knew the tenets of Christian doctrine, and observed its injunctions.
Early medievalists are keen to investigate the success of the efforts made by churchmen and women to evangelise and convert the laity. The Carolingian rulers of the eighth and ninth centuries, and their advisers, sought to ensure the salvation of all their subjects to such an extent that in 1983 Michael Wallace-Hadrill went so far as to describe their ambitious policies for monitoring and discipline as envisaging a police state. Both the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious were marked by a concern with correction (correctio) and emendation (emendatio), that is, a desire to ensure that the practices of both the clergy and laity conformed to the Christian teaching of the Bible and the Church Fathers.”” The guidance on Christian behaviour and practice issued by various bishops to their diocesan clergy in the form of capitula perpetuated these ideas into the late ninth century.”* Although targeted at parish priests, episcopal capitula contained advice on measures to instruct and monitor the behaviour of both priests and their lay congregations. Previous students of pastoral care have ignored the central Middle Ages, focusing either, as we have seen, on the early Middle Ages, that is, the years up to around 900, or on the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries leading to the programme embodied in the decrees issued by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. This approach reflects the fact that both the ninth-century and thirteenth-century pastoral reformers generated a considerable number of pastoral texts for use by bishops checking up on clergy, and by clergy in the field. But it is worth noting that ninth-century texts continued to be read and copied in the intervening period, and helped to shape the thought world in which these later works were composed. Bishop Theodulf of Orléans’s early ninth-century synodal capitula, which were written to help a bishop instruct and check up on knowledge and behaviour of the priests in his diocese, for example, survive in some forty-nine manuscripts, many of them in tenth- and eleventhcentury copies.” Some 106 manuscripts of one particular type of early medieval penitential designed to administer penance to an individual survive copied between the late eighth and twelfth centuries.*° These early medieval texts thus survive in comparable numbers to many thirteenthcentury confession manuals; like their early medieval counterparts some, like John of Freiburg’s Confessionale, survive in numerous copies, whilst the circulation of many others was much, much smaller.*! Diocesan synods offered one opportunity for bishops to monitor the knowledge and equipment of local priests responsible for monitoring pastoral care. Carolingian bishops produced a mass of statutes like those of Bishop Theodulf for such occasions which influenced the composition of similar texts in tenth and eleventh-century Lotharingia, England and northern Italy.” In late twelfth-century France synodal statutes testify to the renewed attention paid by some bishops to monitoring the local priests responsible for the delivery of pastoral care.** In the thirteenth century this interest was followed by an explosion in the composition of such guidance all over Europe.
Given such evidence, to what extent were medieval churchmen in the central Middle Ages really uninterested in pastoral care? The years 900 to 1200 saw the building and rebuilding of many local churches: is it really safe to presume that leading clerics, unlike their earlier and later counterparts, were not interested in the role performed by the clergy serving them? Actual records of episcopal visitations only survive from the thirteenth century onwards, although the first text to prescribe how such visitations should be conducted in detail survives from the start of our period. Thirteenth-century records, such as that of Archbishop Eudes of Rouen, suggest bishops paid more attention to monitoring and disciplining the behaviour of their parish clergy than that of members of the laity.** But Regino of Priim’s early tenth-century account of how a bishop should conduct an episcopal visitation is equally concerned with investigating the behaviour of both the local clergy and their flock. It demonstrates the prevalence of pastoral concerns amongst some of the higher clergy in early tenth-century east Frankia and suggests that it worth delving further into the history of pastoral care in the central Middle Ages.
It is found in a portable guide to church law which Regino of Priim composed in about 906 at the request of his patron, Archbishop Ratbod of Trier. Regino envisaged that the bishop would take it with him on his tours of his diocese and use it to interrogate both the local priest and a jury of seven of ‘the more mature, honest and truthful men’ of each parish he visited. He thus included two lengthy questionnaires as guides to the bishop; the first, which includes 96 questions, was directed at the priest, the second, some 89 questions long, at the lay jury. The questions asked of both local priests and their parishioners have much to tell us about the clergy’s attitude to the laity, and the roles the laity were expected to play in their local church, at the beginning of the tenth century. Those to be asked of the priest include: did all the faithful come to communion three times a year, at Christmas, Easter and Pentecost? Did he preach to all his flock the need to observe the periods of fasting four times a year? Were tithes paid? Had he taught all his parishioners the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed? Had he admonished the married men in his flock as to what times they should abstain from sexual relations with their wives?* Through such means the bishops could establish whether the local church was properly equipped, its priest sufficiently well-educated and living a life in accordance with church law, and whether pastoral care was being properly administered. At the same time the text emphasised the bishop’s claims to authority over the local clergy.
