From the sources 9: self-righteousness and hypocrisy in the eleventh century reformation Part 3

 

The most enigmatic scene from the Bayeux Tapestry. A cleric in secular clothing touches the face of a mysterious woman called Aelfgyva in a bizarre intermission from the story of Harold Godwinson's visit to Normandy in 1064. Some think its an allusion to a notorious sex scandal at the time - it looks like the cleric is amorously caressing Aelfgyva, and in the border below a naked man is touching his genitals. The Bayeux Tapestry was most likely made between 1068 and 1070, not long after the time Guibert's family started searching for a church prebend for him.

So last time I gave my best attempt at a crash course on the papal revolution. But now let’s zoom back into the juicy details of Guibert’s autobiography and see how all this played out at the grass roots.

We’ll firstly revisit that quote from Guibert that was the stumbling block that led us on to the papal revolution:

At that time, the Holy See had initiated a new attack against married clerics. Consequently, some zealots began railing against these clerics, claiming that they should either be deprived of ecclesiastical prebends or forced to abstain from priestly functions.

Now the specific moment in the papal revolution that Guibert is referring to when he says “at that time, the Holy See had initiated a new attack against married clerics” is in the spring of 1059, when Pope Nicholas II convened the Synod of Rome. This was a key point of escalation in the papal reform movement, as one of the most important outcomes of the synod was the creation of the college of cardinals to elect the pope – until 1059, popes had been installed on the throne of St Peter either by the emperor, the aristocratic clans of Lazio or by the Roman citizen mob. But it was also there that he continued what Leo IX did at Rheims in condemning simony, though he went a step further in outlawing all lay investiture even from the German emperor, who could continue to invest bishops once he had acquired that right from the Pope – this would be key in leading up to the struggle between Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. But what it also did was condemn clerical marriage, by forbidding any deacon or priest known to live with a woman from assisting and celebrating at the Mass. And as Guibert indicates clearly in this passage, these measures were widely supported by ordinary lay Catholics.

Early twelfth century fresco of Pope Nicholas II at the basilica of San Clemente Laterano in Rome, appearing no doubt as he did when he issued the legislation outlawing clerical marriage at the Lateran Council, which took place almost in the exact location where this fresco is, in 1059.

This event would have been one of the most discussed and divisive political events of Guibert’s childhood, almost like 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 financial crash, the election of Obama, the Coalition’s Austerity programme and the raising of tuition fees, the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War, Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump were for mine. And it really does testify to the growing power of the papacy that for the first time since the days of the Roman Empire, decisions made in Rome could be have effects on minor provincial towns in Northern France. But what’s also so interesting about this is that Guibert, despite being a serious Benedictine monk who struggled with self-loathing and guilt about his own sexual urges, finds the idea that clerics should be celibate too quite horrifying. You can tell from the language he uses to describe the campaigners against clerical marriage not as heroic moral reformers but as crazy fanatics trying to force good decent people to accept their ideology. Sounds almost familiar, doesn’t it! Indeed, as I’ll no doubt show you in future posts, Guibert was in many ways quite a conservative writer, who did not like the way politics, society and culture were headed. But why was the idea that deacons and priests should not have wives or have sex so radical?

Of course, contrary to what some historians specialising in the high and later Middle Ages (1050 – 1500), especially those specialising in sexuality and gender, tend to think, this wasn’t an idea that had come completely out of blue. Instead, the idea that clerics must be celibate had been floating around for a very long time. Here we are of course wading into incredibly theologically sensitive territory, as Catholics view clerical celibacy as an ancient and unshakeable apostolic tradition, whereas Protestants see it as an evil papistical innovation lacking in any Biblical foundation whatsoever which leads priests down the path of sin because they don’t have the right outlet for their natural urges (the marriage bed). Greek and Russian Orthodoxy sit between the two extremes. Bishops in Eastern Orthodox are generally not allowed to marry – indeed, they are often expected to be former monks. But ordinary priests and deacons are allowed to marry and have children, though they are expected to get married before their ordination, and this has been the tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy since the Middle Ages. Indeed, going back to late antiquity, the morals of priests has always been much more of an issue in Latin (Western) Christianity than in Greek (Eastern) Christianity. To Greek Christians in the fourth to seventh centuries, what mattered most to a church congregation was whether or not your priest believed in the correct theological doctrines, especially concerning the nature of Jesus Christ (whether he was more divine or human, or equally both). Whereas to Latin Christians in that period, and ever since, the question that mattered most was “is my priest a good man?” This is one of the many super-insightful things that Chris Wickham brings up in the “Inheritance of Rome”, which I’m still reading for fun at the moment.

The New Testament doesn’t say anything in favour of clerical celibacy. While, unless you’re Dan Brown, it is indeed true that Jesus of Nazareth himself was not married and never had sex, some of his disciples undoubtedly were. Matthew 8:14 mentions Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law – the first Pope was therefore a married man. St Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians 9:5, mentions that two of the other original twelve apostles, Jesus’ brothers James and Simon, were also married. And so far as we can tell from what Jesus says in the Gospels, he had nothing bad to say about marriage.

However, St Paul, without whom Christianity would have remained an obscure Jewish sect, had an ambivalent view of marriage. He may have been married before he went on the Road to Damascus, but by the time he was spreading the word of Jesus and writing his epistles he was single. Also, and this is really crucial, St Paul argued that being a lifelong virgin was the best possible choice for a Christian – in Corinthians 7:1 he wrote “it is good for a man not touch a woman.” This was because he believed that virgins had greater devotion to God than married men and women. In Corinthians 7:32 – 34 he wrote “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: but he that is married careth for the things of the world, how he may please his wife. There is difference also between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband.” But this doesn’t mean that St Paul opposed marriage outright. Instead, he argued that men and women should marry if they couldn’t contain their lust, because that way they’d avoid sinning. As he wrote in Corinthians 7:8 – 9 “it is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” And, and this is crucial to what we’re focusing on here, he did not advocate for clerical celibacy. In his First Epistle to Timothy 3:2, he wrote “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt at teaching.” Its safe to say that this job description for priests and bishops was the one most widely held to by Christian communities in the first three centuries of Christianity.

Where things really started to change was in the fourth century AD, when as we said before bishops stopped being just local community leaders and essentially became officials under the patronage of the Roman Emperor following the conversion of Constantine the Great. That in itself didn’t do anything to endanger clerical marriage, but the more Christianised late Roman society became, the more issues flared up. Along with the rise of the first Christian monks and hermits, an ascetic invasion took place in which the ranks of the bishops and other church leaders came to be filled with admirers of these holy men and women who believed that virginity was spiritually superior to marriage. I can’t possibly do justice to explaining the rise of Christian asceticism, all I can say is read literally anything by Peter Brown (a living legend) as he’s been the undisputed expert on this stuff for the last fifty years. Among the biggest supporters of asceticism were St Ambrose of Milan, St Martin of Tours, St Jerome and St Augustine of Hippo. They were opposed by many people, including Jovinian, who argued that marriage and virginity were equally good and thus had a lengthy spat with Jerome over it. By the end of the fourth century, the ascetics had definitely won out over their enemies and almost all the writings of the anti-ascetic faction in late antique Christianity do not survive to us today, either being targeted for destruction or simply neglected over the centuries. And in the 390s, Pope Siricius made the first decree advocating celibacy for priests. Thus, by c.400 AD, clerical celibacy was the official ideological position of the Western Church and that did not change.

