Controversies 2: the problem of early medieval literacy (the basics)

In this early tenth century manuscript illustration, thought to be based on a lost ninth century original, Charlemagne has a conversation with his son, Pippin of Italy. Meanwhile a scribe, not obviously a cleric (since he isn't tonsured), writes down the minutes of their meeting

You've almost certainly heard it said by someone, somewhere that only priests and monks were literate in the Middle Ages. Now I'm going to say this from the outset. Like so many other things that people think they know about the Middle Ages, from widespread belief in a flat earth and armoured knights being lifted onto their horses by cranes, to iron maidens, chastity belts and the droit de seigneur, this is a MYTH! But of course, the biggest myth about the Middle Ages is that for a whole millennium of history nothing much changed at all. In fact, I'd argue that the period 500 - 1500, give or take half a century on either side, makes absolutely no sense as a single historical epoch. So which segments of the Middle Ages are we talking about when we say that people other than clerics could read and write. 

As longtime readers of this blog will know, and as you might have figured from the title, I'm of course interested here in the early Middle Ages, by which I mean the period before the year 1000. Now while medievalists of all shapes and sizes can unite against ancient historians/ classicists, early modernists and modernists being ignorant or dismissive about the Middle Ages, that's where it ends. 

In the context of medieval literacy, a specialist on the high and late Middle Ages (1000 - 1500) could laugh at the assertion that only the clergy could read and write in the Middle Ages, and say "you what mate? Haven't you heard of Wolfram Von Eschenbach, Marco Polo, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Catherine of Siena, Christine de Pizan or Margaret Paston? Have you not considered the thousands of financial accounts, property deeds, tax records and other government documents, law books, books of hours, chivalric romances and other works vernacular literature that could hardly have been the preserve of a small clerical elite? Think before you speak again, you ignoramus!"  

But those same people might then say, "but for the period before the year 1000, you're probably right. I don't want to offend my early medievalist colleagues too much, but you might be right in calling those the real Dark Ages."

Indeed this is sort of the thrust of three classic studies of Medieval literacy (both of them now 40+ years old), namely Malcolm Parkes' "The Literacy of the Laity" (1973), Michael Clanchy's "From Memory to Written Record" (1979) and Brian Stock's "The Implications of Literacy" (1983). All three of them are rightly celebrated, as they essentially kickstarted the study of medieval literacy as a serious academic sub-field - they themselves took their cues from the pioneering anthropologically-inspired work of ancient historians and early modernists. While both of them argued that reading and writing had a huge level of importance to medieval government, society and culture, they were  focusing on the high and late middle ages. They saw all of this the product of a great transformation taking place in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. They had different views on what was at the root of this transformation. Malcolm Parkes thought it was Anglo-Norman barons, ladies and knights' growing appetite for fiction and historical romances written in the vernacular (King Arthur, chivalric adventures, you know what I mean) in the twelfth century that kickstarted the rise of lay literacy among the aristocracy. With the rise of commerce and towns and growing need for written financial accounts that came with it, the middle classes followed suit in the thirteenth century. Clanchy, on the other hand, argued it all started in 1066 with the distrust the Norman conquerors of England had for native oral testimony and their preference for written records and law, that began the shift from "memory to written record." Initially this mainly concerned churches and clerical functionaries in William the Conqueror's government. But by the reign of Edward I (1272 - 1307) written law, written instructions from the government, written property deeds and estate surveys, written financial accounts, written literature etc had become so important that the aristocracy and urban middle classes all had to receive at least elementary education in literacy in a bureaucratic world.

Meanwhile, all these authors argued that England and Western Europe in the pre-1000 period were essentially oral societies - laws, literature, history, property rights, customs, religion etc were all passed on by word of mouth with literacy only being used by a small, essentially clerical minority. For reasons that we'll soon see, that has provoked ire from early medievalists. Indeed, in the later editions of "From Memory to Written Record" published in 1997 and 2013, Clanchy was a lot more generous when it came to discussing literacy in Anglo-Saxon England in the opening chapters. And in terms of his central thesis, he's absolutely correct - literacy at a societal level did fundamentally change, quantitatively and qualitatively, in the Medieval West between 1066 and 1300. I wouldn't for one minute quibble with the argument that more people could read and write, and there was much greater use of documents for a much greater range of purposes, in Edward III's England than in Aethelred the Unready's England. But that great upsurge in literacy didn't come out of the blue either. So what was literacy really like before the eleventh century. 