The questions asked of the laity foresaw all manner of bad behaviour, from murder to sexual misconduct, theft to perjury, magic to pagan superstition, food pollution to incorrect Christian practice.*° Many sought to establish whether serious offences had been committed: had there been a homicide in this parish when the killer had killed the man either ‘from free will or through passion, or because of greed, or by chance, or unwillingly and under orders, or to avenge a relation, what we call a “feud”, or in war, or on the orders of a lord, or his servants’. Others seem, from their wording, to be as concerned to prevent violence as to discover sin: ‘If any man through hatred has not returned to peace, or sworn never to be reconciled with his brother, because it is contrary to God, this is a sin unto death.’ Interestingly, several closely echo the wording and concerns of the questions asked of the priest, and seem designed not only to discipline the laity but to check with a lay jury the answers the priest had given to his own examination on these matters. They focus upon whether everyone within that particular parish is practising Christianity correctly: ‘If anyone has not observed the Lenten fast, nor Advent, nor the Major litany nor Rogationtide without permission to abstain being obtained from the bishop’, and ‘If there is any Christian who has not communicated three times a year, that is at Easter, Pentecost and Christmas, unless he has been removed from communion by the judgement of the bishop or the priest for deadly sins.’ The only justification for failure to participate in the Eucharist was excommunication. Had anyone kept back the tithe he owed to God and the saints? Did the godparents instruct their godchildren in the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer? The purpose of the bishop’s visit was first and foremost to ensure that Christianity was being correctly followed, and correctly administered in that parish, and secondly that episcopal authority and jurisdiction was respected. The jury had to swear a public oath to report any act which they know to have been committed and which fell within the remit of the synod and which ‘pertain[ed] to the ministry of the bishop’ on pain of damnation.
But some questions envisage a system in which the parish community policed itself to ensure conformity. The bishop should ask if those whose profession took them outside the heart of the community attended church regularly, that is ‘if the swineherds and other shepherds come to church on Sunday and hear Mass, and similarly on other feast days’. He should also ask if everyone attended Sunday Mass: ‘if there is any man who has worked on the Lord’s day or special feasts, and if they all come to matins and to mass and to vespers on these days’. Even if he attended church regularly, a parishioner’s conduct might not be considered blameless: the jurors should testify ‘if any man, on entering church, is accustomed to recite stories and not to listen diligently to divine worship, and leaves before the mass has finished’. Clearly chatting during, and early departure from the mass were sufficiently commonplace to merit this disapproving mention. But Regino also presumed that there was a system already in place to ensure religious conformity, for the bishop should ask ‘If in each parish the decani are constituted through the villages’, defining decani as ‘truthful, Godfearing men, who admonish others that they should go to church at matins, mass and vespers, and not work on feast days; and if anyone transgresses these injunctions, that the decani immediately report him to the priest and deprive him from luxury and all work’. The reference to decani is unique to this text. Modern scholars have therefore debated whether they were early tithe collectors or church wardens. Whatever the case, the text prescribes a system of self-policing within these villages to ensure religious conformity which was in turn subject to episcopal inspection.
Regino’s portrait of an episcopal visitation represented an ideal; it is not a description, but rather a vision of how the world should be conjured up by an anxious man writing in very uncertain times. He witnessed and participated in the events which accompanied the disintegration of the Carolingian empire in the late ninth century. He composed his church law collection whilst in exile, having been ejected in 899 from the important Carolingian monastery of Priim, in Lotharingia, of which he had been elected abbot in 892. He was to remain in exile for the rest of his life as, in the words of Simon Maclean, ‘an embittered outsider’.*” The author of various works, including a Chronicle which covered events up to 906, his law collection must be treated as the work of an idealist, looking back to a golden age which had never existed when bishops were able to control and monitor both local priests and local communities, and local communities co-operated to enforce and monitor Christian law. It represents Regino’s aspirations for control and regulation in what was in reality an increasingly uncertain world.