Did that decree actually make clerical marriage illegal and lead to any kind of systematic clampdown on married clerics. The short answer is, actually no. In the East, Pope Sicirinus was completely ignored and Greek Christianity has always officially allowed married priests, as I said before. But in the West too, for the next 600 years, clerical marriage was incredibly common and most of the time in most places basically tolerated. Indeed, it became normal for priests and even bishops to treat their churches as property that they could pass on to their sons. A good example is Archbishop Milo of Trier (d.753), who was a close ally of Charles Martel and may have been the uncle of Pippin Short (Rotrude of Hesbaye, Pippin’s mother, is his putative sister), both long-time friends of this blog. Milo was the son of Archbishop Leudwinus of Trier and his wife Willigard of Bavaria. He likewise had lots of children with his wife, and became the archnemesis of St Boniface, who disapproved of his worldly and warlike personality – fittingly enough, Milo died during a boar hunt. Not far from Trier, Archbishop Gewilib of Mainz was also married and was the son of Archbishop Geroldus. Gewilib was another warrior, who avenged his father after he fell in battle against the Continental Saxons on Charles Martel’s campaigns by slaying the Saxon warrior who killed him. He fell afoul of Saint Boniface too, and was deposed by him – back in St Boniface’s home country, Anglo-Saxon England, bishops were predominantly monks and therefore could not possibly be married. Some historians see a shift against clerical marriage, and certainly some Carolingian reformers were against it. For example, our friend Theodulf of Orleans wrote in the precepts for his diocese:

Let no woman live with a presbyter in a single house. Although the canons permit a priest’s mother and sister to live with him, and persons of this kind in whom there is no suspicion, we abolish this privilege for the reason that there may come, out of courtesy to them or to trade with them, other women not at all related to him and offer an enticement to sin with him.

Emperor Charlemagne’s own legislation left the situation much more ambiguous. In his General Capitulary for the Missi in 802, he wrote:

If, moreover, any priest or deacon shall presume hereafter to have with him in his house any women except those whom the canonical licence permits, he shall be deprived of both his office and inheritance until he be brought into our presence.

It is unclear whether the women included in the “canonical licence” for are just a priest’s blood relatives, or whether that would also extend to a lawfully wedded wife. Meanwhile the Penitential of Bishop Halitgar of Cambrai, written in the 830s, says a bit more clearly:

If after his conversion or advancement any cleric of superior rank who has a wife has relations with her again, let him be aware that he has committed adultery. He shall do penance with the foregoing decision, each according to his order.

What Halitgar meant by a cleric of superior rank is unclear. But what he’s saying is that if these clerics get ordained whilst still being married men, that’s fine, its just that they must swear off having sex once they’ve acquired their church positions.

Still, in the Carolingian period we continue to find plenty of married bishops, just as we also find plenty of bishops who led armies into battle and fought as warriors despite St Boniface’s condemnations of it in the 740s. Indeed, even Pope Hadrian II (r.867 – 872) was a married man with children, who remained married, sexually active and a family man after being appointed to the papal office. And among ordinary village priests and other lesser clerics, clerical marriage was normal and mostly unchallenged. We saw some of that in the Marseille Polyptych in 814. And as we go into the tenth century, we continue to see clerical marriage and priestly dynasties flourishing both inside and outside the former Carolingian Empire. In the cartulary of Redon in Brittany in the early tenth century, we see lots of priests passing down their offices to their sons for generation after generation. We can find lots of similar evidence from tenth century England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Italy and Spain. The evidence from Anglo-Saxon England for clerical marriage in the period 900 - 1066 is plentiful, and most named priests in this period seem to have been the sons of priests, many of whom inherited the exact same church offices as their fathers, as painstaking research by Julia Barrow has shown. Indeed, many of these priestly dynasties in Anglo-Saxon England continued even after the Norman Conquest brought the papal revolution to England. William the Conqueror and Archbishop Lanfranc seem to have only really taken action against married bishops, like Leofwine of Lichfield (deposed in 1071), which is a big contrast to Normandy where clerical celibacy did make some headway in the late eleventh century, despite much division over it. Only in the century after 1150 did church reformers really succeed in imposing celibacy on English cathedral canons and parish priests. As a result, many churches in Anglo-Saxon and Norman England were basically the property of these priestly dynasties. For example, when the incumbent priest of All Saints’ church in Lincoln tried to give the church to Peterborough Abbey when he decided to become a monk there, the citizens wouldn’t allow him to remove it from the ownership of his family unless King William consented, a case which is recorded in the Domesday Book.

All Saints' Greetwell, Lincoln, today. Though the church saw some alteration in the nineteenth century, most of the eleventh century building is clearly visible.

A really good example of a clerical dynasty working in practice is the hereditary priests of Hexham in Northumberland, a father, son and grandson who held the parish church in succession from 1020 to 1138. The dynasty began with Alfred, who was also sacrist of Durham cathedral from 1020 until his death in 1041. He married the sister of Collan II, provost of Hexham to the bishop of Durham from 1042 to 1056, and together they had three children: Eilaf, who succeeded his father at Hexham; Hemming, who became priest of Brancepeth no later than 1055; and Ulkill, who was priest of Sedgefield no later than 1085. Eilaf, like his father, held an important position in the bishop’s administration as well, and from his marriage he had two sons: Eilaf Junior, who succeeded him as priest of Hexham; and Ealdred, who was a canon at Hexham Priory. Eilaf Junior became the new priest of Hexham in 1086, the year of the Domesday Book, and kept the office until his death in 1138, the year the Scots invaded Northumberland and were defeated at the Battel of the Standard.

Thereby, while the idea of clerical celibacy had been around for a long time, and influential in a lot of circles, and past precedent certainly did matter – the papal revolutionaries certainly did look back to the late Roman world, when the first calls for clerical celibacy had emerged, for inspiration a lot. Still, it had never been the norm down to the eleventh century. Thus, it was a genuinely shocking idea for a monk, someone who professionally had to be in favour of abstaining from sex, like Guibert, when the papacy launched a campaign to make clerical marriage illegal in all of Latin Christendom in 1059.

Why the Papal revolutionaries would choose to target clerical marriage as one of the main evils to uproot does deserve explanation. Apart from the ideological precedents given by late Roman and Carolingian churchmen, the main attraction of it all came with the idea of bringing all churches and their property under the control of the Church as a multinational corporation and being able to control who was appointed to them. This you could not do if dynasties of hereditary priests existed (the natural consequence of clerical marriage), just like you could not do it if churches were under control of kings and feudal lords (lay investiture) or if people could just buy their way into clerical office (simony). The other underlying reason, going back to the letters of St Paul which we saw earlier, is the idea that you can only be fully devoted to God if you have no distractions, one of which being marriage and family life. Thus, if the papal revolutionaries wanted their priests to be as devout in their service to God and unquestioningly loyal to the Church as a multinational corporation as possible, they needed to deny them marriage and family life. Moreover, celibacy would give the priests moral authority by demonstrating high levels of self-control, just as it had given monks and other holy men such authority in centuries before. This would help them be the enforcers for the Church’s broader programme for Latin Christian society as a whole.

 The reasons why people would want to resist this are as clear as day. Imagine you’re just a regular parish priest somewhere in Northwest Europe sometime around 1100. You’re living a comfortable and wholesome life with your wife, your son and three daughters, all of whom you love to bits. All of a sudden, an order comes from your local bishop, a former monk who has never married, that your marriage is not a real marriage in either the eyes of God or the law. Therefore, you must separate from your wife and children and never let them in your house again, or risk being banned from performing church services and losing your property. People in your local village or town start jeering and publicly shaming your wife, calling her a concubine and a slut. All of your children are now bastards under the law and the plans you carefully laid out for them have to be thrown out the window. Your son can no longer train as a priest and succeed you. And no respectable young man in the local community will want to marry your daughters. This goes in the face of what was perfectly normal in your father and grandfather’s day, and you know that priests, bishops and even popes in the early church were married. You might feel tempted to tell him to f*** off and just carry on as you are. You can try to reason with him, pointing to church history and morality – if you can’t have a wife, your natural urges might lead you and other married clerics to fornicate with, you know, actual prostitutes, a mortal sin. Or you might get sympathetic neighbours to throw stones at the bishop or his agent. Or you might even go about writing pamphlets and speeches suggesting that this all a conspiracy by sodomite bishops and monks, trying to direct the new religious fervour of the common people against good honest married clerics, while they’re busy pulling and sucking each other off in their dormitories. All of these first three responses to the reformers are attested Normandy in the last quarter of the eleventh century by Orderic Vitalis, and the fourth response was taken by the cleric and poet Serlo of Bayeux. Its notable that one of the main champions of clerical celibacy in England, none other than Guibert’s former friend and tutor Anselm of Canterbury, was almost certainly gay. As William of Malmesbury wrote, at the Council of Westminster in 1102 there were going to be laws passed against sodomy in the monasteries, but Archbishop Anselm suspiciously decided not to promulgate them at the last minute. To many people at the time, reformers championing clerical celibacy were nothing but rank hypocrites.

