BOOK VI.

FROM THE DEPOSITION OF POPE GREGORY VI. TO THE DEATH
OF POPE CELESTINE III, A.D. 1046-1198.
 

CHAPTER XIII.

SUPPLEMENTARY.

I.

THE HIERARCHY

 

By the labours of Gregory VII and his followers the papacy was exalted, not only in opposition to the secular powers, but in its relations to the rest of the hierarchy; and the continual increase of its influence over the whole church was unchecked by those frequent displays of insubordination among the subjects of its temporal power which compelled the popes of this time to be in great part exiles from their city. While emperors, instead of confirming the elections of popes, as in earlier ages, were fain to seek the papal confirmation of their own election—while they and other sovereigns were required to hold the pope’s stirrup, to walk as grooms by the side of his horse, and to kiss his feet—while it was taught that to him belonged the “two swords”, that kingdoms were held under him, and that the highest earthly dignities were conferred by him—the principles of Gregory went beyond those of the False Decretals by making St. Peter’s successor not merely the highest authority in the church, but the sole authority—all other spiritual power being represented as held by delegation from him. Thus Innocent II told the Lateran council of 1139 that all ecclesiastical dignity was derived from the Roman see by a sort of feudal tenure, and that it could not be lawfully held except by the pope’s permission. We have seen that an oath of fidelity to the pope was exacted of St. Boniface, when sent as a missionary bishop into Germany; and in other special cases such oaths had been sometimes required. Now, however, an important change was introduced by Gregory, who in 1079 exacted of the patriarch of Aquileia a new episcopal oath, which was in part modelled on the oath of secular fealty, and which thus implied a feudal dependence of the bishop on the pope, as the source of all his powers. By Gregory himself this was not imposed on any others than metropolitans and his own immediate suffragans; but in no long time it was exacted of all bishops, who now professed to hold their office not only “by the grace of God”, but also by that “of the apostolic see”. In some instances Gregory appeared to scruple as to interfering with the ancient right of metropolitans to consecrate their suffragans; and even later popes thought it well to make courteous apologies for having invaded the metropolitan privileges by such acts. But Gregory's council of 1080 had decreed that the election of bishops should be approved by the pope or the metropolitan and, as bishops-elect became more and more disposed to flock to Rome (especially in cases of disputed election, as to which the popes claimed an exclusive right to decide, and in most cases established it before the end of the century), the power of confirmation and consecration was gradually transferred from the metropolitans to the pope alone.

The exercise of penitential discipline was also now assumed by the popes in a greater degree, although they still make occasional professions of respecting the rights of the local bishops. The fondness for appealing to Rome in every case is a subject of complaint, not only on the part of princes, such as Henry II of England, but of such ecclesiastics as Hildebert of Tours and Bernard. Gregory VIII complained of being distracted by needless appeals, and tried to check the practice; but his pontificate was too short to have much effect. As excommunication deprived of the power of appearing in ecclesiastical courts, bishops and archdeacons sometimes resorted to it as a means for the prevention of appeals; but this was forbidden by the Lateran council of 1179.

But it was not by appeals only that causes were transferred from the provinces to the Roman court. There was a tendency to carry questions at once to the pope—passing over the local authorities to whose jurisdiction they in the first instance belonged and the reservation of “greater causes” to the pope alone became more and more injurious to the rights of the bishops and metropolitans. Among these causes were canonization, which (as we have already seen) was for the first time reserved to the holy see by Alexander III, and dispensations as to marriage, oaths, translation of bishops, and other matters. Dispensations, in the sense of a license given beforehand to do something which was forbidden by the laws of the church, had been unknown in earlier times, when the only kind of dispensation granted was a forgiveness of past irregularity. But now popes began to claim the right of granting dispensations beforehand, and of exercising this power in all parts of the church, concurrently with the local bishops. In this, as in other things, the tendency of the age led men to apply to the pope or to his legates rather than to their own bishops; and thus by degrees the pope’s authority in such matters, from having been concurrent with that of the bishops, was established as exclusive by Innocent III.

Among the means of enforcing the idea that all ecclesiastical power belonged to the pope, the system of legation was the chief. In former times, the only representatives whom the popes had maintained in foreign countries were their “apocrisiaries” at Constantinople, or at the court of the earlier Frankish emperors at a later date, such legates as were sent forth were employed only on special occasions, and for some particular business. But from the time of Leo IX legates were appointed with commissions unlimited either as to the nature of their business or as to the duration of their power; and this system was developed by Gregory VII so that every country had its regular legate—whether one of the local prelates, or an emissary sent directly from the papal court. These legates, according to Gregory, were to be heard even as the pope himself. It had before been held that the pope, on personally visiting a country, might summon the bishops to a council; and now this power was extended to the legates, in contempt of the authority of the metropolitans. The legates acted everywhere as the highest authorities, although themselves perhaps in no higher order than that of deacon or subdeacon. They cited metropolitans and all bishops under pain of suspension, deposed bishops, wrested cases from the ordinary courts, and threatened the vengeance of the pope against all who might oppose them. Yet the alliance of these Roman emissaries was so important to bishops, and especially in strengthening them against the secular power, that few bishops dared to provoke their enmity. The assumption, the rapacity, the corruption of the legates were excessive and even proverbial. They were authorized to draw their maintenance from the countries which they passed through, as well as from those to which they were destined, and no limits were set to the demands which they were allowed to make for procurations, so that John of Salisbury speaks of them as “raging in the provinces as if Satan had gone forth from the presence of the Lord for the scourging of the church”.

Bernard, in a letter to a cardinal-bishop of Ostia, has given a remarkable picture of another cardinal, named Jordan, in the character of legate to France—“He has passed from nation to nation, and from one kingdom to another people, everywhere leaving foul and horrible traces among us. He is said to have everywhere committed disgraceful things; to have carried off the spoils of churches; to have promoted pretty little boys to ecclesiastical honours wherever he could; and to have wished to do so where he could not. Many have bought themselves off, that he might not come to them; those whom he could not visit, he taxed and squeezed by means of messengers. In schools, in courts, in the places where roads meet, he has made himself a by-word. Seculars and religious, all speak ill of him; the poor, the monks, and the clergy complain of him”. In some cases sovereigns obtained a promise from the pope that legates should not be sent into their dominions without their consent, but such promises were sometimes broken, and were more frequently evaded by committing the business of legates to persons who were styled by some other title; while, on the other hand, kings sometimes excluded or expelled legates from their territories, or made them swear before admittance that they would do no mischief.

The pretensions of popes with regard to councils rose higher. Princes now no longer convoked such assemblies as in former times; indeed the emperors had no longer that general sway which would have procured for any order of theirs obedience from the subjects of other sovereigns. The councils of Piacenza and Clermont were summoned by Urban II on his own authority, in reliance on the general excitement in favour of the crusading cause. For such a step the ground had been laid by Gregory's summoning bishops from all quarters to his lenten synods at Rome; and in the new episcopal oath there was a promise of attendance at all councils to which the bishop should be cited by the pope. The claims which had been set up for the popes in the False Decretals were now more than realized; for it was held that provincial councils required the pope’s authority, not only to confirm them, but to summon them, and it became usual that papal legates should be the presidents. And for all such assemblies there was the dread of an appeal to Rome, with the knowledge that appeals were likely to be favourably entertained. Towards councils themselves, also, the pope's tone became higher than before; thus Paschal II, in answer to the objection that the new episcopal oath had not been sanctioned by any council, declares that the pope is sufficient without a council, although a council is not sufficient without the pope.

A sort of infallibility now began to be claimed for the popes—chiefly on the ground of our Lord's words to St. Peter, “I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not”. Yet this official infallibility was not supposed to secure the pope against personal errors; and Gratian goes so far as to declare that certain words of Gregory II are utterly opposed, not only to the canons, but to the doctrine of the Gospels and of the apostles..

In consequence of the agitation excited by Hildebrand, the election of bishops fell into the hands of the clergy, and more especially of the canons of cathedrals. It was, indeed, admitted by the hierarchical writers that, according to the precedent of early times, the laity ought to have some part in the election. But those whom such writers were willing to admit as representatives of the laity were the great retainers and officers of the church; the sovereign was declared to be shut out from all share in the choice and, after the pattern of papal elections, which were now confined to the cardinals alone, the election of bishops came to be regarded as belonging to the cathedral clergy exclusively. It was found, however, that the change in the manner of appointment, instead of doing away with that corruption which had been the subject of such indignant denunciations, had only the effect of transferring it from courtiers to canons; and in its new form it worked worse than before, inasmuch as the clergy might choose a bishop with a view of benefiting by his defects, or might make a bargain with him which would be more injurious to the church than any that could be made by a layman. Jealousies, intrigues, and disputed rights, which led to long and ruinous suits, and sometimes to actual war, now became rife, and Frederick Barbarossa had probably good reason for declaring in a well-known speech that the bishops appointed by the imperial power had been better than those whom the clergy had chosen for themselves.

In many countries, however, the sovereigns still retained their influence. In France, England, and Spain, the king’s licence was necessary before an election, and his confirmation of the bishop-elect was also necessary; while in the Sicilies, Hungary, Denmark, and Sweden the kings still enjoyed the power of nomination. The appointment of archbishops of Canterbury was the subject of struggles which were renewed at every vacancy, as, in addition to the claims of the king and of the monks of the cathedral, the bishops of the province claimed a share in the election. The most remarkable of these contests was perhaps that which followed on the death of Becket's successor, Richard. The bishops made choice of Baldwin, bishop of Worcester, but the monks refused to concur in this, and pretended to an exclusive right of election, which, they said, had been confirmed to them by the king in penitence for the death of St. Thomas. This claim was asserted with such obstinacy as to provoke Henry to exclaim that the prior of Canterbury, Alan, wished to be a second pope in England; but after a long contest, and much skillfull management on the part of the king, it was contrived that some representatives of the monks, who had been summoned to Westminster, should, after declaring the election by the bishops to be null, independently elect the same person on whom the choice of the bishops and of the king had already fallen.

Sovereigns no longer ventured to found bishoprics without the consent of popes; but they strongly resisted the attempts of the popes to parcel out their dominions by new foundations or new arrangements of sees. Yet we have seen that Henry the Lion, of Saxony, although his rank was not that of king but of duke, took it on himself to erect bishoprics in the north of Germany, to nominate bishops, and to grant them investiture.

The question of investiture, after the long contests which it had occasioned, was settled by means of compromises. We have seen how this was arranged in England, and by the concordat of Worms; and also that in 1119 the form of investing by ring and staff was not used in France. But the substance of investiture still remained. A distinction was drawn between homagium and ligium— the former implying general faithfulness and obedience, while the other included an obligation to serve the feudal lord “against all men who may live or die”; and it was held that the episcopal homage, being unencumbered with this last condition, was lawful. The name of investiture was applied to the ceremony of homage, and Bernard himself speaks of such investiture as unobjectionable. Hugh of Fleury wrote a tract with the intention of mediating between the claims of the church and of the state. He holds that temporal as well as spiritual power is derived from God; that the priesthood, although higher in order than royalty, cannot claim earthly dignity; and that bishops may rightly be invested with their temporalities by princes, although the investiture with ring and staff, as being the symbols of spiritual office, ought to be reserved for the metropolitans. And, although some bishops were disposed to claim an exemption from feudal duties, even such popes as Alexander III and Innocent III acknowledged that in regard of their temporalities they were liable to the usual feudal obligations, and were subject to the courts of their liege lord.

In this age popes began to interfere with the patronage of ecclesiastical dignities and offices throughout the western church, the earliest instance being a letter of Adrian IV to the bishop, dean, and chapter of Paris, as to the bestowal of a canonry on Hugh, the chancellor of Lewis VII. The favoured objects of the papal requests (preces) were styled precistoe, but, as the requests were the less likely to meet with attention in proportion as their number was unreasonably increased, the more peremptory form of a mandate was adopted—at first as an addition to the requests, and afterwards as a substitute for them. And until a suitable preferment should fall vacant, the patrons were desired to provide out of their own funds a pension for the person recommended to them. When, however, sovereigns attempted any practices of the same kind, the popes were naturally vehement in denouncing them. As yet the papal recommendations, while interfering with patronage, admitted that it rightfully belonged to the prelates, chapters, or monastic societies to whom they were addressed. But in the next century this came to be denied, and the revenues of the church in countries north of the Alps—most especially in England—were preyed on by a host of Italians, forcibly quartered on them by the popes.

