Last time we were with Guibert, he was complaining about his miserable days being homeschooled in Latin from his private tutor Solomon, who was completely incompetent when it came to the subject he actually taught, but enforced strict discipline and denied Guibert all the pleasures of a regular medieval childhood. While it was Guibert’s mother who had got him into this in the first place by hiring Solomon, after some time she started to sense that something was very wrong, that her son’s education wasn’t quite turning out how she’d hoped and that Solomon wasn’t exactly who he'd cranked himself out to be in the job interview (I say this with deliberate anachronism). Guibert tells us how it happened:
She started asking me, as she usually did, whether I had
been beaten that day. So as not to appear to denounce my tutor, I said no
outright. Some call it a tunic, others an undershirt. She saw that my little
arms were black and blue, and that the skin on my poor back was swollen all
over from the canings I had received. My mother groaned when she saw how
cruelly I had been treated at such a tender age. She was disturbed and quite
agitated, and her eyes filled up with tears as she said: “If that’s the way
it’s going to be, you will not become a cleric! You will not put with this kind
of punishment just to learn Latin!” I looked at her, summoning as much
indignation as I could, and cried out: “even if I die, I will not give up my
lessons! And I will be a cleric!” I should add here that she had already
promised me, when I came of age, to provide me with arms and equipment if I
wanted to be knighted.
So, by his own recollection (we have no good reason to think
he made this up), Guibert says that his mother actually considered abandoning
the promise she and her late husband had made to God and the Virgin Mary to
have her son pursue a clerical career. That a pious woman like her, who would
otherwise take a promise to God and His mother very seriously, would say such
things after seeing how badly her son had been beaten by his Latin tutor is
significant.
You see, back in the 1960s and 1970s, many early historians
of childhood and the family, such as Lawrence Stone in “The Family, Sex and
Marriage in England” (1977), thought that medieval and early modern parents
typically felt little to no love or affection for their children. He also
supposed that once they had passed infancy, children were treated like little
adults and were subjected to harsh discipline, and that parents only really
began to nurture and dote on their children and recognise childhood as a
separate stage of existence from the eighteenth century onwards.
Very few scholars, either medievalists or early modernists,
would take these kinds of views seriously now. Stone’s work rested on some very
selective readings of the early modern English evidence, and his attempts to
marshal the social sciences in support of his arguments failed to convince
historians who actually had received training in anthropology, like Alan
MacFarlane. Meanwhile, the work of historians like Nicholas Orme has shown that
medieval people did have a concept of childhood as a separate stage of human
existence, and medieval parents did love their children, did show affection to
them (and even spoil them in some cases) and did genuinely grieve when they
died prematurely. Its society and culture that changes, not human emotions!
Guibert’s mother exemplifies how medieval parents cared
deeply for their children’s physical and emotional well-being, as well as
wanting them to pursue the best paths for them in life. And as I said earlier,
even if Guibert is taking some literary licence here, and we have no good
reason to think that he is, he expected this story to be believed by his
readers. They would have only thought it remotely plausible if indeed they
believed that a mother would typically be loving and caring for her son, and
would therefore be concerned to see him subjected to excessive corporal
punishment that would leave serious physical and emotional scars.
But as we can also see, Guibert himself was insistent that
he carry on with his studies with Solomon. His mother accepted his wishes and
Guibert continued to learn Latin, Bible-reading and hymn-singing with whatever
enthusiasm was left in him. When Guibert, now in his sixties, reminisced on
those times while writing the Monodies, he really had to make a great
deal of effort to comprehend how he was so fired up about education and
performing his religious duties as a 7 – 12-year-old child, and why that
enthusiasm completely evaporated when he was an adolescent. Putting his
proto-psychologist’s hat on, he wrote:
I was quick to pursue my lessons, however badly they were
taught; and I did not shun my churchly duties. On the contrary, when came time
for them, or when some obligation came up, there was nothing I preferred to
these duties, not even meals. That is how it was then. But alas! Dear Lord, you
know how much I shunned those duties later on, and how reluctantly I would go
about the Divine Office! There came a time when even the compulsion of blows
could hardly get me to perform them. Clearly my earlier motivation had not been
religious. It was not a product of mature thought but of childish impulse. But
when adolescence came and my instinctive perversity bloomed, I began to reject
every form of outward restraint, and all my earlier devotion vanished. Oh my
God! For a time there had been good will, or some semblance of good will, aglow
within me, but soon it was snuffed out by a black deluge of perverse fantasies.