But Regino did not make the text of his law collection up. Rather it is the culmination of ninth-century ideas about the importance of promoting and adjusting Christian behaviour to fit with Christian teaching. He drew most of his material from ninth-century sources: the questions to be asked of the priest came from various Frankish (episcopal) capitula, whilst many of those to be asked of the laity seem to have been based on early medieval penitentials.** The epitome of ninth-century concerns with correctio, Regino’s text thus represents an important hinge between the concerns of Carolingian ecclesiastical reformers, and those of later reformers, especially those of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Albeit in an idealised form he transmitted Carolingian ideals for the regular inspection and monitoring of clerical and lay behaviour into a new period, after the demise of the political authority of the Carolingian family, and is in part responsible for ensuring that these ideas were perpetuated into the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries and beyond.
The textual afterlife of Regino’s pastoral vision in the succeeding three centuries points to the continuing significance of Carolingian ideals of pastoral care, which is an important theme of this text. Long after the particular circumstances in which Regino had composed his text had passed, it continued to be read and copied. The Lzbri duo itself circulated throughout the German Reich of the Ottonian and Salian rulers, surviving in some ten manuscripts and four fragments from the tenth and eleventh centuries. It was also one of the main sources for the most influential canon law collection of the eleventh-century Church, Burchard of Worms’ Decretum (c.1020) which spread quickly and more widely throughout much of the medieval west, surviving in seventy-seven manuscripts with a German, French and Italian provenance.*” Burchard’s compilation, which included a version of Regino’s visitation questionnaire, in turn became an important source for some of the cornerstones of twelfth-century canon law, including the writings of Ivo of Chartres (d. 1115x1117).*° Nor was Regino’s a lone voice at the time: other texts were composed by and for bishops in both England and northern Italy in the course of the tenth century which were intended to guide them in how to inspect the standards of their local clergy and which harked back to ninth-century ideals.*’ The ninth-century texts themselves, upon which Regino drew, also continued to be widely copied in the tenth and eleventh centuries. And, as we shall see, their concerns continued to resonate through the central Middle Ages.
The Church’s relationship with the laity
Returning to Regino’s guide, it highlights the importance attached by one medieval churchman to the responsibility of the laity in policing both their own behaviour and that of the clergy. Given the significance attributed by modern scholars to the eleventh-century campaign to separate the laity from the clergy, we need to investigate further the evidence for the roles which churchmen expected the laity to play in the life and reform of the Church in this period. Was the Church’s attitude to the laity and their role in the life of the Church as negative as that suggested by eleventh-century reformist polemic? After all, any attempt by the ecclesiastical authorities to make a distinction between the clergy and the laity came up against the intractable problem of family and community affiliations.
The eleventh and twelfth centuries, as we have seen, are generally understood as moving away from the Carolingian and post-Carolingian worlds of the ninth and tenth centuries, in which secular and ecclesiastical power were viewed as working together, to one in which the clergy sought to liberate themselves from lay control of both appointments to clerical office and of ecclesiastical property, and to emphasize the distinction between the clergy and the laity, and the superiority of the clergy.” This shift is understood as being in large part the work of the papal reformers of the second half of the eleventh century. Thus writing in c.842 the Carolingian monk and courtier, Walahfrid Strabo (d. 849) systematically compared the ecclesiastical and secular orders of government, concluding:
Through the union of both orders and their mutual love one house of God is built, one body of Christ is made by all the members of His Office who contribute fruits for mutual benefit.**
Writing over two centuries later, in 1057, one of the leading papal reformers, Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida envisaged a world of separation between the two powers rather than co-operation:
Just as secular matters are forbidden to the clergy, ecclesiastical matters are forbidden to the Inity.*
Where these writers led, modern scholars have followed. Historians of the earlier period have been happy to explore the positive role played by secular rulers and nobles in promoting the Carolingian programme of correctio, the success of that policy, and what it meant for ‘ordinary’ members of the laity.° Scholars working on the central Middle Ages, however, divide into those who investigate the history of clerical reform, largely from the point of view of the clergy — be they popes, members of the papal cwria (court), local bishops, or monastic reformers*® — and those who are interested in the emergence of lay religious autonomy exemplified by movements such as the crusades, saints’ cults, and popular heresy.*” There are of course exceptions, notably historians of monasticism who have fruitfully explored the complex relations between members of the secular elite and their local monastery, and Maureen Miller’s study of the complex social developments which underlay the ‘reform’ of the religious institutions of Verona in this period.** Whilst building on earlier work, this text is intended to provide a new perspective on these three centuries, studying ecclesiastical developments in this period through the relationship between Church and people.