 

RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND STATE

 

In France the growth of the royal power affected the relations of the state with the church. Philip Augustus was sovereign of a territory twice as large as that of Philip I, and the kingdom had advanced very greatly in culture and in wealth. The kings were getting the mastery over their great vassals, and, although in their struggle against these they had been allied with the clergy, they now put forward new pretensions of dignity against the hierarchy itself; thus Philip refused to do homage for certain lands held under the church, like the former tenants, the counts of Flanders, on the ground that the king must not do homage to any one. On the other hand also the bishops lost, both in Italy and in France, by the rise of the municipal communities. The amount of this rise, indeed, was less in France, where the towns were less populous and more distant from each other, where they were not aided by the influence of the clergy, and, instead of being able to combine their energies against one common foe, each town had, as its first necessity, to carry on a feud with some neighbouring noble. All, therefore, that the French communes as yet claimed was civic freedom—not such independence as the Italians achieved. In many cases bishops were the lords from whom emancipation was desired; and, while some struggled against the movement, others accommodated themselves to it. Sometimes they sold privileges to the citizens; sometimes they freely granted them; while in many cases, especially under Philip Augustus, privileges detrimental to the power of the bishops were granted by the sovereign, on condition of payments to the royal exchequer. By means of friendly arrangements with the citizens, indeed, the bishops were able to secure these as allies against the neighbouring nobles; but, although they still retained their high rank in the state, much of the power which had formerly belonged to their order had now passed into the hands either of the sovereign or of the commonalty.

When Gregory VII propounded his doctrines as to the relations of the ecclesiastical and the secular powers, the imperial cause found many champions among the clergy. But after a time it began to be understood how advantageous the hierarchical pretensions were to the whole clerical body—that the greatness of the pope, as the Hildebrandine system represented him, was reflected in a degree even on the most inconsiderable ecclesiastic. When, too, it was believed that all secular power emanated from the pope, there was less difficulty in believing the same as to spiritual power; and thus, in no long time, the clergy in general were possessed by ideas which ranged them on the side of the papacy in its differences with temporal sovereigns.

The claims of the church as to matters of judicature were continually growing. In this respect the popes made a great step by exempting crusaders from all power of civil magistrates, and by forbidding that they should be sued for debts; and this measure, which was allowed to pass unquestioned amid the general enthusiasm for the holy war, became a foundation for other pretensions, which, if they had been nakedly advanced in ordinary circumstances, would have encountered a strong opposition. As the church was supposed to have jurisdiction in all matters to which the canons related, the condemnation of any offence by a pope or a council was supposed to bring that offence within the cognizance of the ecclesiastical courts, which thus claimed the power of judging, whether solely or concurrently, of such crimes as incendiarism and false coining. These courts also claimed exclusive jurisdiction in all cases relating to wills, marriages, and usury; and this jurisdiction was extended by ingenious subtleties. Thus, under the head of usury, a vast number of commercial transactions were brought within their cognizance, and all dealings with Jews were considered to belong to the province of the ecclesiastical courts. In like manner, if a contract were ratified by an oath, a breach of contract became perjury, and a subject for these courts; and on the ground that the vassal took an oath to his lord, an attempt was even made in France to claim for them a right of deciding questions as to fiefs, although this attempt was checked by Philip Augustus and his nobles. When a French council had forbidden the sale of corn on Sunday, it was held that all cases as to the sale of corn were matter for the ecclesiastical tribunals, because the first question in such cases was the inquiry on what day the sale took place. And such extensions of the province of the spiritual courts were made with general approbation, as these were usually less violent in their processes and in their sentences than the secular courts; while ecclesiastics found an inducement to encroach on the business of the secular judges, not only in the increase of their power, but in the fees and other payments which were transferred to them. But the multiplicity of business which was thus brought into the hands of the clergy became, as St. Bernard complains, a temptation to neglect their more proper pursuits; and many canons were passed to check their fondness for acting as advocates, even in the secular courts. The claim advanced in England, that the church should have exclusive jurisdiction over clerks, and in all cases relating to them, has been mentioned in connection with the name of archbishop Becket. In other countries, too, similar pretensions were set up; but it was soon found that in their full extent they were too monstrous to be admitted, and compromises were made, by which, while a large immunity was secured for the clergy, they were yet not to be exempt from the secular magistrates “for man-slaying, theft, arson, or such like common crimes which belong to the pleas of the sword”.

The change introduced into the functions of archdeacons as to the administration of the church has been already mentioned. But now these officers began to set up pretensions to an increase of dignity and influence. Whereas they had formerly attended on the bishops in their visitations, and, if they themselves visited, it was merely as the delegates of the bishops, they now claimed for themselves independent rights of visitation and jurisdiction; they tyrannized over the clergy, and defied the episcopal authority. In some cases, where a new see had been formed by the subdivision of a diocese, the archdeacons attempted to exercise jurisdiction over the bishops; but this claim was disallowed by the popes, who also found it necessary in other respects to check the assumption and rapacity of the archdeacons. When, however, an archbishop of Canterbury attempted to exempt some places from the jurisdiction of archdeacons, Alexander III forbade this innovation. The advantages of the office continued, as in former times, to attract the desires of laymen, and canons were passed that no one under the order of priest or deacon should be allowed to hold an arch­deaconry. Laymen who for the sake of gain desire such an office, says Innocent II, are not to be called archdeacons, but archdevils.

The exactions of archdeacons and rural deans were the subject of many complaints, especially as to the matter of penance, in which they are described as making a gain of sins. John of Salisbury, in a letter to Nicholas de Sigillo on his appointment to the archdeaconry of Huntingdon, amusingly reminds him of the terms in which he had formerly spoken of archdeacons as a class excluded from the hope of salvation by their love of money, which led them to lie and plunder, and to “eat and drink the sins of the people”. From the time of the council of London in 1108, canons were passed with a view of checking such practices. Bishops at length attempted to get over the annoyance which they experienced from the archdeacons, by erecting new courts of their own, on the principles of the canon law, and by appointing persons with the title of officials to preside in these, while they employed “vicars” or rural deans to assist them in their pastoral work. But here again corruptions crept in; for it was soon complained that the bishops made a gain of the new offices by selling them or letting them for hire, and thus compelling the holders to indemnify themselves by extortion; and Peter of Blois (himself an archdeacon) speaks of the officials by the significant name of “bishops’ leeches”.

In the following century, we find that the practices of archdeacons in England are still complained of, as to exacting money, burdening the clergy with the expense of entertaining an unreasonably large train of their men and horses at visitations, preventing the peaceable settlement of disputes in order to profit by the expenses of litigation, and allowing persons who had been guilty of grievous sin to compound for their offences by pecuniary payments.

The decrease of gifts to the church has been noted at an earlier date. It seems to have been thought that the endowments were already ample, and the wealth of the clergy and monks, with the corruptions which were traced to it, formed a constant theme of complaint for sectaries, for reformers such as Arnold of Brescia, for visionaries like Hildegard and Joachim, and for satirical poets who now arose in Germany, France, and England. Yet the church’s possessions were still increasing by other means. Many advantageous purchases, exchanges, or other arrangements were made with crusaders who were in haste to furnish themselves for the holy war. Much was also acquired by bequest; and the influence of the clergy with persons on their death­bed, together with the circumstance that all testamentary questions belonged to ecclesiastical courts, rendered this an important source of wealth, although in some countries the civil powers already began to check such bequests. And a new species of contract, by which a landowner made over his property to the church, on condition that he should receive it back in fee, was also a means of adding to the possessions of the clergy. For, although these feuda oblate differed from the precariae, inasmuch as the fief was granted to the donor’s heirs as well as to himself, the church not only derived some present advantages from such arrangements, but had a chance of seeing the lineal heirs become extinct, and so of coming eventually into undivided possession of the property.

Tithes were also made more productive than before. It was laid down that they were due on every kind of trade and on military pay; the commentators on such laws even held that the obligation extended to the receipts of beggars and prostitutes. It was, however, found impossible to enforce these rules to the full; and, although Gregory VII designed the entire recovery of such tithes as had fallen in the hands of laymen, he found it necessary to give up this intention, in order to secure the alliance of the nobles, which was essential to him in his enterprise against the power of sovereigns. The Lateran council of 1179 declared the holding of tithes by lay­men to be perilous to the soul, and forbade the transfer of them to other laymen, under penalty of exclusion from Christian burial for any who should receive them, and should not make them over to the church; but this canon (whatever its intended meaning may have been) came to be interpreted as forbidding only transfers and fresh alienations of tithe,—the idea of recovering that which was already alienated being apparently given up. Yet in this time many laymen were persuaded to surrender the tithes which they had appropriated, although in such cases the tithe was often given to a monastery, or to some clerk other than the rightful owner.

First fruits—a thirtieth or a sixtieth part of the produce—began also now to be claimed.

But while others complained of the wealth of the clergy, the clergy were incessantly crying out against spoliation. The advocates subdivided their power by appointing vice-advocates; and these deputies, with a great train of inferior functionaries attached to them, rivalled their chiefs in oppressing the churches which they professed to defend. The advocates built castles not only on that portion of the church’s land which was allotted to themselves, but on any part of its lands; their exactions, both from the church and from its tenants, became heavier and heavier, so that in some cases the tenants were reduced to beggary. Canons were passed to check these evils, but with little effect; and when Urban III attempted to do away with the office of advocate in Germany, he found that the emperor Frederick, although favourable to a limitation of the power of the advocates, was opposed to the abolition, and that the bishops were not prepared to support it. The evil pressed no less on monasteries than on cathedrals, and various means were tried to overcome it. Some churches or monasteries acquired the right to remove their advocates—a right, however, which could not always be readily enforced; some bought them off, or were able to bring them under a measure of restraint by the help of the sovereign while others, in despair of all human aid, instituted solemn daily prayers for deliverance from the tyranny of these oppressive protectors.

Nor were the advocates the only lay officers who preyed severely on the funds of churches and monasteries Great nobles, and even sovereign princes, enrolled themselves among their officials in order to share in their revenues. Thus, at Cologne, the ten gates of the city had for their guardians five dukes and five counts, to each of whom an annual allowance of 2,000 silver marks was paid for his services; and even the emperor Frederick submitted to become truchsess or seneschal of Bamberg cathedral, as the condition of obtaining certain lands to be held under it.

By these exactions, and by the necessity of maintaining soldiers for their feuds, the bishops were heavily burdened, and were frequently obliged to incur debts to a large amount. They had lost their old control over the division of the church's income, and had now under their management only the lands assigned for their own maintenance; and these they charged with their debts, to the impoverishment of the see. This practice, however, was forbidden by decrees of Conrad III, of Frederick I, and of Henry VI.

 

REGALE. JUS EXUVIARUM.

 

The claims of sovereigns to the  regale and to the jus exuviarium excited much contention. By the first of these was meant the right to enjoy the income of vacant sees—a privilege which in Germany did not extend beyond one year, while in England it seems to have been limited only by the king’s will; and both in France and in England, although perhaps not in Germany, to this was annexed the disposal of all patronage belonging to the vacant see. The origin of this custom in France is traced to the circumstance that in the seventh and eighth centuries, when dukes or counts seized on the property of a vacant bishopric, the king often intervened to rescue it from their hands; and hence arose the idea that the king himself, as chief advocate of the church, was entitled to the custody and the profits of vacant sees. It is, however, uncertain at what time the claim was established in France. However it may have originated, the regale was now grounded on the feudal system, by which a vacant fief reverted to the liege lord, until again granted away by him; and monasteries were subject to this exaction during the vacancy of the headship.