To which a cynic might quip – “teenagers, in all times and
places, are the same!”
As Guibert entered adolescence, his mother started hunting out
for church positions for him in hope that her son would one day fly the nest
and become the priest he was always meant to be. This appeared to be quite
straightforward. This was an age in which family connections could get you
quite far in the church – think of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, the half-brother of
William the Conqueror.
Now, as I’ve said before, Guibert’s family really were as
low level aristocratic as you could get. They had a family castle, effectively
the bare minimum needed to make a knight an aristocrat as opposed to just a
peasant or manservant with a mail hauberk, an iron helmet, a sword and a horse
(and really, most eleventh century knights were the latter), and that was it.
They weren’t rich, their local power probably didn’t extend beyond a one-mile
radius of their castle keep, and they had no noteworthy ancestors to boast of.
But, as you did back then, anyone who was vaguely a somebody had links of some
sort to someone who was a bigger, more important somebody who could give
favours to advance you and your friends and relatives.
This, of course, is what we call patronage, and it was
fundamental feature not just of medieval society but of all pre-industrial
societies. Indeed, our very word patron is derived from the Latin word patronus
which describes guess what? A more important person who gives favours to
you, in return for you, a cliens (client), performing various services
for them. And it was these kinds of relationships that were the glue that held
ancient Roman society together. Same goes for the artists of the Italian
renaissance – they couldn’t produce their great masterpieces without wealthy
patrons to fund them, be they city communes, churches, cardinals, patricians,
princes or popes, and in some cases also protect them from accusations of
criminal behaviour (some of them, like Benevenuto Cellini, were thugs who got
away with a lot). Likewise, you can’t understand early modern politics, be it
at the absolutist court of Louis XIV at Versailles or the eighteenth-century
British parliament, without patronage.
Patronage of course continues to exist today, even though it’s
frowned upon in modern society. Most of us at least claim to support selection
for top jobs and commissions based on merit and open competition, but in practice
it definitely happens. Patronage comes up a lot in politics, as anyone who pays
attention to the news knows – Matt Hancock’s awarding of contracts to his matesduring the COVID-19 pandemic or Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list are probably
the most salient examples. The Media is full of it too, and arguably there it gets
even greasier. As Peep Show’s Super Hans, always unhinged but often very insightful,
says in the first episode, about the music industry, “its not who you know, its
who you blow.”
Academia is also full of patronage, and that may be one of
the reasons for why patronage became an incredibly fashionable thing for
academic historians in the mid-twentieth century to look at. For some, it
became an obsession to the point that they saw it as the true substance of
politics and political ideas and principles as virtually irrelevant, a “screen
and a sham” for the real workings of power. The best examples of this are Lewis
Namier’s “The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III” (1928), Ronald
Syme’s “The Roman Revolution” (1939) and K.B McFarlane’s “The Nobility of Late
Medieval England” (published posthumously in 1973, but based on his 1953 Ford Lectures
at Oxford). Since the 1980s and 1990s there’s been a pushback against this kind
of thinking about political history, what I call the “political cultural turn”
in history, but patronage is resurfacing as a major area of interest again
through the current fashion among academic medievalists for looking at
networks, which sound a bit less elitist and a bit more inclusive. Indeed, “Networks
and Entanglements” is going to be the theme for the 2023 International Medieval
Congress at Leeds, which I won’t be attending because I’ve basically left the
academic network and I don’t have a patron (i.e., a doctoral supervisor) to introduce me to all the luminaries. Of course,
networking is a big part of modern professional life in general – the teaching
world is full of it and I’m going to have to do some of it myself next Wednesday
at the PGCE employment fair.
But enough tangential rambling and back to Guibert. He says:
My mother was determined to obtain for me some
ecclesiastical title, whatever the cost. The first opportunity proved not only
bad but harmful. It involved one of my adolescent brothers, who was a young
knight living in the town of Clermont (that is, the one situated between
Compiegne and Beauvais). He was expecting some money from the lord of this
place – whether it was a loan or some kind of feudal obligation I don’t know.
When the lord proved slow in paying his debt (from lack of funds, presumably),
one of my relatives suggested he give me a canonicate or, as they call it, a “prebend,”
in the church of that town. (Contrary to all church regulations, this church
was under his authority). In exchange for this prebend my brother would cease
pestering him about repayment.