The relationship between the ordained clergy and the laity is fundamental to the history of the Church, and yet it is one which, as André Vauchez observed, was subject to ‘considerable shifts of emphasis’ throughout the Middle Ages.*” The danger is that such shifts are seen as all-encompassing, as in the schema sketched out above, which was one Vauchez himself subscribed to, viewing these centuries as witnessing a move from the co-operation of the ninth century to the separation of clerical from secular power in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The dyad of the clergy and the laity certainly became very popular amongst the writers of these centuries, and it is, perhaps, best articulated in the most influential canon law collection of the twelfth century, Gratian’s Decretum, compiled c.1140:
There are two kinds of Christians. There is one kind which, being devoted to God’s business and given up to contemplation and prayer, should refrain from all activity in worldly affairs. These are the clergy and those devoted to God, that is the conversi .. . The shaving of their head shows the putting away of all temporal things. For they should be content with food and clothing and having nothing of their own among themselves, but should have everything in common. There is also another kind of Christian, laymen. For laos means ‘people’. These are allowed to possess temporal goods, but only to the extent that they make use of them... They are allowed to take a wife, to till land, to judge between man and man, to conduct lawsuits, to place oblations upon the altar, to pay tithes, and thus can be saved if they avoid sin by well-doing.”°
Although it circulated widely within the circles of eleventh-century Italian reformers, the idea is much older. Gregory the Great (d. 604) distinguished between the clergy and the laity in the Moralia in Iob, when he divided the Church into ‘the order of preachers’ and ‘the multitude of hearers’.*! It is Gregory’s idea which seems to underlie this depiction of Mother Church on an Exultet Roll made at the monastery of Monte Cassino in southern Italy in c.1087. The personification of Mater Ecclesia stands in the middle; on the left-hand side are the clergy (clerus), represented by a group of men, some with tonsures, some without; on the right are the populus (the people), at the front of whom are a man and woman holding a child. Used in the Easter Vigil, the Exultet Roll contained the text of a hymn of praise sung during the blessing of the Paschal candle by the deacon, who delivered the Exultet from the an elevated lectern facing the congregation, unfurling the roll over its railings, so that the pictures were visible to those members of the congregation close enough to see them. This image echoed the words of the hymn quoted at the start of this chapter, calling on all God’s people to rejoice at Christ’s resurrection. Here the dyad was not a divisive but rather a unifying image, and one with well-established roots.
Whilst populus is sometimes used to refer to both the clergy and the laity, it is more often used, as in the image of the Church in the Exultet Roll, to refer to just the laity. Clerical writers used a range of terms to denote the laity: populus, laici, of course, but also the unlearned and the married.** They recognised the lay order to be a broad one: /aicus (layman) sometimes denoted a person of low status. Thus some tenth-century Burgundian charters distinguished between clerics, nobles, laymen, and peasants. More often it was used in its modern sense to denote those people who were not members of the clergy. The clergy often referred to the laity as ‘“God’s people’ and the ‘Lord’s people’. Thus canons issued at the Council of Trosly (909) emphasised how the populus Domini (the Lord’s people) had been neglected by the bishops and priests, who had responsibility for them:
The Church of God resides in bishops and priests to whom the people of the Lord are entrusted, and is recognised as distinct.**
The Constitutions issued by Archbishop Oda of Canterbury (d. 958) in the early 940s exhorted priests that ‘they should teach the people of God (populum Dei) through good example and holy habit, and inform and instruct [them] in holy doctrine’.** Writing in the early twelfth century one of the crusader chroniclers, Robert the Monk, described how one preacher addressed the crusader army as the people of the Lord and servants of God.*° ‘People’, as it was used by medieval writers, had a universalising meaning, covering men and women, lords and peasants.