By the jus exuviarium was meant the right to inherit the furniture and other property of deceased bishops. In early times it had been held that a bishop might dispose by will of his inherited property, but that any savings out of his official income belonged to the church. Hence the money which was found in a bishop's coffers, and the furniture of the episcopal house, were usually shared among the clergy of his cathedral, and the successor, on taking possession of his residence, found nothing but bare walls. It is easy to conceive that, in lawless ages, such opportunities of plunder attracted the rapacity of the nobles; and in the tenth century we find the council of Trosley, and Atto, bishop of Vercelli, complaining that, on a bishop's death, his goods became the prey of his powerful neighbours. In this case, therefore, as in that of the regale, the intervention of kings for the prevention of worse evils became the foundation of a claim. In France and Germany this privilege was fully established in the twelfth century, and when Frederick I defended it against Urban III, even the refractory archbishop Philip of Cologne admitted that the emperor's claim, although unbecoming, was not unjust. In some cases the jus exuviarium belonged to the great vassals; and it was mutually exercised by the archbishops of Lyons and the bishops of Autun. In England both the regale and the jus exuviarium were introduced by William Rufus, who abused his power very scandalously in this respect.

In this age an attempt was made for the first time by the clergy to procure an exemption from taxation for secular purposes, such as contributions towards the national army. Urban II, at the council of Melfi, in 1089, enacted that the laity should not make any exaction from the clergy, either on account of their benefices or of their inherited property; and that any clerk holding a possession under a layman should either provide a deputy to discharge the duties connected with it, or should give it up. The object of this was to render the clergy entirely independent of the state, and it was natural that such a scheme should be strenuously opposed, not only by sovereigns, but by nobles, who saw that any burdens which might be thrown off by the clergy must necessarily fall on themselves. The claim to exemption, therefore, could not be maintained; and the third Lateran council contented itself with an anathema against the arbitrary and unequal manner in which the clergy had very commonly been assessed, as compared with other classes, in cases of taxation for public works or for maintenance of soldiers.

But while the popes attempted to exempt the clergy from national and local imposts, they themselves taxed them very heavily, under the pretence of a war against the infidels, or for some other religious purpose, such as the maintenance of a pope in opposition to a rival claimant of the apostolic chair, or to an emperor who withstood his power. The “Saladin’s tithe” was at first resisted by the clergy and monks, on the ground that their prayers were their proper and sufficient contribution towards the holy cause; those who fight for the church, said Peter of Blois, ought rather to enrich her with the spoils of her enemies than to rob her. But the popes enforced this tithe, and continued to exact it long after the necessity which gave rise to it had come to an end.

The moral condition of the clergy in general during the twelfth century is very unfavourably represented, alike by zealous churchmen, such as Gerhoh of Reichersperg, by satirists, like Walter von der Vogelweide and the author of “Reynard the Fox”, and by sober observers, such as John of Salisbury. “The insolence of the clergy”, says Bernard, “of which the negligence of the bishops is mother, everywhere disturbs and molests the church”. Among the causes of their deterioration may be mentioned the constant struggles between the popes and secular princes, the frequent internal troubles of kingdoms (such as the long anarchy of Stephen's reign in England), and the disorders produced by the crusades. Bishops also contributed not a little to the discredit of the clerical body by the growing abuse of ordaining clergy without a titled Gerhoh speaks of many of theseacephali as being very learned, but regards them as a sort of centaurs—neither clerks nor laymen—enjoying as they did the ecclesiastical privileges without being bound by ecclesiastical duties. But it would seem that the great mass of them were chiefly distinguished, not for their learning, but for their disorderly and disreputable lives. Attempts were made to check the practice of ordination to the higher degrees, at least, without a title and with this view the third Lateran council enacted that any bishop who should ordain a priest or a deacon without a title should be bound to maintain him until he were provided with a maintenance from some church. But this rule was open to many evasions—some bishops even frustrated it by requiring the candidate for ordination to swear that he would never become chargeable to them—and it proved utterly ineffectual. Nor did any better success attend some attempts to keep the acephalous clerks in check by a revival of the ancient letters of communion.

The encroachments of the popes on the power of the bishops had also a large share in producing the decay of discipline; for now that the popes held themselves entitled to interfere with every diocese, not only by receiving appeals, but by acting as judges in the first instance, the bishops were deterred from exercising discipline by the fear of a mandate from Rome, which might forbid them to judge or might reverse their sentence.

As in earlier times, there are many complaints of lay-patronage; of the employment of stipendiary chaplains, as exercised without the sanction of bishops, and tending to withdraw the clergy from episcopal superintendence; of pluralities, which grew to an enormous extent, so that, while the third Lateran council denounces the practice of accumulating six or more churches on one incumbent, we are told that some clerks had as many as twenty or thirty, and the preferments enjoyed by Becket while as yet only a deacon would seem to have exceeded even this ample measured. But of all pluralists, in England and probably in the whole church, the most rapacious was John Hansel, who served Henry III in the following century as chaplain, counsellor, judge, and soldier, and is said to have enjoyed benefices to the value of four thousand marks a year.

The promotion of boys to ecclesiastical offices and dignities continued in defiance of all the protests of Bernard and other eminent men, and of frequent prohibitions by popes and councils; some bishops, it is said, not only allowed nobles to thrust boys into spiritual preferments, but themselves made a profit of the abuse by pocketing the income during the incumbent's minority. And, notwithstanding the war which Gregory VII and his school had so rigorously waged against simony, the practice still continued. As on the one hand the definition of simony became more refined, so that under this name were forbidden not only all payments for spiritual offices, but even fees for the lessons of cathedral and monastic schools, so on the other hand the scholastic subtlety was more and more exercised in devising distinctions by which the condemnations of simony might be evaded. While the popes professed a zeal for the suppression of this offence, they themselves were continually accused of it; some of them, indeed, are said to have so notoriously bought their office that they can be vindicated only by the desperate expedient of asserting that the pope cannot be guilty of simony. And nothing could exceed the corruption of the Roman curia, which, in order that it might be equal to dealing with the increase of business that was referred to the pope, was newly organized with a staff of ravenous officials. The schemes of Gregory for delivering the church from secular influence had resulted in the secularization of the church itself.

The worldly occupations, amusements, and habits of the bishops and higher clergy were the subject of frequent complaints The German prelates in particular were so much involved in secular business—leading, for the most part, the lives of great nobles rather than of clergymen—that Caesarius of Heisterbach reports a clerk of Paris as having on this account questioned their salvability. In particular, the warlike propensities of bishops would seem to have become more active than ever; for now that the wars against the infidels had consecrated their military service in some cases, the justification of episcopal fighting was not unnaturally extended to other wars. The chroniclers describe with a mixture of admiration and reprobation the exploits of such prelates as Christian of Mainz, who appeared in full armour at the head of armies, and, after having in one battle slain nine men with his spiked club, arrayed himself on the following day in pontificals, and solemnly celebrated a mass of thanksgiving for the victory. Reginald and Philip of Cologne, Absalom of Lund, and many other bishops, are celebrated for their warlike deeds. Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury, and afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, attracted the admiration of the lion-hearted Richard himself by his prowess as a crusader, and after his return found exercise for his military talents in the feuds of his own country. And the story is well-known how Richard, having taken prisoner Philip, count-bishop of Beauvais, met the pope's interference in behalf of the warlike prelate by sending to him Philip’s coat of mail, with the scriptural quotation—“Know now whether it be thy son’s coat or no”.

 

MARRIAGE AND CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY.

 

Of all matters relating to the life and morals of the clergy, the question of marriage 0r celibacy continued to be the chief occasion of complaint and difficulty. The successors of Gregory VII, in endeavouring to carry on his policy in this respect, met with a long and obstinate resistance in many quarters, and as to some points they found themselves obliged to make concessions. Thus, whereas Gregory had forbidden the faithful to receive the Eucharist at the hands of a married priest, Paschal II, on being asked by Anselm of Canterbury whether a person in danger of death might receive from such a priest, replied that it was better to do so than to die without the viaticum; and he added that if a married priest, on being applied to in such circumstances, should refuse his ministry, on the ground of its having been formerly despised, he would be guilty of soul-murder. In like manner, when the knights of the order of St. James asked Lucius III whether they might frequent the churches of married priests, and how they should reconcile the command against attending the mass of such priests with the principle that the sin of the minister does not pollute the ordinances which he administers, the pope replied by distinguishing between notorious sins and those which are hidden or tolerated—telling them that, so long as the church bears with a priest, they might rightly receive the sacraments and other rites from him.

With regard to the sons of priests, too, it was found necessary to deal more gently than the zealots for clerical celibacy would have wished. There was, indeed, a steady endeavour to prevent the transmission of benefices from father to son : and with this view it was sometimes enacted that the sons of priests should not be ordained, unless they became either monks or regular canons; sometimes, that they should not hold the same benefice which their fathers had held, or, at least, that they should not immediately succeed them. But even these prohibitions allow the ordination of the sons of priests under certain restrictions; and even such a pope as Alexander III was always ready to deal tenderly with such cases. In 1161 Richard Peche, the son of a bishop of Coventry, was appointed to succeed his father in the see; and the chronicler Ralph de Diceto, in relating the fact, takes occasion to cite the opinion of Ivo of Chartres, that the sons of priests, if their own life be respectable, are not to be excluded from any ecclesiastical office, even up to the papacy itself.

Notwithstanding the many prohibitions of marriage to persons in the higher orders of the ministry, the decree of the first Lateran council, in 1123, is said to have been the first that dissolved such marriages. In the following year, John of Crema, cardinal of St. Chrysogonus, held a council at Westminster, where he severely denounced the marriage of the clergy, and a canon was enacted against it; but it is said that on the evening of the same day the cardinal was detected in company with a prostitute, and that he was obliged to leave England in disgrace. In 1127 Archbishop William of Canterbury sent forth some strong prohibitions of marriage; but the practice still maintained a struggle in England. In 1129 Henry I, reverting to an expedient for raising money which he had attempted in the primacy of Anselm, imprisoned the housekeepers (who were supposed to be also the wives or concubines) of many of the London clergy, whom he compelled to pay heavily for their liberation and it appears that, both in England and elsewhere, even bishops licensed the cohabitation of the clergy with their wives on condition of an annual payment. The continued marriage of the English clergy is mentioned in many letters of Alexander III and among other evidence of it may be mentioned that of Giraldus Cambrensis, who states that among the parish priests of England the keeping of focariae was almost universal, and that the canons of St. David's—especially such of them as were Welchmen—were notorious for their irregularities in this respect, filling the precincts of their cathedral with concubines, midwives, children, and nurses, connecting their families with each other by intermarriage, and transmitting their benefices by inheritance. He tells us also that the like customs prevailed among the kindred people of Brittany.

In Normandy we are told that in the beginning of the twelfth century the priests celebrated their marriages publicly, that they left their benefices to their sons, and sometimes provided in a like manner for the portioning of their daughters. Geoffrey, archbishop of Rouen, in endeavouring to enforce on his province the prohibitions of marriage enacted by the council of Reims in 1119, was violently assaulted, as his predecessor John had been for a similar attempt in the pontificate of Gregory, and his life was in danger in a serious tumult which ensued.

In Spain, where the marriage of the clergy had been tolerated before the submission of the church to Rome, the legitimacy of their children was sanctioned by Paschal II. Didacus (Diego), archbishop of Compostella, endeavoured to enforce the new regulations, but in this and in his other attempts at discipline he met with obstinate resistance.

In Germany, the last place which retained clerical marriage was Liège, where, as we have seen, the practice had been defended by the pen of Sigebert of Gemblours. Even so late as 1220 the canons celebrated their nuptials "like laymen", and are said to have paraded their wives in a strange and hardly credible manner.

In Bohemia the first attempt to separate clergymen from their wives was made by a legate in 1143 but the separation was not effected until the time of Innocent III or later. In Hungary, which was affected by the neighbourhood of the Greek church, a council of spiritual and temporal dignitaries in 1092 forbade the second marriage of priests,—a prohibition which implies that a single marriage was regarded as lawful; and on this footing the matter rested in that country until after the middle of the thirteenth century. The imperfectly organised church of Poland was for a long time untouched by Gregory's reforms; the clergy married into the families of the nobles, and even till the thirteenth century their benefices were often hereditary. The earliest attempt to enforce celibacy in Denmark was made in 1123, but was ineffectual. Even the influence of Breakspear, as legate, was unable to establish the system in the northern kingdoms. Eskil of Lund, and other eminent bishops, were themselves married. The apprehension of evils which might arise from the compulsory celibacy of the clergy was, as we have seen, among the causes which produced a formidable outbreak in the end of the century. It appears from a letter of Innocent III that the Swedish clergy professed to have a papal sanction for their marriage; and the practice continued into the thirteenth century. In the remote island of Iceland the license for marriage or concubinage of the clergy took a peculiar form—a payment to the bishop on the birth of every child.