So how do we determine early medieval literacy? Now that is a difficult question. I think there's two ways of looking at literacy, on a personal and a societal level. Personal level meaning who exactly could read and write. Societal level meaning the place of literacy in society. 

Personal literacy is probably the hardest to figure out. To state the most obvious, no one in the early middle ages was producing statistics about how many people could read or write. Indeed, prior to about 1850, all data on literacy in Western Europe has to be inferred from various kinds of evidence. For example, ancient historians have tried to infer a high degree of literacy in the Roman Empire, possibly as high as 30% of the adult male population, from things like the Pompeii graffiti, the Vindolanda tablets or the Egyptian papyri found in the Oxyrhynchus rubbish dumps. For historians of early modern Europe (1500 - 1800), the generally agreed baseline is how many people could sign their own names. Unfortunately, and this something I lament all the time, there's no early medieval Pompeii. Though the latter method could work for the early middle ages, its much less reliable than for the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries  given that much less survives by way of original documents, and not of the right type. 

There are individual lay people from the early Middle Ages who we know were literate. From the Carolingian Empire (751 - 888), we have some long-time friends of this blog like Einhard, Angilbert, Nithard and Dhuoda, all of whom wrote works in learned Latin whilst being lay nobles and courtiers. All Carolingian kings from Pippin the Short to Carloman II, we know were literate and had received a full education in Latin. Meanwhile, Margrave Eberhard of Friuli had a huge library of books he read and consulted, and showed an interest in theological debate, and Count Gerald of Aurillac read his psalter regularly. Most famously, Einhard says of Charlemagne that he could read and understand St Augustine's "City of God", a highly difficult theological text, though he never mastered learning to write, but not for want of trying.

From the Merovingian period before it we know that all the Merovingian kings from the generation of King Chilperic (r.561 - 584), whose Latin poems were dreadful according to Gregory of Tours, to that of  Childebert III (r.694 - 711), whose autograph survives on royal diplomas, were literate. We also know that various Merovingian saints like Desiderius of Cahors. Audoin of Rouen, Bonitus of Clermont and Leudegar of Autun had spent their earlier careers as lay civil servants at the Merovingian court and had received secular legal and literary educations. At a humbler level, we have the slave Andarchius who could read Virgil and the Theodosian Code. 

Signature of the Merovingian King Chlothar II (r.584 - 629) to the Edict of Paris in 614. People love to slag off Merovingian handwriting as clumsy and illegible, but this is a good deal more elegant than the signatures of modern politicians. See Donald Trump's signature below.

In Visigothic Spain, King Sisebut (r.612 - 629) and King Chinthila (r.636 - 639) are known to have written poems, and the former corresponded with the great Isidore of Seville on Classical Roman poetry and science. We also know from the letters of Isidore's pupil, Braulio of Zaragoza, that King Chindasuinth (r.642 - 653) and Count Laurentinus (otherwise undocumented) owned libraries in which all kinds of obscure texts that Braulio had difficulty obtaining were located. Another seventh century Visigothic nobleman, Count Bulgar, wrote letters to Frankish bishops in which he expressed anxiety about the Avar horde and their involvement in wars north of the Pyrenees.

For Anglo-Saxon England, we have King Sigeberht of East Anglia and King Aldfrith of Northumbria, who Bede informs us were able to read and write Latin. King Alfred the Great (most famously) translated the works of Gregory the Great and Boethius into Old English. And Ealdorman Aethelweard, a West Saxon aristocrat, wrote a Latin version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for his cousin, a German abbess. 

Early medieval lay literacy in action: Alfred the Great's translation of Gregory the Great's pastoral care

From post-900 Germany and France, we know that emperors Otto II and Otto III were literate in Latin and German (Otto III knew Greek as well from his mother, Empress Theophanu). Likewise, Otto III's contemporary King Robert the Pious (r.996 - 1031) of West Francia/ France was literate in Latin too and enjoyed debating theology. Duke William V of Aquitaine (d.1030), had a huge library and corresponded in letters with Bishop Fulbert of Chartres, who called him a second Maecenas (after Augustus' chief adviser and patron of Virgil and Horace) for his literary interests. 