The clerical-lay dyad was not the only model for the Church available to clerical writers. By the beginning of the tenth century medieval writers who wished to conceptualise the Church were able to draw upon a tremendous variety of different models. In addition to the dyad, they could use, as the seventh-century Spanish bishop Isidore of Seville did, a tripartite model to distinguish between clerics, monks and the laity. This threefold distinction remained popular throughout the Middle Ages; it was taken up in the twelfth century, for example, by the Cistercian author Ailred of Rievaulx who divided society into three orders: the natural order, who were married, enjoyed meat, wine and wealth — that is, the laity; the necessary order, whose members ‘expel the passions by keeping itself from licit things’ — that is, the clergy, and the voluntary order, whose members make a ‘willing sacrifice? — that is, monks.*° Another model, found, amongst other places, in Gregory the Great’s Moralia, drew a distinction based not on function but sexual practice: ‘[there are] three divisions of the faithful, in the state of life in the Church, that is those of pastors, of the continent, and of the married’.*” This threefold model became equally popular, and was taken up in the late tenth century by the Anglo-Saxon homilist, AZlfric of Eynsham, who made its hierarchical aspect more explicit:
in Goad’s church are three degrees of chosen men. The lowest degree is of believing laymen, who live in lawful marriage, for the sake of a family of children than of lust. The second degree 1s of widows, who after lawful matrimony live in purity for the attainment of the heavenly life. The highest degree is of persons of the virgin state who from childhood purely serve God and despise earthly Lusts.**
But writers of the central Middle Ages were also perfectly capable of attributing a much more positive and active role to the laity than the standard narratives of the period allow. In another sermon A'lfric interpreted Christ’s parable of the talents in which a rich man gave one servant five talents, another two, and another one, and the one who received five made another five, and the one who had received two made another two, but the one who received only one went and hid it in the ground, and therefore made nothing.” Surprisingly Ailfric interpreted the good servant who received five talents, and made a further five, as an unlearned/lay (ewed) man:
for some lay men are so constituted, that, with stimulation from the realm above, they give good example to other faithful, and ever teach rightly what they may know by the outer senses, though they cannot comprehend the inward deepness of God’s doctrine; and when in their fleshly lusts they ave temperate, and in worldly desires not too greedy, and also, through awe of God, preserve themselves from other vices, then also will they direct other men by the righteousness of their lives, and gain to God some man or more.”
The servant who received and made two talents he interpreted as the conscientious clergy, and the servant who hid his talent in the ground, as a member of the slothful clergy. A.lfric’s text was based mainly on Gregory the Great’s sermon on the same parable; however, whilst Gregory had targeted his sermon at the clergy, and interpreted the various talents representing possession of inner and outer understanding, A£lfric pushed Gregory’s text to identify explicitly the first servant with the laity or unlearned; the second servant with the learned, and the third servant with those who abuse their sense for things of the flesh. When the third servant is made to give his talent to the first servant by the master, the clergyman is therefore interpreted as giving the layman the inner understanding which he had previously lacked.°! In Alfric’s view, therefore, laymen could, if they lived correctly, play a central and important part in the work of the Church. Recent work suggests that Alfric directed his series of homilies to the clergy of the diocese of Sherborne, in southern England, for use in their preaching: his message was presented to the laity themselves.®
Ablfric’s view was not unique. The Visio Tnugdali, the tale of the vision of an Irish nobleman recorded by a twelfth-century Bavarian monk, recalls how Tnugdal saw in heaven, on a level with monks, men and women under a tree, each crowned with a golden crown, with a golden sceptre in his hand and he was told by his guiding angel:
this tree is the allegory of the holy Church and the men and women who ave under it are the builders and the defenders of the holy churches. They have striven to build or defend churches and, for the favours which they bestowed on holy churches, they have been welcomed into their religious confraternities, and through the admonitions of the religious, they left the secular condition and restrained themselves from carnal desires which wage war against the soul. They lead sober, righteous and godly lives in this present world, awaiting the blessed hope, which, as you see, has not fatled them.