While the legislation of the church was steady in the direction of suppressing the marriage of the clergy, it is remarkable that some of the most eminent writers were very moderate in their opinions on the subject. Thus Gratian, although he takes the view which the church had sanctioned in his time, yet allows the greater freedom of earlier ages to be fully represented in his digest of the ecclesiastical laws. Peter Comestor, a famous professor of Paris, is said by his pupil Giraldus Cambrensis to have publicly taught that the devil had never so much circumvented the church as in enforcing the vow of celibacy; that, although no authority less than that of a general council could set the clergy free in this matter, there is nothing in Scripture to forbid marriage; and that Alexander III would have rescinded the law but for the opposition of his secretary, who afterwards became pope under the name of Gregory VIII. And while, in the following century, Thomas of Aquino declares the celibacy of the secular clergy to be merely of human institution, and differs from the zealots of celibacy in regarding secret marriage as less culpable than unchastity, the younger Durandus of Mende frankly owns the futility of all repressive measures, and suggests that it might be expedient to return to the practice of the early church, as it was still maintained among the orientals.

Among the clergy who were charged with irregularity of life, none were more conspicuous than the canons of cathedrals; and the rise of this class in dignity and importance made their ill example the more mischievous. Ever since the ninth century, canons had endeavoured to get into their own hands the independent management of their property; and in this they had generally been successful. The common table and dormitory, which had been parts of the original institution, had fallen into disuse, so that, if the canons ate together on any occasion, it was not in order to fullfill their rule, but to enjoy the extraordinary cheer of a festival. The canons had become proud, luxurious, ostentatious in affecting the fashions of the world as to dress and habits, and utterly neglectful of their ecclesiastical duties, which were in part devolved on hired substitutes. Preferment of this kind was coveted by noble, and even princely, families, as a stepping-stone for their members towards higher dignities, and as affording a comfortable income in the meantime. Not only was illegitimate or servile birth regarded as a disqualification, but in many cases it was required that the canons should be noble by descent on one side, at least, if not (as at Strasburg) on both. Any who without this qualification were appointed by papal provisions, were regarded with contempt by the rest; and sometimes a chapter ventured to withstand even the authority of a pope in defence of its exclusive restrictions. In some cases canonries became hereditary in families.

The canons were no longer content to be styled brethren, but were now addressed as domini. The elder among them depressed the younger, whom they treated as an inferior class—curtailing their share of the revenues, and in some cases even exacting homage from them. Now that they had got the election of bishops into their hands, the canons made terms beforehand with the future bishop, and, in addition to much individual jobbery, they very commonly extorted from him the right of appointing to places in their own chapter and to other offices in the church. They affected great independence of the bishops; they attended councils; they claimed all the administration of dioceses, and even of provinces, during the vacancy of sees; and in all their assumptions they were generally supported by their powerful family connections.

The difficulties occasioned by the degeneracy of the canons are the subject of continual papal letters. Many attempts were made to recall them to the practice of living in common and to their other ecclesiastical duties; while some bishops and princes, regarding such attempts as hopeless, ejected the secular canons, and planted in their stead either monks, or canons of the class which was styled regular, and which was distinguished from the seculars chiefly by the renunciation of all individual property. In Germany the seculars had such strength that the only course for reforming bishops was to leave them in possession, and to found new societies of canons on a more rigid footing.

 

Monasticism—Religious Associations.

 

The twelfth century saw the rise of several new orders, in addition to those which have been already described. Among them was that of the Carmelites, founded by Berthold, a native of Calabria, who about the year 1180 settled on Mount Carmel—a place to which, from the fourth century downwards, many recluses had been drawn by its connection with the prophet Elijah. But in later times the Carmelites, disdaining to acknowledge Berthold as their founder, professed to trace themselves up to Elijah himself through a line which included the Rechabites and some of the Old Testament prophets; and whereas their oldest rule was really given by Albert, patriarch of Jerusalem, in 1209, they pretended to reckon among their legislators St. Basil, in the fourth century, and John of Jerusalem, the contemporary of St. Jerome. These pretensions led, in the seventeenth century, to a fierce controversy between the Carmelites—chiefly those of Flanders—and the Bollandist hagiologists, who maintained the truth of history; and the war was carried on not only in learned dissertations, but in satirical pamphlets. Innocent XII., in 1698, in accordance with a decision of the Congregation of the Index, attempted to allay the quarrel by imposing silence on both parties under pain of excommunication; but Benedict XIII afterwards countenanced the pretensions of the Carmelites by allowing a statue of Elijah to be erected in St. Peter's among those of the great founders of monachism.

On the expulsion of the Latins from the Holy Land, the Carmelites, who professed to have been warned by the Blessed Virgin to quit their mountain, acquired settlements in Europe, and it is said (although perhaps with exaggeration), that at one time they possessed 7,500 monasteries, with upwards of 180,000 members. The original rule of the order was very rigid; but on leaving Carmel they petitioned Innocent IV for a mitigation of it, on the ground that they were no longer hermits. The pope, accordingly, relaxed it in some respects in 1247; and in the fifteenth century further relaxations were granted. In consequence of this, the order was divided into two branches—the stricter being styled barefooted or observants, while those who adopted the milder rule were known as shod or conventuals.

Another order of this time (which has already been mentioned on account of the confusion which its name has sometimes produced between it and the Waldensian sectaries) was that of the Humiliati, which seems to have been confined to Lombardy. The origin of this order is traced to some Milanese who were carried off into Germany by an emperor, but were afterwards allowed to return to Milan. In their exile they adopted a strict manner of life, and supported themselves by cloth-weaving; and this occupation was afterwards continued among them—their skill in the art being famous, and much of their cloth being given to the poor. To the secular men and women of whom the society at first consisted was afterwards added an order of monks and nuns; and about 1140 a priest named John of Meda completed the organization by the addition of an order of priests. The institution was confirmed by Innocent III, who in 1201 provided it with a rule mainly derived from that of St. Benedict, and its members were distinguished for their charitable labours. In the course of centuries, however, the Humiliati showed the usual degeneracy. An attempt of St. Charles Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, to reform them provoked a violent uproar, so that his life was even in danger; and in consequence of this the order was abolished by Pius V in 1571.

Among the other orders of the twelfth century may be named that of Fiore, which has been already mentioned in connection with its founder, Joachim and the English order of Sempringham, founded by Gilbert, after whom the members—male and female—were commonly called Gilbertines.

 

CLUNIACS AND CISTERCIANS

 

The new orders, being founded in a spirit of reaction from the laxity of those which before existed, were likely to excite the rivalry of their elders; and this rivalry was especially shown in France between the Cistercians and the Cluniacs. The contrast between the black dress of Cluny and the white dress of Citeaux was enough to proclaim at sight the difference of the orders; and, while the Cistercians were not slow to tax the Cluniacs with degeneracy, these retorted by charges of vanity and presumption against the younger society. Hence, about the year 1125, a discussion took place between Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable of Cluny—each the chief ornament of his order, each respecting the other, and both free from the more vulgar feelings by which many of their partisans were animated. Bernard wrote his 'Apology' at the suggestion of William, abbot of St. Thierry, a Cluniac, with a view of satisfying those who complained of the Cistercians as detractors. In the outset, he is very severe on such of his own brethren as had indulged in censures on the alleged laxity of the Cluniacs. As men differ in character, he says, so a corresponding difference of usages may be lawful pride and censoriousness are evidences of a want of charity far worse than the slight indulgences which it attacks. He professes a high regard for the order of Cluny, and says that he had always dissuaded those who wished to forsake it for the Cistercian order. But from this Bernard goes on to blame the Cluniacs for their disobedience to the rule of St. Benedict. While admitting the lawfulness of dispensations, he holds that the secular manner of life which prevails in some monasteries is such as no dispensation can warrant. Many of the monks, though young and vigorous, pretend sickness, that they may be allowed to eat flesh; and those who abstain from flesh indulge their palate without limit by exquisite varieties of cookery, while, in order to provoke the appetite, they drink largely of the strongest and most fragrant wines, which are often rendered yet more stimulant by spices. At table, instead of grave silence, light worldly gossip, jests, and idle laughter prevail. The Cluniacs have coverlets of fur or other rich and variegated materials for their beds; they dress themselves in the costliest furs, in silk, and in cloth fine enough for royal robes; and a ludicrous picture is drawn of a Cluniac choosing the stuff for his cowl with feminine care and fastidiousness. This excessive care for the body, says Bernard, is a consequence of the neglect of mental culture. But even more than for their personal luxury, he taxes the Cluniacs for the excessive splendour of their worship, and for the unsuitable magnificence of their buildings. The walls of their churches are adorned, while the poor are left in nakedness; the pictures distract the mind, instead of raising it to devotion; and the monstrous and grotesque carvings which abound are altogether unfit for a religious house. The chandeliers and tree-like candlesticks are of vast labour and cost, and are set with jewels; the pavements are inlaid with figures of saints and angels, which in such a position cannot escape irreverent usage; the sight of the golden shrines in which the relics are encased fattens the eyes and unlooses the purse-strings of beholders. Such things, he says, might be allowable in churches intended for lay worshippers, whose carnal minds may need them; but for monks, who have renounced the delights of the senses, they are incongruous and unseemly. Bernard also blames the Cluniacs for their exemption from episcopal authority, and for impropriating the tithes of parish-churches; and he denounces the pomp of many abbots, who, on going barely four leagues from home, took with them baggage enough for a campaign, or for a journey through the desert—especially of one whom he had seen travelling with sixty horses, and a train sufficient for two bishops.

Peter's defence of his order, written in 1143, although addressed to Bernard, is not a reply to his tract, but to the Cistercian accusations in general. He taxes the Cistercians with breach of the charity inculcated by their rule, and speaks of their white dress as a blamable singularity, whereas the black of the older orders was suitable as an emblem of sadness. He justifies, as far as possible, the Cluniac departure from the letter of the Benedictine rule, which, he says, is beyond what the men of his day could bear; and he adds that the Cistercians sin against charity by the severity of their discipline, which often drives monks to forsake the order, or renders them discontented, and impairs their health. The use of furs and other such materials in dress and bedding, and the abatement of the precepts as to fasting, he excuses under the allowance which the Benedictine rule had made for diversities of climate, and of the discretion which it vested in the abbot; moreover, as coats of skins were given to Adam and Eve not for pride but for shame, the use of furs might serve to remind us that we are exiles from our heavenly country. If the Cluniacs have lands, they are kinder to their tenants than lay landowners; if they have serfs, it is because they could not but accept them with the lands to which they were attached; if they get possession of castles, they turn them into houses of prayer. They may rightly possess tolls, since it was only from the injustice of the toll-gatherer's trade that St. Matthew was called; if tithes were given to the Levites because they had no inheritance, they may rightly be given to monks, who have forsaken all earthly possessions; and if they are given to clerks for their pastoral care, why not to monks for their prayers, their tears, their alms, and their other good works for the benefit of men? As manual labour was prescribed by St. Benedict by way of a remedy against idleness, it is needless when idleness may be avoided by other means; and for men who are weak from the nature of their diet, prayer, study, psalmody, and spiritual labours are more suitable than the works of husbandry. The Benedictine precepts as to receiving strangers and washing their feet could not be literally performed without inconvenience and grievous waste of time; but they are observed in spirits And whereas the Cluniacs had been censured for being under no bishops, they have the truest and holiest bishop of all, the bishop of Rome, while they have the privilege of obtaining episcopal offices from any bishop of their own choice.