The patronage relationship here is of course a feudal one
between lord and vassal, with Guibert’s brother being a vassal of the lord of
the castle at Clermont in Picardy. That’s the thing about feudalism – we often
make it out like its this weird, distinctively medieval thing but really its
just a patronage relationship but with land (held on condition of service) involved.
But feudalism didn’t just involve land and military service. It could involve
money too i.e., among the complaints of the barons against King John when they
forced him to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 was that he charged extortionate
amounts of money for them to inherit their lands or get married, both of which
were in themselves standard feudal obligations which the barons expected of
their own knightly subtenants. Guibert is unsure whether his brother owed his
feudal lord one of those, or whether it was a financial loan – if the latter,
then we could interpret as a sign of the increasingly commercial world of the
high Middle Ages (1000 – 1350). But what’s most interesting to us here is that
in lieu of paying this debt to Guibert’s brother, the feudal lord was going to
offer Guibert a prebend. A prebend is a portion of the revenues of a cathedral
or collegiate church (church run by a group of lesser clerics) to a canon or other
cleric who hasn’t been ordained as a priest.
Now why would a feudal lord have the authority to do this. Well,
you see, private individuals had always been founding churches. Back in the Roman
Empire, when Christianity was a small persecuted, breakaway sect of Judaism, a
church had typically been inside someone’s house. and the church as an institution
didn’t really exist, being instead a loose grouping of local Christian
communities without much overarching leadership and organisational structures. In
this period, bishops, priests and deacons were basically just part-time local
community volunteers – their names in Greek, the main language of the early
Christians, are episkopoi, presbyteroi and diakonoi, which
literally mean “managers”, “elders” and “sponsors” respectively. I’ve found
Kate Cooper’s work incredibly helpful in realising this, and her husband Conrad
Leyser taught me at Worcester College – I always found it kind of cute how much
the two of them share historical theories and ideas. This changed somewhat in
the fourth century with Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, which
saw the church being constituted as an empire-wide corporate organisation with
bishops becoming quasi-civil servants and a definite formal hierarchy of clerics
emerging. Churches became important urban civic buildings which bishops had
responsibility over, repairing them if they became rundown and providing them
with clergy, though most of the churches were founded by private individuals as
a public demonstration of their religious faith and generosity to the community
just as earlier Roman aristocrats had done with temples, bathhouses, theatres,
amphitheatres and the like. Even churches built on the estates of aristocratic landowners
were under the control of bishops, and indeed the estates of Roman senators in
fourth century Africa were so massive that many of them needed not just their
own churches but their own bishops too.
By Sixtus - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=707711
After the Western Roman Empire had fallen and Christianity
continued to spread, both within the former empire and outside it, two trends
came about. One was that more churches were being built in rural areas by
private landowners. Another was that the slow weakening of state power meant
that local custom could increasingly take hold. By the eleventh century both of
these processes were complete, and so throughout a lot of Europe, especially northern
Europe, private landowners had the right to appoint priests to their local
churches, along with the responsibility to maintain them. Various attempts had
been tried to combat this situation, like the Synod of Trosly in 909 said that churches
were under the gubernatio (governance) of the bishop and the dominium
(ownership or lordship) of the lord. Confusing isn’t it. But clearly by Guibert’s
day, some people were aware that there was something illegal about a lord appointing
a priest or awarding a prebend, as Guibert’s own account would seem to indicate.
But it was common all the same, and most could get away with it. Indeed, there’s
a scholarly German word for this practice, as there so often is – eigenkirche.
From the late eleventh century, church reformers led by the papacy tried to
combat powerful lay landowners having control over churches, but elements of it
still lingered on. Exemplary of this is the late medieval English legal
principle of advowson which allowed local landowners the right to appoint parish
priests, which wasn’t phased out until the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries – thus, you’ll often find as a plot-point in a Victorian novel a
country squire trying to give a plum vicarage to a family friend.
So, it all seemed like a brilliant plan to kickstart young Guibert’s
career as a priest. But, as with a lot of things in Guibert’s life, things didn’t
turn out as hoped. How and why this happened, we’ll see next time.
Works cited:
A Monk's Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent, translated by Paul J Archambault, Pennsylvania University Press (1996)
Edward Powell, "After after McFarlane: The Poverty of Patronage and the Case for Constitutional History" in Dorothy J Clayton and Peter McNiven (eds), Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval English History, Sutton Publishing Ltd (1994)
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