From the sources 9: self-righteousness and hypocrisy in the eleventh century reformation part 1

 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.

Clermont, Picardy, with the castle of the lord whom Guibert's brother served and the church where Guibert was going to be given a prebend pictured. By Guillaume de clermont 60 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11505039

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.

Basilica of San Clemente, Rome, a quintessential ancient Roman house church traditionally believed to have been that of the first century Pope Clement himself. The current building is mostly twelfth century with some even later additions. 

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.

The quintessential example of a proprietary church. Lorsch Abbey in the Middle Rhine Valley in Germany, founded in 764 by Count Cancor and his mother Willeswind on their estates. Charlemagne took it over in 774 as a royal foundation and the remarkable, and very classical-looking Carolingian gatehouse (c.850 - 900) dates from that period of royal ownership hence why its called the Konigshalle. I visited it in May this year. 

Another good example of a proprietary church. Einhard's basilica at Michelstadt in Hesse, Germany, built by Charlemagne's friend and biographer, Einhard, in 828 to house the relics of Saint Marcellinus and Peter that he had brought all the way from the catacombs in Rome. Einhard intended it to be part of his retirement home in the Odenwald. I had the pleasure of visiting this place back in May, and I wish my retirement home will be as grand as this, which it almost certainly won't.

The parish church of St Mary's Stanwell, formerly Middlesex now Surrey, founded in 1204 as the local parish church by the knight William Windsor after King John confirmed a grant of land made by William to the parson of Stanwell. William Windsor's descendants kept the advowson until 1415, when Richard Windsor gave the right to nominate the parish priest to Chertsey Abbey. After the abbey was dissolved in 1537, the crown took over that right. I visited here on an epic walk two weeks ago.

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)

Kate Cooper, Property, power, and conflict: re-thinking the Constantinian revolution, in Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser, Making Early Medieval Societies, Cambridge University Press (2016)

'Stanwell: Church', in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 3, Shepperton, Staines, Stanwell, Sunbury, Teddington, Heston and Isleworth, Twickenham, Cowley, Cranford, West Drayton, Greenford, Hanwell, Harefield and Harlington, ed. Susan Reynolds, London (1962)