The rivalry between Cluny and Citeaux was exasperated by the circumstance that the general exemption of the Cistercians from tithes affected some lands which had formerly paid tithes to the Cluniacs; and from this collisions frequently arose. In one of these quarrels the Cluniacs burnt down a Cistercian monastery; and the enmity of the two orders outlived both Peter and Bernard.

It would seem that Bernard’s Apology, written soon after the scandals which the misconduct of abbot Pontius had occasioned among the Cluniacs, contributed to suggest the important reforms which Peter effected in his order. But the Cistercians themselves, although they continued to find eulogists, although their salvation was declared by visions, and although for a time their order was the refuge of spirits which sought a rigid discipline, began early to show symptoms of decay. A prophetess of Lorraine in 1153 addressed to them a letter on their decline in zeal and love. The records of their general chapters contain many significant notices; thus, in 1181 it is said that some monasteries had run into debt by purchasing wine; in 1182 it appears that their rule had been broken by the introduction of painted windows into churches; in 1191 the chapter endeavours to take measures for the removal of the imputations of greediness which had been fixed on the Cistercians. Alexander III found it necessary to reprove them for having deviated from their rule by possessing farms and mills, parish-churches and altars, receiving fealty and homage, holding the offices of judges and tax-gatherers, and using all their endeavours to enlarge their borders on earth, whereas their conversation ought to be in heaven; and he threatens, if they live like ordinary men, to take away the privileges which had been granted to them in consideration of their extraordinary strictness. Privileges had, indeed, been so largely bestowed on the Cistercians that pope Clement IV, in the middle of the thirteenth century, speaks of these as “against the law of God and man”, and already they had everywhere acquired exemptions like those which Bernard had strongly censured in other orders. Walter Map in the end of the twelfth century speaks of the Cistercians with especial abhorrence, and ridicules their pretensions to superior holiness and mortification.

The increase of monachism, through the foundation of the new orders, and other causes, was enormous. Thus, it is said that whereas in England there had not at the Conquest been above a hundred monasteries, the number founded under Henry I and his two successors was upwards of three hundred. Of these some owed their origin to compositions for vows of service in the holy war. There was a general desire for all sorts of papal privileges; and, as has been already stated, where these could not be proved by genuine documents, recourse was often had to forgery. The abbots aimed at entire independence of the episcopal authority—even attempting, like the lawless barons of the time, to present clerks to parish-churches without submitting them to the bishop of the diocese for institution. They affected the use of episcopal ornaments, and the episcopal right of bestowing benedictions. “How much more would they pay”, asks St. Bernard, “if they might have the name as well as the privileges of bishops?”. Peter of Blois says that the monasteries most distinguished for holiness were those which either had never desired such privileges or had voluntarily resigned them; that in any one but a bishop the use of episcopal ornaments is a mark of pride and presumption: and he prevailed on his own brother to give up an abbacy to which the pope had granted the use of those ornaments. So jealously was the privilege of exemption guarded that when Maurice, bishop of Paris appeared at the consecration of the new church of St. Germain-des-Prés by Alexander III the monks rose in tumult, as if his very presence were a claim of jurisdiction over them, and the pope sent three cardinals to beg that he would withdraw. In England we find quarrels of this kind between the bishops and the great monasteries in many quarters; thus the bishops of Chichester had contests with the abbots of Battle, the bishops of Bath with the abbots of Glastonbury, the bishops of Sarum with the abbots of Malmesbury, the bishops of Lincoln with the abbots of St. Albans. But nowhere was there a more remarkable display of such differences than in the city of Canterbury, where the archbishops were engaged in long and bitter feuds, not only with the abbots and brethren of St. Augustine's, but with the monks of their own cathedral.

The great monastery founded by the apostle of England was the first in rank of English religious houses, and in western Christendom was second only to Monte Cassino. It was the burial-place of Augustine and of his successors in the throne of Canterbury, and on that account its members looked down on the cathedral of Christchurch or Trinity, until Archbishop Cuthbert, when dying in 758, took measures that his death should be kept secret from the Augustinians until he should have been interred in the cathedral. From that time the archbishops, with the exception of Cuthbert’s second successor, Janbert, who had himself been abbot of St. Augustine's, were buried in the cathedral, and its monks were thus enabled to take a higher standing than before against their Augustinian neighbours. But in the twelfth century serious disputes arose between the arch­bishops and the monks of St. Augustine’s. The monks asserted that their house had been wholly independent of the see of Canterbury until Lanfranc, taking advantage of his ancient friendship with the Norman abbot Scolland, persuaded him to cede privileges which the monastery had before enjoyed; while on the other side it was maintained that the abbey and the patronage of the abbacy had belonged to the archbishops until the Norman conquests. The abbots claimed that the archbishops should give them the benediction in their own monastery, and without exacting any payment, or any profession of obedience. They claimed, not only the patronage of parish-churches on their estates, but exclusive jurisdiction over the incumbents. They disputed certain yearly payments which they were required to make to the cathedral, and the archbishop's charges for supplying them with consecrated oil and chrism. They professed to have privileges, reaching down from the age of king Ethelbert and St. Augustine, by which the monastery was rendered independent of all power, ecclesiastical or secular. In one of these documents Augustine was made to charge his successors in the see to regard the abbot not as their subject, but as their “brother, colleague, and fellow-minister in the word of God”. According to another document, pope John XIII ordered that the abbot should be treated “as a Roman legate”; and (as we have seen) it was said that the abbots had been privileged by Alexander II to wear the mitre (with the sandals and other episcopal ornaments), although they did not make use of the right until a hundred and twenty years later. These claims were the subject of continual appeals to the popes, who, according to their usual policy, for the most part sided with the abbey, while the officials of the Roman court were not sorry to make a profit out of the complicated litigation. At one time, when Eugenius III had desired archbishop Theobald to bless abbot Sylvester without exacting any profession, the archbishop repaired to the monastery for the purpose; but there (by his contrivance, according to the Augustinian chroniclers), the prior of Christchurch appeared, with a force of armed men, to protest against the benediction; and the archbishop caught at this pretext for delay, although a further reference to Rome obliged him at last to perform the office in the manner required. At another time, when Alexander III had ordered the benediction of abbot Roger, not only the archbishop of Canterbury, but the bishop of Worcester and the archbishop of Rouen refused to officiate; and the abbot found it necessary to seek the blessing from the pope himself, who gave it at Tusculum, granting to the abbot the use of the episcopal mitre, ring, and gloves, but with a reservation of the archbishop’s rights. On another occasion, when Theobald had interdicted England in consequence of his differences with king Stephen, the Augustinians continued to ring their bells and to celebrate divine offices as usual; but for this they were put to penance by pope Eugenius, on the ground that they were bound to obey Theobald as legate, if not as archbishop; and when the pope, after some difficulty, absolved them, he declared that he acted not as apostolic pontiff but in the room of the archbishop of Canterbury.

The monks were extremely unwilling to produce the originals of the privileges on which they relied; but, after having eluded two papal orders for their production, they were at length, in 1182, compelled to exhibit them to three commissioners appointed by Alexander III; when it was found that as to materials, form, and substance, the documents which pretended to the greatest antiquity were suspicious in the extreme. They were, however, approved by Lucius III, and archbishop Richard was obliged to withdraw the charge of forgery which he had thrown out against them. A compromise was agreed on as to some of the rival claims; but as to the benediction in the monastery all the papal authority was unable to enforce obedience from the archbishops; and the abbots were obliged to receive their blessing, sometimes from the pope in person, sometimes from any bishop who could be persuaded to give it, until in 1406 abbot Thomas Hunden was blessed in St. Paul's, London, by archbishop Arundel, who acknowledged him, in the words of the charter ascribed to St. Augustine, as his “brother, colleague, and fellow-minister”.

But while the monks of Christchurch were allied with the archbishops against the rival monastery, their own relations with them were far from harmonious. “It seems”, wrote John of Salisbury during Becket’s exile, “as if hatred of their archbishops were an inheritance of the monks of Canterbury. When Anselm was twice banished for righteousness’ sake, they never bestowed any consolation on him. They despised Ralph, they hated William, they laid snares for Theobald, and now, without any cause, they insatiably persecute Thomas”. Theobald turned out two of their priors (who were the virtual heads of the monastery, as the archbishop himself was supposed to be abbot); and at a later time a more serious difference broke out. The circumstances of archbishop Baldwin’s election had naturally left unpleasant remembrances on both sides; and soon after entering on his see, the archbishop and the monks were violently embroiled. They complained that he interfered with their revenues and privileges; that he seized the management of their estates, expelled their officials, whose places he filled with his own servants, suspended the prior, confined the monks within their own precincts, cutting off their supplies of food, so that they were indebted for the means of life to the charity of their neighbours—even of Jews; and that he excommunicated them.

In order to rid himself of the annoyances resulting from his connection with them, he formed the scheme of erecting a new church of secular canons, to bear the name of St. Thomas the Martyr, and of supporting it chiefly at the expense of Christchurch. As the germ of this, he began to rebuild and enlarge the church of St. Stephen at Hackington, about a mile distant from the cathedral, and afterwards removed the site to another place in the neighbourhood. In order to carry out his scheme he caused collections to be made throughout all England, with the inducement of ample indulgences; he endeavoured to draw the other bishops into taking part in the foundation; and he was encouraged by the support of Henry II, who had abundant reasons for disliking the monks of Christchurch. These, however, showed themselves determined to resist by appealing to the pope, and enlisting in their cause the influence of the French king and of other foreign patrons. They declared that the archbishop intended, by bestowing the canonries of his new church on the bishops of his province, not only to transfer to these the rights of the cathedral as to the election of archbishops, but to constitute himself a pope, surrounded by a college of cardinals, subject to the influence of the crown in ecclesiastical matters, but independent of the apostolic see. The popes were naturally inclined to side with the monks, more especially as the usual means of securing the favour of Rome were largely employed; and, with the exception of Gregory VIII, they showed themselves favourable to the convent. In 1189 two legates were sent by Gregory to investigate the matter; but one of them died by the way, and the other, John of Anagni, was not allowed to approach Canterbury until the question had been compromised by Richard I, on the footing that a prior whom Baldwin had nominated should be otherwise provided for, that another should be appointed by the king and the archbishop, and that the archbishop should give up the project of a collegiate church on condition of receiving from the monks the same obedience which they had paid to his predecessors. The legate indignantly declared that this agreement was void, as having been extorted from the monks, and it was afterwards annulled by Celestine III, who ordered the new buildings to be destroyed. Baldwin, before setting out on the crusade, directed that the materials should be removed to Lambeth, which he had lately acquired for his see but on hearing of his death at the siege of Acre, the monks of Christchurch drove out their prior, appointed another in his room, and elected to the primacy Reginald, bishop of Bath, who ordered the demolition of his predecessor's college at Lambeth. Reginald, however, died before consecration, and his successor, Hubert Walter, revived the project. But, although he had the support of king Richard, although all the Cistercian abbots in England exerted themselves for him, and although the authority of archbishops Anselm, Theobald, and Thomas was alleged in favour of the design, he was compelled by Innocent III in 1199 to pull down the buildings which he had begun to erect.

In other English cathedrals which were in the hands of monks, similar troubles often arose; and it is said that archbishop Baldwin induced all the bishops to promise that they would follow his example by turning their episcopal churches into colleges of secular clergy. Hugh of Nunant, bishop of Lichfield, nephew of Arnulf of Lisieux, incurred the especial abuse of the monastic writers, with the single exception of Giraldus Cambrensis, by substituting secular canons for the monks of Coventry, and is said to have advised Richard I to suppress all the monks in England; but a few years after he was obliged to succumb, and archbishop Hubert, in obedience to papal authority, reinstated the monks whom Hugh had ejected.

While monks were thus brought into rivalry and actual collision with secular canons, they were involved in a continual controversy with the regular canons as to the superiority of their respective manners of life, while the canons denied the right of the monks to preach, and would have confined them to the strict duties of religious seclusion. Among the writers who took the monastic side were Abelard, Hugh of Amiens, archbishop of Rouen, and Rupert, abbot of Deutz; among the champions of the canons were Anselm, bishop of Havelberg, Philip of Harveng, a Prémonstratensian abbot in the diocese of Cambray, and Lambert, abbot of St. Rufus, near Avignon.