In many ways, this is a story that resonates with our own times, in more ways than one, and historians writing about this period often slip into casting one side as the goodies and the other as the baddies, depending on their personal and political inclinations. The Gregorian reformers/ papal revolutionaries can seem like the good guys, as stalwart progressives who were trying to stamp out corruption and nepotism and make priests more upright and accountable. On the other hand, their opponents among the parish clergy can seem like the good guys, as honest, down-to-earth folks who were really doing their duties as best as they could but had fallen victim to snobby aristocratic bishops and hypocritical do-gooder monks who wanted to destroy established traditions and local communities in the name of their radical ideology. Likewise, both can seem like the bad guys in the face of twenty-first century sensibilities. The Gregorian reformers were undoubtedly misogynistic, essentially saying that women were to blame for bad priests and as soon as they put them away the better, and some would say that clerical celibacy is directly to blame for the current problem of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. On the other hand, their opponents resorted to what we would now recognise as homophobia in their polemics against the reformers, and essentially held to the belief, common among modern anti-feminist movements, that heterosexual men can’t control their lust and that without a wife or a stable long-term relationship they’ll shag any woman with a pulse. I’ve tried my best to be as impartial and empathetic as I can to both sides. Guibert was impartial on the matter in his own characteristically downbeat way, as we’ll see.

Now there were not one but two people helping bat for Guibert in getting that church prebend at Clermont. The first was of course his brother, a knight of the castle of Clermont whom the lord owed a debt. The other was his brother, a layman whom the local bishop had illegally made abbot of the very collegiate church where Guibert was going to get his prebend as a priest. Guibert describes his cousin, whom he detested, thus:

It just so happened that one of these zealots was a certain nephew of my father. This man, who was more powerful and cunning than his peers, would indulge in sex like such an animal that he would never put off having a woman when he wanted one, and yet to hear him rail against clerics regarding this particular canon [the ban of clerical marriage], one would have thought he was motivated by a singular modesty and distaste for such things … He could never be chained to a woman through marriage, for he never intended to be shackled by such bonds … Finding a pretence by which I might benefit at the expense of a certain well-placed priest, he began pressing the lord of the castle … For contrary to every law, human and divine, this man had been authorised by the bishop to be the abbot of that very church. Thus, even though he himself had not been canonically appointed, he was demanding of the canons that they respect the canons.

Much like in Serlo of Bayeux’s polemics, here the supporters of the papal revolution are hypocrites. All except here, the hypocrite in question (Guibert’s cousin) is not a covert homosexual, but a red-blooded openly promiscuous heterosexual. Guibert describes him both with vitriol and his outstanding verbal wit and sense of irony, and in doing so sums up what many people felt at the time about the reformers – that they were preachy and self-righteous, but ultimately more morally bankrupt than the clerics they were trying to cast aside.  

What did the poor married priest, whose job Guibert’s relatives were trying to steal to give to Guibert, do about this. Well, he took the nuclear option. Beat these revolutionaries and fanatics at their own game by turning their own principles against them. Guibert relates it thus:

At this time, it was not only a serious offence for members of the highest orders and canons to be married, but it was also considered a crime to purchase those offices involving no pastoral care … Those who took the side of the cleric deprived of his prebend as well as many contemporaries of mine, started murmuring about simony as well as the excommunications that had recently proliferated.

Now if there was anything more sure-fire to bring the ecclesiastical authorities and popular opinion on your side, it was accusations of simony. As I’ve explained before, outlawing simony was a cause celebre of the Gregorian Reform movement as well as imposing clerical celibacy. And most people could get behind it on that. As I explained to my year 10s when I was teaching them the church reforms of Archbishop Lanfranc as part of their Norman Conquest GCSE unit, having a simoniac priest in the eleventh century would be like having a local GP or a headteacher who had purchased their position rather than getting it on merit now. It was absolutely scandalous, because the church for people in the eleventh century was like the school system and the NHS for us today and so they wanted priests who were honest, upright and well-qualified for the job. And in trying to secure a church position for Guibert through a debt his lord owed him, what was his brother doing other than well, you know, simony of course. And from how Guibert describes it, in this way the married priest was able to get public opinion on his side over an issue that had clearly caught the attention of the citizenry of Clermont.

Even though he was a married priest, this man could not be forced to part with his wife through the suspension of his office; but he had given up celebrating Mass. Having given the divine mysteries less importance than his own body, he justly escaped the punishment that he thought he had escaped by renouncing the sacrifice. Once he was stripped of his canonical office, there being nothing left to deter him, he began publicly celebrating mass again while keeping his wife. Then a rumour spread that, in the course of these ceremonies he pronounced excommunication on my mother and her family and repeated it several days in a row. My mother, who always feared about divine matters, feared the punishment of her sins and the scandal that might erupt. She surrendered the prebend that had illicitly been granted and secured another one for me from the lord of the castle in anticipation of some other cleric’s death. Thus, do we “flee the weapons of iron, only to fall under the shafts of a bronze bow [Job 20:24].” To grant something in anticipation of someone’s death is hardly more than issuing a daily incentive to murder.

So the priest had successfully mobilised the local community against Guibert’s family, and by publicly excommunicating them in front of a crowd of the ordinary churchgoers who supported him, he was able to force them to back down. What Guibert’s mother then did next horrified Guibert, and indeed by the time Guibert wrote the Monodies, the practice of securing a church position in anticipation of the incumbent’s death had been outlawed by Pope Paschal II (r.1099 – 1118) at the Council of Beauvais in 1114. Thus, a would-be victim of the papal revolution was able to use some of most important weapons in its arsenal, accusations of simony and public opinion, against its very zealots.

As Conrad Leyser, who was my tutor at Worcester College during my undergraduate years has argued in a brilliant review article aimed at specialists, this little anecdote nicely illustrates the significance of the Gregorian reform movement as it was felt at the time. While it did nothing to immediately eliminate patronage, proprietary churches, dynasticism and lay aristocratic power from the church, decisions made in distant Rome nonetheless affected how people jockeyed for clerical offices in obscure corners of Northern France. Both sides appealed to the principles of the papal revolutionaries in their struggle over the church prebend at Clermont, one side doing so more successfully than the other, and both tried to get local public opinion, which was becoming very influenced by these revolutionary ideas, on their side. Indeed, in many ways this post and the two before it has been something of a homage to Conrad, who I really enjoyed being taught by, as they’ve touched quite a bit on his research interests and theories. Indeed, shoutout to Conrad if you happen to be reading this – you provided me with three years of excellent teaching and mentoring at Oxford, and you helped encourage and inspire me on my journey as a medieval historian, even though I eventually decided academia wasn't the future for me.