The laity mentioned in the Visio Tnugdal are clearly members of the elite, those lords and princes able to endow materially churches. The author nevertheless shares the ambivalent attitude towards the laity of other clerical writers in this period. On the one hand they are seen as the lowest of the hierarchy, on the other as those who are the most significant members of the Church, and the ones who had the most potential. There was thus widespread recognition that the laity constituted a crucial and important part of the Church, and had a significant role to play in its development.
This view went back to the Gospels where crowds of ordinary people had an important role to play in supporting, and promoting, Christ’s message. The crowds (turbae) which were fed with five loaves and two fishes, which listened to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, and which witnessed Christ’s entry into Jerusalem the week before his crucifixion, were interpreted in scriptural exegesis as prefiguring the faithful of the Church itself. Such an interpretation also underlies the positive view attributed to crowds in many central medieval accounts, and this textual precedent, as much as social change, helps to explain the role which crowds were portrayed as playing in the religious life of the Church in these three centuries.°° Such reports must, however, be approached with caution, signalling as they do clerical rhetorical tradition rather than social reality. But it is worth remembering that this tradition contained positive as well as negative elements.
Viewing, as we must, the laity through the lenses of clerical writers, it is as well to remember therefore that the Christian people of the medieval west actually constituted a far more variegated body than that reported in many accounts. The bias of much of the surviving evidence for clerical—lay relationships is towards those at the higher end of the social spectrum, those able to afford to patronise the Church, and who were thought worth remembering by it. This text’s focus is therefore, largely, on the experiences of the lay and clerical elite, but wherever the sources allow it also investigates those of people towards the lower end of the social spectrum.
Reinterpreting the relationship between Church and people
Narratives of change are prone to error, but they are also necessary: we need them in order to make sense of seemingly unrelated changes across long periods of time and we reject them at our peril. But they can, as we have seen is the case with those for reform, pastoral care, and the relationship between spiritual and secular authority, also limit our understanding. This text does not seek to substitute yet another grand narrative but rather to suggest that rejection of the conventional periodization which structures most work on this period offers an opportunity to view the religious developments from a new perspective: that of the varying and multi-faceted relationship between the Church and people.
Adopting such an approach cuts across the conventional internal barriers erected by scholars of medieval religious history in this period, who tend to study specific institutions or religious movements, and joins up developments currently spread across a series of separate sub-fields in the scholarship: work on the development of parishes, monastic reform, clerical reform, the delivery of pastoral care, saints’ cults, pilgrimage and other forms of lay devotion, and its flipside, heresy. By examining the developments in the ecclesiastical institutions which made up the Church in this period through their relationship with the laity, I hope to bring a more integrated approach to the study of religion in western Christendom in this period.
This text is in three parts. The first part investigates the relations of members of the laity with ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, that is, with local churches, the secular clergy (including bishops), monasteries and canons, and considers their role in the successive changes which these institutions underwent in these centuries. The second part explores the evidence for the laity’s experience of Christianity, both that offered by the routine rites and services of the official ‘Church’, and that of the more autonomous movements which have been viewed as so typical of the later end of the period but many of which have earlier roots: confraternities, saints’ cults, long-distance pilgrimage and the crusades. The last part attempts to combine these two approaches by looking at how churchmen reacted to challenges to their authority from the laity. In particular it considers what many churchmen perceived as an increasing threat from heresy: how and why were laymen and women condemned as heretics? To what extent did the charge of heresy result from increasing lay religious autonomy, or was it rather a consequence of the growing awareness of a separate clerical identity, and the consequent desire of clergymen to assert their authority in the face of challenges to it? To conclude we investigate the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council: how far do they represent the culmination of the religious history of the preceding three centuries?
The dyad of Church and people constituted a powerful rhetorical trope, but it was also a reality. By studying the role the laity played in the changes taking place in the Church in this period, and the impact which the Church had on lay lives this text offers a fundamental reappraisal of what the Christian religion meant in the everyday lives of believers in this period.
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