Notwithstanding the frequent attempts at a reformation of monastic life, and the institution of new orders with a view to a greater severity of discipline, we still find that the state of monachism is a subject of frequent complaint. Godfrey of Vigeois describes the monks of his day as spurious heirs of the older coenobites; as lax in their diet, devoted to the vanities of fashion, and otherwise unfaithful to the true idea of their profession. In some cases the monastic food and clothing were commuted for an allowance in money—an arrangement utterly opposed to the principles of the monastic system. Giraldus Cambrensis mentions as a chief cause of disorder among the English monks the custom of sending them by twos or threes to remote cells, where they were free from the discipline of the convents on which the cells depended. Although the life in such places often involved much of roughness and privation, the monks greatly preferred it to the “imprisonment of the cloister”, on account of its freedom from restraint; but the system became the cause of general laxity, and of frequent and serious scandals. Wibald of Stablo speaks of some monastic societies as careless of their rule, and engrossed by talk of canons, decrees, appeals, councils, rights, laws, condemnations and the like; as devoted to bodily indulgences and temporal good things, and impatient of all control from their superiors. Nor were the attempts at reform always of such a kind as to deserve approval. Thus cardinal Walter of Albano, after mentioning with praise the zeal of some abbots and others who had agreed to meet annually at Reims with a view to monastic reformation—that by their means houses which had been temples of voluptuousness, the haunts of owls and hedge­hogs, syrens and satyrs, had become “glorious sheepfolds of Christ”—goes on to censure them for indiscreet innovation in some respects. Anselm of Havelberg represents people as perplexed by the number, the eccentric affectations, and the contradictory rules of the new orders which had arisen; and John of Salisbury strongly denounces the practices of hypocritical monks, who pretended to an extreme severity of life in order to cloak their ambition, avarice, and malignity.

 

MILITARY ORDERS.

 

The history of the military orders of the Temple and the Hospital has in part been noticed by anticipation, and partly in connection with the crusades. In addition to their quarrels with each other, with the patriarchs, and with their other neighbours in the east, we find them continually engaged in disputes as to privileges and exemptions in the west. By the abuse which they made of these (as by keeping their churches open in time of interdict, receiving excommunicate persons to the sacraments, and giving them Christian burial) they were drawn into frequent collisions with the bishops and clergy; and such abuses were strongly denounced by Alexander III and by the Lateran council of 1179.

In addition to the templars and hospitallers, other orders, in which religion was combined with special objects, took their origin from the crusades.

The Teutonic order, which afterwards became famous, arose out of the association of about forty crusaders from north Germany, who, at the siege of Acre, formed themselves into a brotherhood for the care of the sick and wounded—sheltering them in tents made out of the sails of their vessels. The new society gained the patronage of the king of Jerusalem, of the patriarch, and of other important personages; and Frederick of Swabia, during the short interval between his arrival at Acre and his death, recommended it to his brother, Henry VI, and also to pope Celestine, who in 1196 confirmed its institution. The order was governed by provincials, with a grand-master at its head. The first master was Henry of Walpot, but the great extension of the order was due mainly to his third successor, Herman of Salza, who, according to a chronicler, had the pope and the emperor, with other princes and great men, in his own hand, so that he obtained whatever he might ask for its honour and advantage. Under him it acquired great privileges and emoluments, and entered on its career of conquest on the shores of the Baltic; and whereas Herman had expressed a wish that by the sacrifice of one of his eyes he might raise the order to the number of ten military brethren in arms, it counted soon after his death more than 2,000 knights of noble German families.

At Acre also was instituted an English order of hospitallers, named after St. Thomas the Martyr, whose birth came by a romantic story of later date to be connected with the Holy Land; and in the last year of the century arose the order of Trinitarians or Mathurins, founded by John of Matha, a priest of Provençal birth, for the redemption of captives from the infidels, and confirmed by Innocent III.

In Spain various military orders arose, such as those of Calatrava and Avisa, both instituted for the defence of the faith against the Moors, and connected with the Cistercian order; and the order of St. James, intended for the protection of pilgrims to the shrine of the apostle at Compostella. 

An association which in so far resembled the military orders as it was formed under a religious sanction for a warlike purpose, was that of the Caputiati, or White Hoods of Auvergne. Large bodies of the mercenary soldiers whom it had become usual to employ in war, and who, from the province which originally supplied them, were known by the name of Brabançons, had betaken themselves to a life of plunder and violence, and kept that country in terror. Their numbers were swelled by desperate and disreputable persons of all classes, among whom it is said that there were many clerks, monks, and even nuns. These “hellish legions”, as they were styled by a chronicler of the age, robbed, burnt, slew, carried off the precious ornaments of churches, profaned the holy sacrament, and treated the clergy with savage insult and cruelty, so that some even died of their blows. Although in this they appear to have been moved rather by utter irreligion than by any heretical opinions, they were condemned by the Lateran council of 1179 in the same canon which proscribed the Cathari. But the beginning of active measures against them was made in 1182 by one Durand, a carpenter of Le Puy-en-Velay, which had been a popular place of pilgrimage until the outrages of these ruffians made the roads unsafe. Durand professed to have been repeatedly warned by the blessed Virgin to exhort his neighbours to the establishment of peace and the bishop of Le Puy gave his sanction to the undertaking. Bishops and abbots, nobles, clergy, and men of all classes banded themselves together in an association for the purpose. The members were pledged to eschew gaming, excess in meat and drink, swearing, and other vices; to do no wrong, and to carry on implacable hostilities against all wrong-doers; and such, it is said, was their union, that, if one had killed the brother of another, the surviving brother admitted the slayer to the kiss of peace and was bound to supply his needs. The mark of their profession was a white hood, of monastic shape, with a leaden image of the Virgin sewed on to it.

The enterprise thus set on foot was crowned with success; it is said that in one engagement 7,ooo of the Brabançons or cottereaux were slain, but the clergy of the victorious party disgraced themselves by inciting their companions to cruelties against the prisoners, and fifteen hundred wretched women of loose life, who were among the number, were burnt at a slow fire. The country which had been infested by the cottereaux was speedily cleared of them; but the white-hoods themselves began to show symptoms of opinions dangerous to social order, maintaining the equality of all men, and attacking the nobles who were within their reach; so that Philip Augustus, who had aided their undertaking at the outset, found it necessary to suppress the association.

 

Rites and Usages

 

In the early church, the term sacrament had been applied to any symbolical religious act, so that, while baptism and the Eucharist were regarded as rites having a peculiar character of their own, there was no limit to the number of things which might be styled sacraments. And thus, as late as the twelfth century, we find the name given by Godfrey of Vendome to the symbolical ring and staff which were used in the investiture of bishops, and by Bernard to the symbolical washing of feet. From this vagueness in the use of the term, the number of sacraments had been very variously stated. Thus Raban Maur and Paschasius Radbert, in the ninth century, laid down that there are four sacraments—Baptism, Unction, the Body and the Blood of the Lord, whereas Peter Damiani, in the eleventh century, speaks of twelve, but elsewhere distinguishes three as chief—namely, Baptism, the Eucharist, and Ordination.

In the eastern church, although John of Damascus speaks only of Baptism and the Eucharist, yet from the time of the pretended Dionysius the Areopagite, in the sixth century, six sacraments had been generally acknowledged—namely, Baptism, the Eucharist, the Consecration of Chrism, Ordination, Monastic Profession, and the Rites for the Dead. But now, in the western church, the mystical number of seven was fixed as that of the sacraments, from the idea of a correspondence with the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Ghost. This number is insisted on in the report of Otho of Bamberg's missionary teaching, and may be gathered from the writings of Hugh of St. Victor, although he also uses the term sacrament in the more general sense of the older writers; but the establishment of the number is chiefly to be ascribed to the “Sentences” of Peter Lombard, the most popular theological manual of the age, in which the sacraments are said to be Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Ordination, and Matrimony.

The doctrine of Berengar as to the Eucharist, although condemned, was not extinct. Thus we are told of some who, while they held with Berengar in substance, joined with the church in condemning him, because, instead of contenting himself with the language of Scripture, he had put forward his ideas too nakedly. Abelard speaks of the question, “whether the bread which is seen be only a figure of the Lord's body, or be also the real substance of the Lord's very flesh”, as being yet undetermined. And Rupert of Deutz expresses himself in such a manner as to the continuance of the bread and wine in their own substance as at least to need a subtle vindication of his conformity with the modern Roman doctrine against the apparent meaning of his words. But the doctrine of transubstantiation—a word which is first found in a treatise professing to contain the opinions of Peter Damiani,—made way, and the impression of it on the popular mind was strengthened by an ever-increasing multitude of miraculous tales—as that the eucharistic wafer was seen by the priest to change into a beautiful infant; that the bread appeared as flesh, and the wine as blood; and that the consecrated host resisted the power of fire.

The growing opinion of a material presence in the eucharist introduced an important change in the manner of administration. In early ages, the sacrament had been always given under both kinds, although in Africa it had been usual to allow morsels of the consecrated bread to be carried from the church for the sick, or for the use of devout persons at times when they could not attend the public communion. The declaration of pope Gelasius I against a separation of the elements has been already quoted; and, although primarily directed against the Manicheans, who condemned the use of wine, it is equally applicable against all mutilated administration. Now, however, it began to be thought that there was a danger of profanation in receiving the wine, from the dipping of the beard into the chalice, or from the inability of sick persons to swallow. In order to guard against such accidents, it had been usual from the eighth century to employ a tube in drinking from the chalice; but in the latter part of the eleventh century, a custom arose of dipping the bread into the wine, and so administering both elements together, and, from having at first been practised in the communion of infants and of the sick, it was extended to other cases. This usage was condemned by Urban II at the council of Clermont, and by Paschal II in a letter to abbot Pontius, of Cluny, which allows no exception other than the cases of infants or very sick persons, who could not swallow the breads Ernulf, bishop of Rochester, however, on being questioned by a friend as to the propriety of thus administering in a manner different from, and almost contrary to the Saviour’s institution, answered by maintaining the right of the church to legislate in such matters, and defending the practice as a safeguard against profanation. And in England it kept its ground until forbidden by the council of London in 1175. The doctrine of concomitancy—that Christ is contained entire under each of the eucharistic elements —had been laid down by St. Anselm on independent grounds, and, while stating it, he had spoken of communion in both kinds; but it was now brought to support the novel practice of administering in one kind only. The writers of the age, in general, however, —even those who held that administration in one kind was sufficient, and that a contrary opinion was heretical,—yet maintained the ancient usage of administering in both kinds.

The belief in the necessity of infant-communion had died out in the West, and, in consequence of the supposed especial danger of profanation by spilling the consecrated wine, the practice was now forbidden, although it was not yet wholly disused. In this case, as in that of adults, unconsecrated wine was sometimes given as a substitute for the eucharistic cup; but Hugh of St. Victor (or a writer who has been identified with him) ascribes such usages to the ignorance of the clergy, and declares that it is better to rely on the grace of baptism, as sufficient for the salvation of young children. At a later time the communion of infants became a subject of controversy between the Greeks, who retained it, and the Latins.

The more rigid view as to the observance of the Lord’s day continued to grow in the church, and attempts were made to enforce it by some of those pretended revelations which have been used in behalf of the same cause from the time of Charlemagne, or earlier, to the miracle of La Salette in our own days. Thus, when Henry II of England was at Cardiff on his way from Ireland to Normandy, as he was mounting his horse after mass, he was accosted by a man apparently about forty years of age, tall and spare in figure, with yellow hair displaying a tonsure, dressed in a white robe, with a girdle around his waist, and with naked feet. After having greeted the king in English this personage charged him, in the names of the Saviour, the Blessed Virgin, St. Peter, and St. Paul, to allow no markets to be held, or any but the most necessary secular works to be done, on the Lord's day, and warned him that a neglect of this command would be followed by heavy judgments; and having delivered his message he disappeared. Again, in 1199, it was said that a letter from the Saviour was found in the church of the holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, denouncing terrible chastisements for breach of the Lord's day; and this letter was used by Eustace, abbot of Flai, in the diocese of Beauvais, who preached in England with great effect. Eustace denounced the holding of markets on the Lord’s day, and the sale of anything, except that of necessary food and drink to travellers—in the case of which sale, one-fourth of the price was to be devoted to pious and charitable uses. He prescribed the observance of rest from the ninth hour on Saturday to sunrise on Monday; and it is said that his preaching was confirmed by miraculous judgments on some who ventured to profane this extended Sabbath. But a chronicler tells us that the king and other great men questioned the truth of the abbot’s doctrine, and that the people feared them more than God.