Sources used:

A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent, translated by Paul Archambault, University of Pennsylvania Press (1996)

Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press (2009)

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 – 1000, Penguin (2009)

Julia Barrow, The Clergy in the Medieval World: Secular Clerics, the Families and Careers in North-Western Europe, 800 – 1200, Cambridge University Press (2015)

R.I Moore, The First European Revolution, 970 – 1215, Blackwell (2000)

H.A Freestone, The Priest's Wife in the Anglo-Norman Realm, 1050-1150 (Doctoral thesis, 2018)

J.W Fawcett, “The Hereditary Priests of Hexham”, Hexham Parish Magazine (1903), pp.37–38

https://notchesblog.com/2016/02/09/the-manly-priest-an-interview-with-jennifer-thibodeaux/ - post by Katherine Harvey, in conversation with Jennifer Thibodeaux

https://blog.oup.com/2014/09/clerical-celibacy/ - post by Hugh Thomas

Conrad Leyser, “Review article: Church reform – full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?”, Early Medieval Europe, Volume 24 (2016), pp 478 – 499

From the sources 9: self-righteousness and hypocrisy in the eleventh century reformation Part 2

 

So we’re back where we left off. Why did the plan to kickstart the almost adolescent Guibert on his clerical career fall through? Well firstly, we need to understand how the initial job offer was made. Like most job offers, then and now, it was made after a vacancy had emerged in the institution, in this case the collegiate church at Clermont owned and controlled by Guibert’s brother’s feudal lord. But the circumstances in which the vacancy had emerged were nothing ordinary. Indeed, it had come about because a new revolutionary movement was starting to send shockwaves across Europe in the 1060s. But what was this revolution? Guibert, who had a good awareness of recent historical developments, gives us plenty of indication as to what this revolution was:

At that time, the Holy See had initiated a new attack against married clerics. Consequently, some zealots began railing against these clerics, claiming that they should either be deprived of ecclesiastical prebends or forced to abstain from priestly functions.

What Guibert is alluding to here is a revolution brewing all the way over in Rome (the Holy See), but one that nonetheless was sending none other than the papal revolution or the reformation of the eleventh century. Historians have traditionally called it the Gregorian reform movement – the latter term is misleading because, contrary to what earlier generations of scholars thought, pretty much all historians now would agree that it wasn’t all the brainchild of Pope Gregory VII (r.1073 – 1085). For starters, it had begun a generation before Gregory, in the time of his predecessors Leo IX (r.1049 – 1054), Nicholas II (r.1059 – 1061) and Alexander II (r.1061 – 1073). The exact roots of this revolution are incredibly murky and hard to determine, and there’s no agreement among historians as to why it came about, though its safe to say it didn’t come out of the blue. What we can say is that by c.1060, a clearly identifiable revolutionary movement, with its cockpit in Rome and its main hotbeds of support in France, the Low Countries, Western Germany and Northern and Central Italy, had emerged calling for the following:

1.       Strong, centralised papal leadership over a Latin Western church unified by law and religious practices.

2.       The end of secular control over churches and monasteries, and any lands or tithes attached to them, and the appointment of priests by lay men (lords and kings).

3.       A wholesale campaign against corruption within the clergy, aimed specifically at stamping out the four evils of simony (purchasing of church positions), nepotism, clerical marriage and pluralism (priests being responsible for multiple churches and getting revenues from them).

While not the mastermind behind the Eleventh Century Reformation, without a doubt one of the most fiery and determined revolutionary leaders in history - Hildebrand of Sovana (1015 - 1085), or as he became, Gregory VII. 

All of these three aims were highly interconnected. In the first half of the eleventh century, Western Christendom was essentially a patchwork of local churches, all with their own effective leadership and very different customs, especially when it came to church services (the liturgy). They essentially shared only the Latin language, a set of theological doctrines that hadn’t changed in almost 300 years and nominal allegiance to the pope in Rome. Peter Brown has aptly described Europe in the period 500 – 1050 as consisting of “micro-Christendoms.” The papal reform movement aimed to transform this into a tightly-run religious multi-national corporation, or to pick a different analogy a sort of medieval European Union. To this end, the church as a corporation needed complete control over all church buildings, lands and offices, and the clergy needed to be transformed from being essentially local community figures and civil servants to kings and princes, into a tightly organised and morally upright pan-European bureaucracy answerable first and foremost to the church as a corporation and its CEO, the pope.

The effects of this transformation can be clearly illustrated by a comparison, between Gregory the Great (r.590 – 604), arguably the most powerful and successful early medieval pope, and Innocent III (r.1198 – 1216), without a doubt the most powerful and successful pope of the high Middle Ages.

More than 850 of Gregory letters survive. This is a figure so voluminous that only a few figures in European history before the twelfth century, such as the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, 835 of whose letters survive thanks to the heroic efforts of early medieval copyists, can come close to rivalling him for. Gregory’s letters are overwhelmingly addressed to recipients from Central Italy, the Bay of Naples and Sicily. Fewer than thirty of his letters were addressed to recipients in Merovingian Gaul, excluding those for Provence where the Pope owned agricultural estates. Fewer than ten were addressed to Visigothic Spain. Perhaps Gregory the Great’s most famous achievement was instigating the process of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity by sending St Augustine of Canterbury to the court of King Aethelbert of Kent. Yet most of the Anglo-Saxons were converted not by the Roman mission, but by Irish missions led by the likes of Saint Aidan. The result of this was that Anglo-Saxon England remained divided between Celtic and Roman Christian customs, which were profoundly different from each other until the Synod of Whitby in 664, in which the Roman method for calculating the date of Easter won out over the Celtic one, which was then followed by a plague that killed off most of the pro-Celtic bishops. Theodore of Tarsus, whom I’ve mentioned here before, came over to England in 668 and strictly reorganised the church under Roman lines, and from his time on Anglo-Saxon archbishops of Canterbury would collect their pallium (band of cloth symbolising their office) from Rome.

 Thus, the Pope had considerable leverage in Anglo-Saxon England, but very little anywhere else in early medieval Europe outside Italy. Pippin the Short might have deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, with the sanction of Pope Zacharias and been anointed by his successor Stephen II. Charlemagne might have been crowned by Pope Leo III. Lothar I might have got Pope Gregory IV to be on his side for moral support in the Field of Lies in 833, where he and his brothers Pippin and Louis the German tried to depose their father, Emperor Louis the Pious. But papal authority in the Carolingian empire was mostly nominal. The Carolingians may have spread Roman customs for monasticism and the liturgy across their territories at the expense of pre-existing local ones, but they did this at their own accord, not that of the papacy, and the pope only exercised influence over the internal affairs of the Carolingian Empire when he was called in to do so i.e., Pope Nicholas I (r.855 – 867) in Lothar II’s messy attempt to divorce Queen Theutberga. Indeed, sometimes the papacy and the Carolingians resented each other and wanted to stay out of each other’s affairs completely, as was the case with Pope Paschal I (r.817 – 824), who basically wanted the Holy See to withdraw into its own and told Louis the Pious’ envoys in 823 to f*** off. And as Paschal I’s pet project, the Basilica of Santa Prassede in Rome shows, he really fancied himself as essentially the local ruler of the eternal city, unmatched throughout the Christian world in the number of ancient martyrs, saints and churches it could fit within its walls.

Pope Paschal I's ninth century mosaics at Santa Prassede, Rome. By Welleschik - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6853832

For Innocent III, 5,000 of his letters survive. These are addressed to an impressive range of recipients which are more evenly across the whole of Catholic Europe. To give just a particular kind of example, he sent letters addressed to ordinary men and women (not kings, queens or aristocrats) who wanted to separate from their spouses at Osney in Oxfordshire, Siponto in Southern Italy and in Spain and Austria. His activities as pope also included the following:

1.       At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, he received delegates from Poland to Portugal and from the Arctic Circle to the Holy Land – until the First Lateran Council in 1123, church councils in the west tended to be only kingdom-wide or provincial affairs. There he made rulings, binding throughout the whole of Latin Christendom on a whole range of things. These included declaring that the universe was indeed created from nothing; banning the clergy from gambling and being drunk; exempting priests from taxation; determining how many degrees of kinship made a marriage incestuous; requiring Jews to wear special clothing to mark themselves out from Christians.

2.        Innocent III excommunicated King Philip Augustus of France for making an attempt at licenced bigamy when he couldn’t divorce his queen, Ingeborg of Denmark, and King John of England for refusing to accept his favourite candidate for Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. He even forbade religious services from taking place in both kingdoms until their kings had reconciled with him.

3.       He acted as referee in the civil war in Germany from 1198 – 1208, made and unmade one German Emperor (Otto IV) and then made another (Frederick II).

4.       He launched two crusades to the Holy Land, one of which (the Fourth Crusade) he inadvertently sent off course to Constantinople after he excommunicated all the crusaders in 1202 for attacking the Catholic Croatian town of Zadar, and another against the Cathar heretics in Southern France.