This immediately confronts us with a problem. Can these people be considered at all representative, or just exceptions to the general rule? Some certainly look more like exceptions than others. King Aldfrith of Northumbria, for example, looks like a fairly obvious candidate for being exceptional. He was trained at a monastery in Ireland and would have almost certainly become a cleric had it not been for his brother, King Egcfrith, dying in battle against the Picts in 685, creating a dynastic crisis which it was up to Aldfrith to resolve by returning home to take up his brother's throne. King Sigeberht of East Anglia likewise spent his childhood in exile in a Frankish monastery. Alfred the Great definitely belongs in a category of his own as well. And for some of the other royal examples, there's an argument that kings belong in a category of their own. But the Visigothic kings we know were literate, Sisebut, Chinthila and Chindasuinth, acquired their thrones either by usurpation or military coup and had had careers as generals and military governors before becoming kings. So we can probably actually take their personal literacy as a sign that literate education was common among the Visigothic nobility in seventh century Spain.

Indeed I'm reminded of a comment I once heard in one of master's seminars from a fellow student. I can't recall exactly what she said, but it was along the lines of "if you have to give the names of powerful women in history, then that indicates they're not very common or significant." Precisely this kind of argument is what the minimalists and sceptics would say about lay literacy in the early medieval West. Of course, there are obvious fallacies with this kind of argument when applied to both, but especially so for early medieval literacy. For the vast majority (90% and upwards) of known individuals from the early Middle Ages, we have no surviving writings and we can say nothing about their education. And for those that we do know about, like all the names I've mentioned, its not because they were the only ones who left writings or received a literate education. Rather its because their writings survive to us today, either by accident or survival, or because we have anecdotal and other circumstantial evidence of them being able to read and write from histories, hagiographies, letters etc. 

But where this kind of argument gets us somewhere is that we need to be focusing on qualitative evidence rather than quantitative evidence. To put it another way, if we want to know whether these individuals were exceptions or not, it makes more sense to try and find what were the general expectations surrounding lay literacy and education, as well as the range of purposes for which writing was used in government and society. What really matters is not finding out how many people outside the clergy could read and write, but to what extent did you need to be able to read and write or at the very least be able to use documents through intermediaries to do well for yourself as an elite (or indeed non-elite) lay person in early medieval society. This is after all, how ancient historians and later medievalists have approached the subject, and its no surprise that this exactly how early medievalists have been approaching the problem since the 1980s. Literacy and education, literacy and government, literacy and society, all of these I'm going to explore here some time to show how lay literacy was much more common than people think in the early Middle Ages. But I'm too constrained by time and space to look at them now. 

Before I finish with this post, we need to consider two things. Firstly, whether or not learning Latin was a barrier to literacy in the early middle ages. Secondly, whether it ever makes sense to speak of early medieval societies as oral cultures. 

As is well-known, the language of the vast majority of early medieval texts (outside of Anglo-Saxon England) was Latin. Traditionally, scholars presumed that only priests and monks would have known how to read Latin in the sixth to tenth century West, and even then not all of them. Let it of course be known that the existence of poorly educated illiterate clerics was a consistent source of complaint from St Boniface and Alcuin in the eighth century to Erasmus and John Colet on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. The presumption was that Latin was a foreign language, albeit a highly important, indeed sacred one, and that only those given a rigorous education could read it in the post-Roman West. This would obviously hold true in areas like Anglo-Saxon England, where the local language was a Germanic one, but even in Gaul, Spain and Italy where scholars used to think that sometime in the seventh or eighth centuries the spoken vernacular had completely evolved into early forms of French, Spanish and Italian and that Latin was no longer intelligible. But Rosamond McKitterick in "The Carolingians and the Written Word" (1989) challenged this and has argued that the spoken vernacular in the Romance regions wasn't actually all that different to Latin, except that it was spelled and pronounced differently.