The observance of the Lord’s day, and of other holy days also, is said to have been especially strict in Norway, so that the people never ventured of their own accord to do anything either great or small.

To the great festivals of the year Trinity Sunday was now added. It differed from the rest in character, inasmuch as it was not the commemoration of any event, but was consecrated to a doctrine; yet it seemed a fitting completion for the circle of festivals, and, although not without some opposition on the ground of novelty, it succeeded in establishing itself and has continued to hold its place.

Reverence for the blessed Virgin was continually rising to a greater and greater excess. The idea of her acting as a mediatrix for those who might fear to approach the Saviour immediately is inculcated by St. Bernard. She was spoken of as “Queen of heaven”; the angelic salutation was repeated as an address to her fifty, a hundred, or even a thousand times a day, and in monasteries offices were said in her honor from the time of Gregory VII. As Sundays and festivals were dedicated to God, so Saturdays and eves were dedicated to St. Mary; and the recitation of her office on Saturday was ordered by Urban II at the council of Clermont. The new orders of monks—above all the Cistercians—were under her especial protection. The most extravagant and hyperbolical language was employed to express her greatness; while on the other hand, in the vernacular poetry of Germany, she was addressed in strains which borrowed something from the feelings of chivalry.

The heightened reverence for the Virgin had long assumed that she was without sin; but it had been supposed, as by Paschasius Radbert and by Anselm, that she was conceived in sin, and was afterwards sanctified, either before or after her birth, by the special operation of the Holy Spirit. A festival was instituted in honour of her conception, and although it met with opposition in some places, was generally received in England in the course of the century. But now the opinion began to be broached that she was herself conceived without sin, and about 1140 the canons of Lyons proceeded to celebrate the new doctrine by a festival of the Conception, on the 8th of December. By this, Bernard was drawn to write a letter of remonstrance, in which he states his belief that the Virgin was sanctified in her mother’s womb, but that Christ alone was conceived without sin. If, he says, we were to suppose that the Saviour’s mother must have been so conceived in order that she might be fitted to give him birth, we might be required to suppose the like as to her parents also on both sides, and so of all her ancestors; and he censures the institution of such a festival without the sanction 0f the apostolic see. Other eminent divines of the age took the same view with Bernard; as Peter of La Celle, who strongly defended him in two letters against a monk of St. Alban’s named Nicolas; Potho, a monk of Prüm; and the ritualist John Beleth, who says that the feast of the Virgin's immaculate conception ought to be suppressed, forasmuch as she was conceived in sin..

The ancient pagan festival of the Saturnalia, with its wild license and misrule, had affected the Christian celebration of the Christmas season, as appears by the protests of a chain of witnesses which reaches down from the fourth century. Out of this arose a class of mock festivals, in which the rites of religion were parodied in a strange and startling fashion—at first, perhaps, without any evil intention, but gradually developing into gross profanity. The Feast of Fools was celebrated in some places on the Circumcision, and in others on the Epiphany or its octave, when the subdeacons chose a Bishop of Fools. This prelate was arrayed in pontificals, and performed a burlesque mass, during which his attendant minister ate sausages, and carried on all manner of extravagant gambols in church. In 1198 a papal legate, cardinal Peter, strongly condemned this profane mummery at Paris, and in the following year it was suppressed in that church by bishop Eudes of Sully. In the thirteenth century, a still stranger festival of like kind—the “Feast of Asses”, in mock commemoration of the ass which carried the infant Saviour into Egypt—was celebrated at Rouen and elsewhere and in England the boy bishop or abbot was chosen by the choristers of the greater churches on the feast of St. Nicolas, the patron of children, down to the time of the Reformation.

The passion for relics was greatly encouraged and nourished by the crusades, which introduced to the Christians of the West many saints before unknown to them—such as the virgin Catharine of Alexandria—and supplied a vast quantity of materials for superstitious reverence. Among the chief of the relics which now became famous was the “holy dish”, brought by the Genoese from Caesarea, after the capture of that place in 1101, and still preserved in the cathedral of their city—a vessel which, although in reality made of green glass, was believed to be of emerald, and was venerated as having been used at the last supper. Another was the Veronica—a cloth on which our Lord was said to have miraculously impressed his countenance while on his way to Calvary. The Veronica was exhibited in St. Peter's at Rome from the year 1011, and was connected with a legend that it had been brought to Italy for the cure of the emperor Tiberius, when afflicted with leprosy, and a saint Veronica was imagined as the person who handed the cloth to the Saviour. Another relic of great fame was the seamless coat of our Lord found at Argenteuil in 1156—one of many coats which claimed the same sacred connection, but distinguished from the rest as having been made for Him in his childhood by his virgin mother; and from this age also comes the first authentic mention of the holy coat which the empress Helena was said to have presented to an imaginary archbishop of her pretended birthplace, Treves.

To a different class belong the renowned relics at Cologne—the bodies of the holy three kings, which, as we have already seen, were translated from Milan by archbishop Reginald, and those of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins. The legend of the British princess and her virgin companions, who are said to have been martyred by the Huns at Cologne, had been told by Sigebert of Gemblours, early in the twelfth century, under the date of 453. But when heresy afterwards became rife at Cologne, and miraculous aid was desirable in opposition to it, some bodies were opportunely found, and were sent to St. Elizabeth of Schonau, who referred the martyrdom of the virgin com­pany to the year 238—a date inconsistent with the story of their martyrdom by the Huns—and had visions of their heavenly glory. In connection with this affair, it is mentioned that the relics had been suspected, because some persons were in the habit of practising frauds in such matters for the sake of money; and of such practices there is abundant evidence.

In the end of the eleventh century, Guibert of Nogent-sous-Couci was led to compose a treatise “On the Relics of Saints”,—the immediate provocation being the impudence and the success with which the monks of St. Medard’s at Soissons displayed a pretended tooth of our Lord. Guibert altogether denies that such bodily relics of the Saviour could be genuine; he opposes the practice of disturbing the saints in their graves, and enclosing their remains in gold and silver; and he speaks without reserve of the arts by which both relics and saintly reputations were manufactured. As a specimen of the audacity with which impostures of this kind were carried through, he mentions that once, while listening to a sermon, he was astonished by the preacher's pointing at him as a witness for the genuineness of some crusts which were said to have come from our Lord's own table!, and that, although he blushed at the falsehood, he allowed it to pass, out of deference for those who had taken such means of filling their monastic purse. The superstition which Guibert attacked, however, found a zealous defender in his contemporary Thiofrid, abbot of Epternach, and continued in undiminished popularity.

The practice of pilgrimage had produced the great movement of the crusades, and, after the success of the Latins, the crowds which flocked to the Holy Land were, for a time, greater than ever. Particular indulgences were attached to the longer pilgrimages—such as those of Rome, Compostella, and Jerusalem; and Innocent III complains that, for the sake of the privileges connected with the Compostella pilgrimage, the scallop-shells which were the token of it were counterfeited. But warnings continued, as in early times, to be lifted up by eminent teachers against a reliance on pilgrimage. Thus Hildebert praises a widow for having chosen, instead of running after the Saviour’s burial-place, to “follow Him in his burial” by entering a convent, and remonstrates with count Fulk, of Anjou, for neglecting his duties that he might go on pilgrimage to Compostella:—“Among the talents which the Householder hath distributed to his servants”, he says, “no doctor and no scripture mentions that of wandering round the world”. In like manner, Bernard exhorted against leaving the duties of home in order to visit the Holy Land; and Peter of Cluny strongly reproves a monk for intending to set out on pilgrimage. “It is”, he says, “a greater thing to serve God continually in humility and poverty than to perform the journey to Jerusalem in pride and luxury. If it be well to visit Jerusalem, where the feet of our Lord stood, it is far better to pant after heaven, where He himself is beheld face to face”. It was held that a vow of pilgrimage was fulfilled by entering a monastic order—that so to vow the whole life to God was more than the partial vows of pilgrims. Other commutations for the longer pilgrimages were also sanctioned; thus Calixtus I allowed the English and Scots, instead of going to Rome, to content themselves with resorting to St. David’s—two visits to the Welsh sanctuary being reckoned as equivalent to one pilgrimage to Rome. And in this, as in other things, the idea of performing duties by proxy was introduced; for instance, a lady left estates to a Danish convent in 1272 on condition that, for the good of her soul, the monks should send off three pilgrims to Jerusalem, Rome, and Aarhuus.

The belief in the continued performance of miracles was unabated; and special collections of miraculous stories were formed, as by Peter of Cluny, Herbert, archbishop of Torre, in Sardinia, and in the next century by Caesarius of Heisterbach; to which may be added the books on the miracles of St. Thomas of Canterbury, by William of Canterbury and Benedict of Peterborough. Yet Abelard ventured to deride the miracles of his most famous contemporaries, such as Norbert and Bernard—declaring that they did not rely on their prayers alone for a cure, but sometimes employed medicine in simple cases; that they sometimes ludicrously failed; and that all such failures were set down to the unbelief of the people, while the cures were ascribed to the holiness of those who wrought them..

The system of penance became more and more widely different from what it had originally been. Not only did pecuniary commutations hold their ground (especially in England), notwithstanding all the prohibitions which councils could utter against them, but other things of a new kind contributed to destroy the ancient system. Among these new influences, the pope's assumption of a right to interfere with the penitential discipline in every diocese has been already mentioned. But most especially the penitential discipline suffered from a system which now superseded the penitential books of earlier times—the system of indulgences which were granted by way of inducement to perform some service for the church. These, unlike the indulgences of former days, were not limited to the forgiveness of particular sins, but extended to all. Thus Gregory VII, in the names of St. Peter and St. Paul, promised absolution of all their sins to those who should take part with Rudolf of Swabia against Henry IV; and Victor III endeavoured by a like promise to enlist men for a religious war against the Saracens of Africa. This system was brought into its fullest operation by the crusades, from the time when Urban II at Clermont proclaimed a plenary indulgence for all who should share in the holy war. These indulgences, indeed, were intended as remissions of those temporal penalties only which it was believed that the sinner must undergo either in this life or in purgatory; but the people in general understood them, and persisted in understanding them, as promises of eternal forgiveness, while they overlooked any conditions of repentance or charity which had been annexed to them. And the license which marked the lives of the crusaders, and of the Latins who settled in the Holy Land, is an unquestionable proof of the sense in which the papal offers were interpreted.

In addition to the enterprises in which life was risked, and to which, therefore, the ancient belief in the cleansing power of martyrdom might be extended, indulgences of lesser degrees were granted by bishops for all manner of small performances—such as the recitation of a certain prayer before a certain altar, visiting a church on a certain day, pilgrimages to relics and miraculous pictures, or the like; and in furtherance of local undertakings, such as the building or enlargement of a church, the building of a bridge, the making of a road, or the enclosure of a forest. Payment towards the expenses of the holy war was rewarded with indulgences in proportion to its amount; and the allowance of indulgence was greatly increased. Thus an act which in an earlier age would have earned an indulgence of forty days, was now rewarded with absolution from a hundred years or more of purgatorial pain. There were, however, those who, as Abelard, and Stephen, abbot of Obaize, did not hesitate to express their objections to the trade which was driven in indulgences, or their doubts as to the efficacy of theses The question whether confession to a priest were necessary in order to forgiveness of sin was often discussed. Both Gratian and Peter Lombard give the arguments on each side; Gratian, with some qualification, decides against the necessity, while the Master of the Sentences takes the opposite view. Peter teaches, as Hildebert had before taught, that true repentance must consist of three parts—the compunction of the heart, the confession of the mouth, and the satisfaction of work; but he holds that, if the assistance of a priest cannot be had, confession to a lay Christian is allowable. As to the effect of priestly absolution, he thinks that the priest cannot forgive sins, but can only declare them to be remitted or retained; that, although we may have been forgiven by God, yet absolution by the priest's judgment is necessary “in the face of the church”; but that this absolution is valid in so far only as it agrees with the Divine judgment. This opinion is spoken of by Richard of St. Victor as frivolous and ridiculous; yet Richard himself did not venture to maintain that the priest had absolute power to forgive as with God’s authority; and as yet the form of absolution continued to be precatory, not declaratory.