5.       He approved the creation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders of friars.

6.       He annulled the Magna Carta for King John in 1215.

The following was also true of the church as an institution by 1215:

1.       It had a clearly defined, fairly uniform official hierarchy across Europe that had to answer first and foremost to the authority of the Pope – Pope, Cardinals, Legates, Bishops, Archdeacons, Deacons, Priests, Canons and Minor Orders.

2.       It directly owned 20% of all agricultural land in Europe, and could claim 10% of all legitimate incomes as tithes paid to priests and bishops (not to be appropriated by kings and lay aristocrats).

3.       It had a network of church courts all over Europe, with the Papal Curia in Rome being the highest of them all, in which priests could be tried for criminal offences separately from the rest of the population, and anyone could appeal to for dispute resolution over marriage, debt and a whole host of other things.

A near-contemporary fresco (1219) of Pope Innocent III, the Uber Pope of the Middle Ages

All of this would have been unthinkable until the later eleventh century. This might surprise us, because many of us are used to thinking of the Middle Ages as single epoch in the general setup of things largely stayed the same throughout. We’re also used to thinking of it as an age in which the Church was a concrete and all-powerful institution with iron control over all of Europe – almost like the Cold War era Eastern Bloc, but with popes and the inquisition being like a kind of Stasi. Of course, this popular view in the Anglo-American world is in itself is a misleading caricature, based on more than 500 years of anti-Catholic propaganda. But like all myths there is a kernel of truth in it. Yet that kernel of truth only applies to the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when the Church really was this pan-European religious corporation under the supreme central leadership of the Pope. And the revolution going on in Guibert’s lifetime was the turning point that made this world possible. Without it figures like Innocent III, who really was quite the authoritarian and really did try to leave the stamp of his power across the whole of Europe, could not have existed.

Who made this possible? Political revolutions need leaders and visionaries and the papal revolution had them aplenty – Pope Leo IX, Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida (1015 – 1061), Cardinal-Bishop Peter Damian of Ostia (1007 – 1073), Pope Nicholas II, Pope Alexander II, Pope Gregory VII and Pope Urban II (r.1088 – 1099). Indeed, Gregory VII can be seen as something of a Vladimir Lenin figure in the Papal Revolution, and he divides opinion among historians as much as Lenin used to do, but now doesn’t so much.

But revolutions can’t succeed with these alone. They need provocateurs and shock troops. Provocateurs they certainly had in the form of Cardinals and Papal Legates (commissioners sent into different kingdoms), themselves innovations of the late 1050s and early 1060s. But who were their shock troops. Among their shock troops were the German nobles who rebelled against Emperor Henry IV during his struggle with Pope Gregory VII over who had control over the church in the German Empire in the 1070s. Also among them were the Norman barons and knights who conquered Anglo-Saxon England with William the Conqueror or who subdued Southern Italy with Robert Guiscard. The Normans fought at Hastings on 14 October 1066 under the papal banner, after William had gained Pope Alexander II’s support for the invasion on the promise he would reform the English church, helped by Gregory VII (then Archdeacon Hildebrand). The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 – 1071 was then followed by a programme of thoroughgoing reform and upheaval of the English church under William the Conqueror – I recently taught this to my Year 10 GCSE history class, focusing of course on the latter side of things. The Norman Conquest of Southern Italy meant bringing those lands back under the Pope’s remit to begin with, since they belonged either to the East Roman Empire or the Muslim Arab rulers of Sicily, and the Normans literally held their territories there as fiefs from the Pope.

The papal banner at Hastings as shown in the Bayeux Tapestry (c.1070)

But it wasn’t just elite warriors who were the pope’s shock troops. The eleventh century is basically the point in time at which we see popular politics and the crowd re-emerging clearly for the first time in the West since the days of the Western Roman Empire. We’ve seen signs that peasants in the Carolingian Empire were aware of politics and the law in the Carolingian Empire, but its in the eleventh century that we really start to see ordinary people getting politicised for the first time since antiquity. Relatively humble clerics, monks and preachers, the “zealots” of Guibert’s account, were able to capture huge audiences with their charismatic speeches and demonstrations. They could then whip up these crowds into a frenzy and use them as lynch mobs to go after priests deemed to be corrupt or pressure the authorities to reform the church.

This was the case from the beginning. The nominal start date of the papal revolution is the Council of Rheims in 1049, which Leo IX held despite not asking for King Henry I of France’s permission. For the Pope to hold a church council outside Central Italy without asking the permission of a monarch was unprecedented and unacceptable. The king angrily responded by holding a feudal levy at the same time as a council which a third of the French bishops and abbots attended, and Leo IX excommunicated them – no ninth or tenth century pope would have dared try and override the authority of a king like that. But what interests us is that at the council, Leo IX made all the French bishops and abbots who did attend swear on holy relics that they had not bought their offices – that they hadn’t committed simony, in other words. They had to do this in front of crowds of ordinary citizens of Rheims and peasants from the surrounding countryside, who had come to cheer on the reformers and pressure and intimidate the bishops and abbots who wouldn’t comply. From the beginning, the papal revolution was populist.

Quite the place to start a revolution, is it not? The Romanesque basilica of Saint Remigius at Rheims, which Leo IX consecrated before the council in 1049. I visited it in May and had a very good time there.

And it only got more so from there. In May 1057, an incendiary sermon preached when the relics of Saint Nazzarro were being moved from one church to another led to popular uprising in Milan – the Patarenes. This predominantly lower-class movement took over the city government of Milan from its archbishop, installed their own priests in the city churches in place of those they saw as corrupt and even lynched some of the priests who had bought their offices/ were married – there was revolutionary violence aplenty in the Patarene uprising, that any Jacobin or Bolshevik would give a nod of approval.

At Florence in 1068, an immense crowd of its citizens gathered to watch Peter, a Vallombrosan monk, walk through flames in support of his abbot, Giovanni Gualberto’s, campaign against simony and nepotism, in particular against the Bishop of Florence who had bought his office. He miraculously survived, the opposite of what happened to Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 and literally ignited the Arab Spring, but this put kindling on papal revolution all the same.

Pope Gregory VII himself was all in favour of encouraging popular unrest against clerics who wouldn’t budge. Indeed, he himself said in one of his letters:

We have heard that certain of the bishops who dwell in your parts either condone or fail to take notice of the keeping of women by priests, deacons and sub-deacons. We charge you in no way to obey these bishops or follow their precepts …

… If they disregard our rulings, or rather those of the holy fathers, the people may in no wise receive their ministrations, so that those who are not corrected by the love of God and the honour of their office may be brought to their senses by the shame of the world and the reproof of the people.

Gregory VII was hardly a democrat. But he did hold the incredibly radical belief that if people in positions of authority were deeply corrupt and immoral, you were under no obligation to show respect or obey them in any way. This was exemplified in 1076 when he released all the German nobles from their oaths of loyalty to Henry IV of Germany, thus taking a sledgehammer to the traditional authority of kings and emperors. But here was appealing to a lesser sort of people, ordinary townspeople and peasants as well as aristocrats. And to encourage them to reject the authority of bishops who allowed the priests in their diocese to live in sin really was incredibly socially subversive, as well as theologically dubious – it did sound remarkably like the late Roman heresy of Donatism. This kind of thinking, that high-minded transformative ideas must trump respect for established order and authority, is the spirit that has, for better or worse, made the modern world. in many ways also, Gregory VII was being just like a Mao Zedong, a supreme leader  trying to build his own power by encouraging terror, unrest and general defiance of established elites in favour of high-minded revolutionary ideas. The parallels between the traditional Chinese elites and the centrality of kings and bishops to early medieval Western European social order, both of whose traditional power was challenged or even broken in this wave of extremism, are also tempting. Gregory VII was a truly dangerous man, and in the words of my former university tutor Conrad Leyser “a maniac.”