This is an argument that makes a huge amount of sense when you make the analogy between Standard Chinese and regional dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Min, Yue and Guangxi), Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects (Iraqi, Levantine, Egyptian, Maghrebi etc) and indeed English. English is an absolute nightmare for pronunciation, and I feel really sorry for my EAL (English as an Additional Language) pupils who have to go through their whole secondary schooling in it. This is also the reason why we had to do a short course on phonics as part of the PGCE. For example the grapheme (combination of written letters) -ough represents eight different phonemes (sounds) in spoken English i.e., borough, rough, cough, hiccough, lough, through, fought, dough and plough. Or the constant arguments between Northerners and Southerners in England over whether to pronounce a as a long vowel or a short vowel.

McKitterick also points out that the standard textbooks used for teaching Latin grammar, syntax, spelling and pronunciation in Carolingian monasteries in Gaul and Italy were ones written in the fourth century Roman Empire, and would not have made sense unless the students reading them already spoke Latin. Its revealing how Latin-vernacular interlinear glosses and dictionaries from the eighth and ninth centuries only appear in Germany, Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, where Latin really was being learned as a foreign language. A lot of this is going against what I wrote in my post on the Oaths of Strasbourg, but McKitterick's (and by that token, Roger Wright's) arguments are actually quite convincing. And besides the oaths of Strasbourg and the martyrdom of St Eulalia, which could be considered to be just the Latin dialects native to Gaul written phonetically. Its worth noting, as I did in that post, that besides those possible exceptions, we don't have any vernacular texts written in Romance languages until after 950. Its in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries that we start getting inscriptions, charters, short poems and documents of a practical nature (like a list of cheeses from a monastery in Northern Spain from 959) written in Old Italian and Old Castilian. Thus McKitterick, and before her Banniard and Wright, would argue that the real shift from Latin dialects to Romance languages happened around 900 rather than around 700 as per the traditional view. This is by no means settled scholarly consensus though. 

The geographic divide between regions where Latin/ Romance and Germanic languages were predominantly spoken speakers in 750 (green line) and 1914 (red line). Interestingly, the line hasn't changed much since the early Middle Ages, except in regions like the Pas de Calais in France or Tyrol in Italy. You can also see the origins of the Flemish-Walloon divide in Belgium. By Resnjari - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93789268

Thus, there's good reason to think that Latin was not a barrier to literacy in Gaul, Spain and Italy before the late ninth and early tenth centuries at the earliest. In the Germanic and Celtic-speaking lands it would have been more of one, though in those regions you also had vernacular texts. Can we really consider Anglo-Saxon noblemen who couldn't read Latin poems illiterate if they could read Old English poems like the Wanderer, Beowulf or the Battle of Maldon. Furthermore, we should take into account that there were many different levels to Latin literacy, especially how much the Latin language had evolved since Classical times and the range of different registers in which it was written. Virgil and Horace would have been difficult texts to the Carolingians, just like Chaucer and Shakespeare are difficult texts for people in the US and UK today.

As for the whole question of oral culture, I don't think it makes sense to call early medieval cultures oral even if we took the clerical monopoly view of early medieval literacy. The definition of oral culture used by experts like Walter Ong is a culture whose knowledge and worldviews have not been shaped by writing and texts at all. If we go by that definition, then early medieval Western societies cannot be considered to be true oral cultures because they were, after all, Christian.  Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, is a religion based around the written word, specifically its sacred text the Bible - indeed from as early as the seventh century, Muslim writers identified all three Abrahamic faiths as "peoples of the book." Likewise the very existence of written law codes, charters, histories, poems and treatises from Western Europe in the period 500 - 1000 show that writing was important to creating and preserving society's knowledge. And if only a minority could directly access it, even more would be affected by it i.e., as I've shown in previous texts, regardless of whether or not Carolingian peasants were literate, they were affected by the information recorded in the polyptychs and other documents drawn up by landlords. Sufficeth to say that while not everyone in the early middle ages was literate, virtually no one was insulated from the effects of the written word in society. 

On a final note, this blog has, as of a few weeks ago, been around for a year and half. Thank you everyone for reading my posts, whether you're a veteran reader or a first-timer, and to those who have given praise and constructive criticism - it means a great deal to me!

Let;s finish with one of my favourite early medieval artworks, St Matthew from the Ebbo Gospels (first quarter of the ninth century).

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)