Indeed, we can see the truly subversive potential this had after Gregory VII’s death. In the opening decades of the twelfth century, around the time Guibert de Nogent was writing his autobiography, a blacksmith in Ghent in Flanders called Manasses led a crowd of his fellow citizens to expel a married priest from one of the city churches. He was an associate of Tanchelm of Antwerp, a critic of corrupt and unreformed clergy who was so extreme that he was accused of heresy, but was so popular that until some years before his death in 1115 no one dared arrest him and he actually served as the Count of Flanders’ envoy to the papal court. Another example of papal reformers who veered into heretical territory is the monk Henry of Lausanne, a super charismatic preacher who in 1116 led a successful popular revolt against the clergy of Le Mans and forced all the city’s prostitutes to marry all the unmarried men there. Henry of Lausanne encouraged people, as shown by his wildfire preaching campaigns in southern France, to reject infant baptism and the necessity of priests performing the sacraments for people to get into Heaven, ideas that prefigured the teachings of Protestant Reformers. Gregory VII would have been horrified by him, as indeed were orthodox Catholics at the time, but he was nonetheless part of the can of worms that Gregory VII had unleashed. Indeed, so much of the history of the high and late medieval church is all about the attempts to reign in the demons that the papal revolution, and Gregory VII in particular, had unleashed. It is also through this that we can trace a direct link between the two great reformations – the one in the eleventh century, and the one in the sixteenth.

This post might seem like an unnecessary tangent, given that we were supposed to be discussing Guibert, but I’m afraid it was necessary. Thanks for bearing with me, but for the next post we’ll zoom back into the juicy details, and see how the eleventh century reformation/ papal revolution played out at the grassroots level and how that affected young Guibert’s future.

Sources:

“A monk’s confession: the memoirs of Guibert de Nogent” edited and translated by Paul Archambault, University of Pennsylvania Press (1996)

Chris Wickham, “The inheritance of Rome: A history of Europe from 400 -1000”, Penguin (2009)

Robert Moore, “The first European Revolution, 970 - 1215”, Blackwell (2000)

“Selected letters of Pope Innocent III concerning England (1198 - 1216)”, edited and translated by C.R Cheney, Thomas Nelson (1953)

From the sources 8: Guibert de Nogent’s schooldays and timeless insights into good pedagogy

 

A much later (early fourteenth century?) satirical image of a medieval schoolroom featuring monkeys!

So when we last left Guibert, he was seven-years-old or thereabouts (he doesn’t specify his age) and struggling to learn the basics of Latin grammar – all those declensions and conjugations back in the days before you had all those handy noun and verb tables to memorise and Kennedy’s Latin Primer, the Cambridge Latin Course or whatever textbook you think is best for beginners (though nowadays very few people start learning as young as Guibert did). Now Guibert seems to have reflected a lot on what his education was like and the difficulties that came with learning and memorising a new language. In the process he came up with some ideas that felt uncannily familiar when I was reading just a few weeks ago – like the theories of cognitive neuroscience we covered as part of our learning and memory sessions in September for the PGCE.

Now I must admit here that I will be engaging in a certain degree of anachronism in my reading of Guibert, which some medievalist scholars would find immediately off-putting. Obviously, psychology as an academic discipline didn’t exist in the early twelfth century, nor would it until more than 750 years after Guibert’s death, and so Guibert would not have used the terms I will be using to refer to what he was describing. If a time-travelling cognitive neuroscientist were able to have a conversation with Guibert, it would take a long time before they could reach some mutual comprehension, since all the technical language of modern psychology would be completely alien to him. Even then, this hinges on the whole meta-question of how mentally similar were medieval people to us. This is an issue that is super-divisive to medievalists, who basically fall somewhere along a spectrum on this. At one end of the spectrum, you have those who think medieval people were basically people exactly like us – they just had swords, horses, heavy-ploughs, parchment and candles rather than automatic firearms, cars, combine-harvesters, laptops and electrical lighting. At the other end of the spectrum, you have medievalists who argue that medieval people were so mentally different from us that they might as well be Martian visitors – according to them, medieval people were incapable of thinking rationally like we do except according to their own weird logic, and their worldview is incomprehensible unless understood completely in its own terms. Both extremes in my view are unhelpful – the first is essentially the costume drama version of history. The latter is basically a postmodern repackaging of old stereotypes about medieval people as violent, uncouth, superstitious, prejudiced and lacking in individuality. Most medievalists, including myself, however, sensibly fall somewhere in the middle. And Guibert I feel nicely illustrates that. All his talk of sin, demons and God’s providence feels very alien to us and very evocative of the culture of twelfth century France, which was indeed very different to that of twenty-first century Britain. But strip those layers of paint away, and one can see a deeply insecure but highly intelligent mind trying to make sense of his own abnormal life experiences and the rapidly changing world around him.

But let’s get back to the classroom with Guibert. Guibert was, as we established in the previous post, in a class all by himself. He was taught by a private tutor called Solomon who, as we saw last time, had received his own education quite late in life (how late exactly we don’t know) and was probably not a very competent teacher – Guibert perhaps exaggerates this somewhat; indeed, as both Paul Archambault and Jay Rubinstein note, Solomon is deliberately made out by Guibert to be a negative inversion of the ideal schoolmaster described by the first century AD Roman educator Quintilian. Guibert makes it very clear to his readers that his school days were an unhappy time for him.

For starters, Guibert was placed under the complete authority of his tutor, who essentially controlled his upbringing and daily schedule from then on. This was not uncommon for that time. Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142) was given the same kind of power over Heloise when her uncle, Fulbert, hired him to be her private tutor and, because he already had a crush on her, he accepted the contract for this very reason. This one of the reasons why a lot of twenty-first century readers of Abelard and Heloise’s story find it less romantic and more creepy. What this kind of arrangement meant for Guibert was that he couldn’t live the same lifestyle as the other children growing up at his family castle. Guibert recounts that:

I wasn’t even allowed to play the usual games. I couldn’t go anywhere without his permission, couldn’t eat outside the house, couldn’t accept a gift from anybody without his consent. I couldn’t do anything “intemperate”, whether in thought, word, or deed. He seemed to expect me to behave more like a monk than a cleric. The other boys of my age could come and go as they pleased and, at times, with no constraints at all. I, on the other hand, was scrupulously guarded from such behaviour. I would sit in my cleric’s garb and watch the squads of players like a trained animal. Even on Sundays and saints’ feast days I had to put up with the constraints of this scholastic system. There was not a day, not a moment, when I was allowed a holiday. It was study, study, study all the time. Besides, when he had accepted my tutorship, my master was not allowed to take on any other student.

Guibert was thus, from the age of seven or possibly even six, allowed no school holidays, no play-time and no friends. For the time, that was weird enough, and nowadays child protection agencies would doubtless get involved. And in Guibert’s estimation, all of this relentless studying was all for naught, because Solomon was an awful teacher – a stern disciplinarian, yet completely incompetent when it came to his own subject knowledge (Latin language and literature). Guibert relates:

Because he worked me so hard everybody who watched us was convinced that with so much perseverance he would considerably sharpen my fledgling mind. Alas! This didn’t happen. My master was completely ignorant of the techniques of composition or metrics. Meanwhile I was deluged everyday with a hail of blows and whippings. This man was trying to force me to learn what he couldn’t teach!

Guibert’s brilliant sense of irony really does become apparent here! Now, if we measure Solomon up to the areas of professional learning used by my PGCE programme to assess student teachers like myself, Solomon would be strong (indeed, too strong) on behaviour management, but incredibly weak on pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and professional behaviours. Back in the eleventh century there weren’t really any teacher training programmes, but today Solomon definitely wouldn’t be awarded Qualified Teacher Status. And his use of punishments, seen as unnecessarily severe by eleventh century standards, would be regarded today as professional misconduct/ child abuse. So, by the standards of the time, Solomon was frankly not worth the money, and by the standards of the present, he would be barred from the teaching profession.

This being said, Guibert’s view of Solomon isn’t entirely negative. On the contrary, he says that he taught him “everything pertaining to modesty, chastity and good manners.” So at least he got something out of his education, but not what his mother paid for.

Guibert reflects quite deeply on this, and in the process comes up with some theories of how the education of children should work.

Any person’s nature, let alone a child’s, ends up being blunted if it has to submit to too much intellectual work. The more a mind is fired up by extended study, the more the spirit cools as the energies become overexerted. Energy dissolves into apathy.

How cognitive neuroscientists think memory works

What Guibert is describing here sounds a lot like what neuroscientists and educational theorists call “cognitive overload.” The theory of cognitive overload is essentially that new information has to be processed through the brain’s working memory before it can be committed to the long-term memory. The working memory can typically only process seven things at a time. Giving too much information to students at any one stage in the lesson, or getting them to do too many tasks, leads to cognitive overload as there’s just too much information for them to process. Therefore, what’s recommended to trainee teachers like myself is to chunk knowledge and tasks between different stages of the lesson/ different lessons to make it more manageable and easier to take in. Unnecessary or distracting information, meanwhile, gets cut out and scaffolds for complex tasks like prompts, instructions broken down into stages, templates, tables and other tools are provided so that not too much mental effort has to be made at any one time. Most people see cognitive load as cutting-edge educational theory, but Guibert was already thinking about this in the early twelfth century. Guibert then writes:

If, as Scripture puts it, “there was silence in heaven for half an hour [Revelation 8:1],” even the gift of contemplation cannot be sustained unceasingly. It is the same thing for any activity of the mind: it cannot be maintained without interruption. It is my belief, then, that any mind concentrating on a specific object should use varying degrees of attention. Alternately thinking about one thing, then another, we should be able to come back to the one that our mind is most interested in, as if renewed by the recreation we have given ourselves. Nature, too, tends to get tired and should find its remedy in a variety of activities. We must remember that God did not create a uniform world but allowed us to enjoy time changes – days and nights, spring and summer, autumn and winter. People who call themselves schoolteachers should find ways of varying the education of children and young people. Even students who have the seriousness of old people about them should not be treated any differently, in my opinion.

In a sense, what Guibert is recommending here is now enshrined in the modern school day timetable. In mainstream English schools, you will typically have five to eight lessons a day, each of them typically between 40 and 60 minutes in length. Normally, you will have all these lessons in different subjects – at most, you will have two in the same subject in the same day. You will also have an approximately 20-minute morning breaktime and a 40-to-60-minute lunch period. But many educational theorists see that as not providing enough variety, rest and focus in itself. Instead, they have argued for things like spaced learning and interleaving. Spaced learning is when a topic is spread out over a long period of time – rather than learning it all in one lesson, you instead spread it out over several lessons or even several weeks while mixing it in with unrelated stuff. As Guibert might have been hinting at here, it requires students to immediately commit things to their long term memory rather than try and hold them in their working memory and then retrieve them as and when required – its quite good for retrieval practice (being tested on previously learned content – something I try and do a lot in my lessons) and revision. Interleaving is when, during a lesson, you take a break from the current content to look at a slightly different but related topic within the same subject area, before coming back to the topic you’re currently studying. Both the structure of the modern school day, interleaving and spaced learning sound very similar to what Guibert was recommending, and are based on the same logic.

Guibert sums up thus how shambolic the education he received was, and in doing so imparts some truly timeless wisdom:

While my master was taking it out on me for not knowing what he himself did not know, he might have been well advised to consider the harm he had done by squeezing out of my frail little head what he had never put there in the first place. Lunatics’ words can be barely understood by the sane, if at all; similarly the utterances of people who are ignorant but pretend to know something, and who pass on their “knowledge” to others, become even murkier when they attempt to explain what they are saying. There is nothing harder than trying to hold forth on something you cannot understand. It is obscure for the speaker, and even more so for the hearer; it is really as if both were being turned to stone. I’m saying this, O Lord, not because I want to stigmatise this man who, all things considered, was a good friend, but in order to let the readers know, whoever they might be, that we must not be entitled to teach as truth anything that crosses our minds. Let us not lose other people in the clouds of our own theories.

Sources cited:

A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent, translated and with an introduction by Pail J Archambault, University of Pennsylvania Press (1996), pp 16 – 19

Jay Rubinstein, Guibert de Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind, Routledge (2013), p 13

Education Endowment Foundation, Cognitive Neuroscience in the Classroom: A Review of the Evidence (2021)

From the sources 7: childhood and going to school in the 1060s

 I can’t tell you how great it feels to be writing a blogpost now. The last two weeks have been absolutely hectic for me with the PGCE and my mental health has taken a toll for the worse. But now I’m ahead with my lesson planning and have realised that I’m doing very well in the taught part of the course, I can sit down and write a blogpost. Given my current focus in life is “education, education, education” to quote Tony Blair (honestly though, with the possible exception of last year, when has it ever been otherwise), lets return to Guibert and have look at his education

But first, lets hear a bit about his birth and early upbringing. As I said in the previous post, Guibert’s parents were from the lower rungs of the Northern French warrior aristocracy. I also mentioned that Guibert and his mother were very close, if not in an entirely healthy way and that he struggled to relate or sympathise with his father, who was a knight. Guibert remarks eloquently in his autobiography that “in two sense of the word I was the last of her children” – Guibert was the youngest out of his several brothers and sisters, and by the time he wrote his autobiography in the 1110s, when he was in his sixties, he was the only one of them left alive. Guibert also says that he was his mother’s favourite child, though he doesn’t try and make himself out as special for it – “aren’t mothers usually more affectionate with their last born.” Guibert also imagines his mother watching over him lovingly in Heaven, as well as sighing with despair whenever he strays from the path of virtue that she set out for him.

Guibert’s mother had gone through a terrifying experience to give birth to him. The perils of premodern childbirth are often exaggerated in popular history. While concrete statistics from the Middle Ages can’t be obtained, from the much better sixteenth and seventeenth century parish register evidence it seems more likely to have been in the realm of 2 - 3 in 100 women dying in childbirth rather than 33 in 100, as some people might imagine it to be so when they think of “ye olden days.” In other words, you were more likely to have a couple of women in your village or neighbourhood die in childbirth than close family members. Still, let’s not downplay it. Death from childbirth was a real enough and accepted possibility before modern medicine that, as we know from, again, early modern sources, women would make plans for how their husbands would honour their memory and their surviving children’s upbringing if something did go horribly wrong either when they went into labour or immediately after delivery, to say nothing of the extreme pain that would have been felt in any case in an age before modern anaesthetics. And in the case of Guibert’s mother things almost did go horribly wrong for her. Guibert relates them in chapter 3:

As she approached the end of her pregnancy my mother had been in the most intense pain throughout the season of Lent. How often she reproached me in later years for those pangs of childbirth when she saw me straying and following the slippery downhill path! Finally Holy Saturday, the solemn vigil of Easter, dawned. My mother was wracked with continuous pain. As the hour of delivery approached, the pains increased, but they were presumed to lead to a natural delivery. Then I turned around in her womb, with my head upward. My father, his friends, members of the family, all feared for both our lives. The child, they thought, was hastening the mother’s death; and the offspring’s exit from the world at the very moment he was being denied an entrance to it added to their sense of pity. On that day, except for the solemn liturgy that is celebrated at a certain hour, the offices usually sung for members of the household were not scheduled. The family held an urgent meeting. They rushed to the altar of the Mother of God. To the one who was, and ever will be, the only Virgin to give birth, they made the following vow and left it as an offering at our Lady’s altar: if the child were male, it would be consecrated a cleric in God’s service and hers; if the child were of the lesser sex, it would be given over to a corresponding religious vocation.

At that moment a frail little thing came forth, looking almost like an aborted fetus, except that it was born at term. It looked like a most miserable being, and the only reason for rejoicing was that the mother had been saved. The tiny human being that had just seen the light was so lamentably frail that it looked like the corpse of a stillborn baby. The little reeds that sprout in mid-April in this part of the country are fuller by comparison than were my little fingers. On the same day, as I was brought to the baptismal font – this was often related to me as a joke when I was a child, and even during my adolescence – a woman kept rolling me from one hand to the other and saying “Do you think this little creature is going to live? I guess mother nature never quite finished this one. She gave him an outline more than a body.” All of these things foreshadowed the way I am living own.

(Source: “A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent” edited and translated by Paul J Archambault, Pennsylvania University Press (1996), pp 10 – 11)

This is all trademark Guibert de Nogent – gloomy and self-deprecating, yet lively and well-written. And sure enough, the circumstances of Guibert’s birth did set him on his general trajectory in life. Because of that vow made when his mother was in labour, Guibert was destined for a career in the church. Had he been a girl, he would have had to become a nun. Because he was a boy, he therefore had to be trained up to become a priest or a monk. This wasn’t altogether unusual in a medieval aristocratic family. Normally, though depending on how many children there were in the family, at least one child, male or female, would be given a religious vocation. Having one of your children serve in a church or monastery dedicated to a powerful saint would enable them to pray for their patron saint to petition God to have mercy on your family’s souls and grant them a place in Heaven. In a way it was a kind of insurance. Also, to have a relative occupy a high-enough position in the church (a deacon, an abbot/ abbess or bishop) was always advantageous given the wealth, authority and connections that came with those offices. A mixture of piety and family strategies were always in the equation.

Guibert claims that his mother was most committed to this plan for Guibert, while his father had doubts about whether a religious vocation was the best plan for him when, as it turned out, baby Guibert wasn’t so sickly after all. But fate intervened to keep Guibert on the path that had been set out for him before his birth:

I was hardly born, I had scarcely learned to grasp my rattles, when you made me an orphan, dear God, you who were my father-to-be. Yes I was just eight months old when my physical father died: thank you so much for having permitted this man to die in a Christian state of mind. Had he lived he unquestionably would have tried to block the providential design you had for me. My physical build, combined with an alacrity of spirit natural for my age, seemed, in fact to direct me towards a worldly vocation; so nobody doubted that my father would break the vow he had made when it came time for me to begin my education. O good provider, you have managed a resolution that worked well for the well-being of both of us: I was never deprived of the rudiments of your teachings, and he never broke the oath to you.

 (Source: Ibid, p 14)

Once again, we have to be careful as to whether Guibert is being strictly truthful about all this. Not only is there the obviously parallel with Augustine, but also it was a hugely common trope in early medieval saints’ lives, especially from the seventh and eighth centuries, to claim that the mother was always supportive of their child’s religious vocation, whereas the father was sceptical or outright opposed to it. The Life of St Gertrude of Nivelles, an early Carolingian hagiography of a Merovingian-era saint, is a case in point, and given that Guibert wrote about saints he was probably familiar with this literature. At the same time, there’s no good reason to be dismissive of his testimony. But anyway, Guibert’s father died in 1056 when he was only eight months old, and so his mother, who did not remarry, was left in complete charge of his upbringing. To give due thanks to Jesus and the Virgin Mary for saving her life, she was insistent that her son grow up to be a monk or a priest.

If Guibert was going to be a monk or a priest, he would need to be able to read and write, and of course that meant reading and writing in Latin. Latin was of course not Guibert’s mother tongue, which would have been the Picard dialect of Old French. By Guibert’s day, learning Latin wasn’t easy. There’s a lot of debate as to when exactly the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire evolved into the earliest versions of the modern Romance languages. But everyone would more or less agree that this had happened everywhere by about 900, so more than a century and half before Guibert was born. Arguably, Latin would have been in some respects easier to grasp for Guibert as Frenchman than if he were a Dane, an Irishman or an Anglo-Saxon, given the similarity of most of the vocabulary, but the grammar, spelling and pronunciation wouldn’t have come naturally at all. Indeed, about 100 years before Guibert was born, an Italian cleric and grammarian called Gunzo got mightily offended when he visited the monastery of St Gall (in modern Switzerland) and the German monks there corrected him for using a noun in the accusative case instead of the ablative after a particular preposition like he was some ignoramus. Learning Latin in the eleventh century was thus something that didn’t come naturally to anyone (other than linguistic geniuses), just as is very much the case today. Since this was an age before printing, it was very hard to produce large numbers of standardised Latin textbooks, dictionaries and other indispensable teaching tools. How much Latin anyone was able to learn, and to what standard, thus varied a lot in the Middle Ages. On the one hand, you could find plenty of priests and monks who only really knew enough Latin to recite prayers and hymns, draft basic legal and administrative documents like charters and read bits of the Vulgate Bible. On the other hand, a sizeable minority had an almost perfect knowledge of Classical Latin and were well-versed in ancient Roman literature. Guibert was closer to that end. He quotes Sallust and Virgil on a number of occasions in his autobiography and he was clearly comfortable with writing in it about deeply personal subjects. But that doesn’t mean he found learning Latin easy:

I began to study Latin. Some of the basics I learned as best as I could, but I could hardly make sense of it. My dear mother, who really wanted me to be a scholar, decided to turn me over to a private tutor. In the recent past, and even during my childhood, there had been such a shortage of teachers that you could find hardly any in the towns and really any in the cities. When one did happen to find some, they knew so little that they couldn’t even be compared to the wandering scholars of the present day. The man that my mother decided to send me to had been studying grammar late in life, and he was all the more incompetent in his art for having absorbed so little of it in his youth. He was a very modest man, though, and he made up in honesty for what he lacked in literary knowledge.

(Source: Ibid, p 14)

Guibert leaves it quite ambiguous as to how he received his earliest schooling. But clearly it didn’t work very well and so he required a private tutor if he was to get to grips with Latin grammar. Guibert speaking about the shortage of teachers in his childhood (the 1060s) compared to at the time of writing (the 1110s) shows just how aware he was of the huge social changes taking place in his lifetime. This period saw a massive expansion of secondary and higher education in Western Europe as new urban schools, typically based in cathedrals, took shape. Some cathedral schools had existed since the mid-ninth century, but their number greatly increased in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and they marked a significant change from the school system of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, based around royal courts and monasteries. Why so many sprung up in this period cannot be answered here, because it would basically mean tapping into all the major changes (political, economic, social and cultural) taking place in the period 1060 – 1215. But its effect was that there were more graduates around who were in need of employment. And like with the great expansion of secondary and higher education in Britain in the period 1945 – 1970, but unlike with the post-1997 expansion, this was easily found. That was in part because the number of local churches, which needed priests, was growing across western Europe, but also because landed aristocracies were growing in size across Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries alongside the proliferation of castles, which we talked about before. It’s likely that Guibert’s family had only been part of the knightly class for a couple of generations before him. These aristocrats needed educated men to act as their personal secretaries and administrators on their estates – written documents were a much more powerful tool for squeezing higher rents out of peasant tenants than just sending a bunch of men on horses with iron helmets and swords into the village at harvest-time, which was why bishops and monasteries were always the most ruthlessly efficient landlords. They also needed private tutors to educate their children, as was the case for Guibert’s mother who was quite ahead of the curve for the 1060s.

Chartres Cathedral, home of one of the most famous schools in the eleventh and twelfth centuries

How Guibert’s mother found his tutor is a very interesting story in itself. Of course, she didn’t leave an advert of Gumtree or visit an online agency. Instead, having consulted her household chaplains, she headhunted the private tutor of Guibert’s cousin. He was quite comfortable in his job – the boy’s parents got on well with him and gave him room and board (pretty good employment benefits). But his pedagogy, whatever its virtues, was wasted on Guibert’s cousin:

The boy for whom he was responsible for was handsome and aristocratic-looking, but allergic to the liberal arts, recalcitrant to any form of discipline, and for his age quite a liar and a stealer. He could put up with no form of supervision, seldom came to school, and could be found hiding in the vineyard just about every day.

(Source: Ibid, p 15)

Every secondary school teacher will have encountered someone like this boy. I have yet to personally encounter anyone like that, as someone who is only one term into a PGCE, but at my first placement school I have regularly heard my colleagues talking about such individuals with despair. Mutatis Mutandis. Thus, Guibert’s mother was able to snap him up, admittedly after the teacher had a strange dream. How did young Guibert find his new teacher? We’ll hear more about that next time.