 

State of Learning

 

The rise of great schools, and the increase of intellectual activity which marked the twelfth century, have been already noticed. The foundation of the university of Oxford has been referred to Alfred; that of Paris, to Charlemagne; while Bologna has been carried back, by fable which has called forgery to its support, as far as the reign of Theodosius II, in the year 433. For Cambridge too has been claimed an origin from Sigebert king of Essex, in the seventh century, from the British hero Arthur, in the fifth, and even from some date as early at least as the second century, when the professors of Cambridge are said to have converted king Lucius to the Christian faith. But in truth the oldest of these famous seminaries cannot be traced to any earlier time than the twelfth century; nor can any formal foundation of them be shown, inasmuch as they did not owe their origin to any acts of papal or sovereign authority, but to the spontaneous concourse of lecturers and students. Their distinct organization and the bestowal of privileges by papal, imperial, or other charters, followed on the establishment of each body, as regulation became necessary, and as privileges were felt to be desirable; and at a later time the sanction of popes and princes was called in to give new universities a rank equal with those of earlier foundation, and especially to secure a general recognition for the degrees which they conferred. The name of University, by which these great schools became distinguished, was not derived from their teaching of universal learning, but from the usage of the Roman law, in which it signified a corporation. Thus, according to the varieties of constitution, the “university” might consist of the masters only (as at Paris), or might include the students also (as at Bologna); a single faculty might form an university, as we And the expressions universitas artistariun (i.e. the professors and students of the arts included in the trivium and quadrivium) and universitas juristarum; and that which is popularly styled the university of a place might in reality consist of two or more universities—as at Bologna, from the time of Innocent VI., there were four universities, each under its own rector—two of them being devoted to law, one to medicine and philosophy, and one to theology.

The story that the knowledge of Roman law, after having been extinct for ages, was revived by the discovery of a celebrated copy of the Pandects at Amalfi on the taking of that place by Lothair in 1135—that the emperor presented the book to his allies, the Pisans, in whose city it was long preserved with reverence—and that, at the instance of the great jurist Irnerius, he decreed that all men should thenceforth obey the Roman law only—appears to be utterly fabulous. For traces of acquaintance with the Roman law are to be found throughout all the ages which had intervened since the time of Justinian, and not only were other copies of the Pandects known before the date of the alleged discovery at Amalfi, but there is reason to believe that the book in question had been at Pisa long before that date— perhaps even from the days of Justinian himself.

The increased study of Roman law would seem rather to have grown out of the needs of the Lombard cities, which, long before they extorted an acknowledgment of their liberties from Frederick Barbarossa, set up pretensions to independence, and wished for a system of law more suitable to their circumstances than the barbaric codes. Moreover, the ancient civil law was regarded as having a claim on all the West beyond the immediate occasion, inasmuch as from the time of Charlemagne the states of western Europe had all been considered as forming one empire. Hence arose the law-school of Bologna, under Irnerius, who has been supposed by some to have been a German, but was more probably a native of the city; and the first formal recognition of it is in a rescript which Frederick issued at Roncaglia in 1158. By this document special privileges are bestowed on the schools. The students, and the messengers or posts by whom they kept up communication with their homes, are to travel without hindrance; it is ordered that no one shall be held liable for the misdeeds or for the debts of his countrymen; the students are exempted from the jurisdiction of the secular magistrates, and are subjected to the judgment of their professors or of the bishop.

The method of teaching and the writings of Irnerius and his followers, the “Four Doctors of Bologna”, excited a desire for a compendium of church-law, which had been regarded as a branch of theology and the need of such a work was the more felt, because the Bolognese lawyers were imperialist and antipapalist in their principles. Collections of ecclesiastical law had, indeed, been formed in times not remote, by Regino, abbot of Prüm, by Burkhard, bishop of Worms, by Ivo of Chartres, and others. But these collections were not reduced to a system, and one great purpose of the digest which was now compiled by Gratian, a monk of Bologna, may be understood from the title which was given to it (although possibly not by the author), “A Concordance of discordant Rules”. In this the matter was classified under proper heads; the various sentences of councils, popes, and fathers were cited, and harmony was as far as possible established between them, while Gratian, unlike the earlier compilers, added to the usefulness of the book by introducing his own views and “dicta”. The genuineness of the False Decretals was assumed, and their principles were carried throughout the work, which thus served to establish those principles instead of the older canonical system. The Decretum (as it was generally styled) was recommended not only by its superiority over other collections in method and completeness, but by the circumstance that it emanated from the city which was the chief seat of legal science. It was valuable as preserving many important fragments which would otherwise have perished, and became popular as the source of much second-hand learning which is displayed by writers of the middle ages. But it abounds in uncritical blunders, and the compiler's attempts at a harmony of authorities were after all so far from satisfactory that a Cistercian chapter in 1188 ordered the book to be locked up, lest the promiscuous reading of it should propagate errors. Eugenius III is said to have approved the Decretum in 1152, and, although this statement seems to be very questionable, the importance of Gratian’s compilation for the papacy was speedily understood. It became the great text-book of the subject; within a few years after its publication, special professorships of canon law were established both at Bologna and at Paris; the faculty of canonists or decretalists arose in rivalry to that of legists, and each conferred degrees on its members. From this time the popes, if they wished to give currency to new decrees, had only to send them to the professors of the chief universities, by whom they were eagerly caught up, expounded, and disseminated through the agency of their pupils. 

The university of Paris owes its origin to William of Champeaux, Abelard, William of Conches, and their contemporaries, whose lectures attracted a great concourse of hearers to the city; and it speedily grew to such an extent that the number of students is said to have exceeded that of the citizens. The earliest documents which recognize the existence of the university are two decretals of Alexander III. Celestine III exempted the students in all questions as to money from the jurisdiction of the secular magistrates, and ordered that they should be judged according to the canon law, before the bishop, or the abbot of St. Genevieve, and in the last year of the century, in consequence of a great quarrel between the students and the citizens, a grant of privileges was bestowed by Philip Augustus, who acknowledges the office of rector as already existing. As the cathedral school had been the germ of the university, the chancellor of the cathedral was its superintendent; and hence, in other universities founded on the same model, the chief officer bore the title of chancellor. The students of Paris were divided into four nations—a division which was afterwards imitated elsewhere. This arrangement is said to have been fully established before 1169, when Henry II of England offered to refer his differences with archbishop Becket to the judgment of the university; but the evidence appears unsatisfactory.

As Bologna was the great school of law, so Paris took the lead in theology; but it also became eminent in the other faculties. Giraldus Cambrensis, who had studied at Bologna as well as at Paris, tells us that both civil and canon law were best taught in the French university, and quotes the opinion of another, that Paris was the best school for every sort of learning which might be taken up there; and whereas, in John of Salisbury's time, it was usual for the students of medicine to repair from Paris to Montpellier or Salerno, which were then in the highest fame as medical schools, Paris itself under Philip Augustus, was provided with facilities of all sorts for teaching medical science.

England bore its share in the intellectual progress of the century. Englishmen, such as Robert Pulleyn, Robert, who, from the place where he lectured, was styled of Melun, and John of Salisbury, became famous abroad for their learning; and to this time is to be ascribed the real origin of the university of Oxford. The earliest fact which seems to be certain in the literary history of Oxford is the establishment of Vacarius, a Lombard, as professor of civil law there, under the patronage of Archbishop Theobald, in 1149; from which we may infer that it was already known as a place of study. It is remarkable that John of Salisbury, although he mentions Vacarius, says nothing of his having taught at Oxford; but Giraldus Cambrensis, about the year 1185, speaks of Oxford as the place most distinguished in England for the excellence of its clerks. The sister university of Cambridge, according to the continuation of Ingulf which bears the name of Peter of Blois, existed as early as 1109, when Joffrid, abbot of Croyland, taught there. But the authority is worthless, and the statement is encumbered by the difficulty that Averroes, whose works Joffrid is said to have expounded, was then unborn. It is not until the beginning of the thirteenth century that any trustworthy mention of Cambridge as a seat of learning is to be found.

The theologians of the western church in these times laboured under the disadvantage of being unacquainted with the original languages of Scripture. Anselm appears to have been ignorant of Greek; Abelard’s knowledge of it seems to have been limited to such Greek words as are to be found in Latin writers, and he avows that he was unable to read some works of Aristotle and Plato because they had not been translated into Latin; John of Salisbury, although his knowledge of the classical Latin authors vas unrivalled among his contemporaries, on meeting with the word ousiain a treatise of St Ambrose, was unable either to understand it or to find any western teacher who could explain it to him. In consequence of this ignorance, the expositors of Scripture did not so much aim at discovering its real sense as at forcing into it such matter as they supposed to be edifying; and hence they not only disguised all that they treated by a mystical system of interpretation, but in their choice of subjects there was an especial fondness for the obscurest books, such as the Canticles, Ezekiel, and the Apocalypse. The theologians of the time were divided into three classes—those who, like Bernard, followed the ancient expositors; the more speculative and adventurous thinkers, of whom Abelard is the chief representative; and a middle class, who, after the example of Lanfranc and Anselm, endeavoured to combine original thought with a deference to antiquity. These three classes were respectively known as Positives, Scholastics (a word which, from having been used as a general term for learned men, was now applied more especially to signify the professors of philosophical theology), and Sententiaries.

A service like that which Gratian had rendered to ecclesiastical law was performed for theology by Peter Lombard, a native of Novara, who, after having long taught with great reputation at Paris, became bishop of that city in 1159, and died in 1164. The name of Sentences had before been given to the collections of ancient authorities which had been popular since the seventh century. Such a collection of opinions had been formed by Abelard, under the title of “Yes and No”, with a view of exhibiting their contradictions; but Peter Lombard, on the contrary, in his “Four Books of Sentences” aimed a harmonizing them. He discusses questions down to those raised by Abelard, although without naming the authors; and the authorities which he cites come down to the time of Bede. The method which was observed in the work gave it the charm of novelty, while in substance it was intended to accord with antiquity; and it speedily obtained a great popularity. The “Master of the Sentences”, indeed, was not exempt from censure; Gerhoh of Reichersperg denounced him to Alexander III, and one of his own pupils, John of Cornwall, attacked him both while living and after death. An opinion imputed to him—that our Lord, in so far as He is man, is nothing—was brought before the council of Tours in 1163, and before the Lateran council of 1179, and was condemned by Alexander, who directed the French bishops to teach “that Christ, as He is perfect God, so also is He perfect man, consisting, according to his manhood, of soul and body”. Joachim of Fiore also charged Peter with heterodoxy, as has been already mentioned; but the Fourth Lateran council in 1215 pronounced in favour of the Master of the Sentences; and from that time his reputation and authority were greatly increased. Lectures and commentaries on his “Sentences” were composed in vast abundance, and among the authors of them were the most eminent teachers of the church; England alone is said to have produced no less than a hundred and sixty-four writers who illustrated this famous text-book. Yet the work, while it aimed at settling every point of doctrine, was often found rather to suggest questions than to answer them; and in the year 1300 the professors of Paris extracted from it sixteen propositions as to which the Master’s opinions were not generally held.

The school of St. Victor at Paris, founded by William of Champeaux, while it endeavoured to reconcile the scholastic method of inquiry with practical piety, was especially opposed to the dialectical subtleties which were now in fashion, and was itself inclined to mysticism. The most famous teachers of this school were Hugh—a Saxon, according to some writers, while others suppose him a native of Ypres—who died in 1141; Richard, a Scotsman, who died in 1170 and Walter, who, in 1174, wrote against “The Four Labyrinths of Gaul”, under which name he denounced Abelard, Gilbert de la Porrée, Peter Lombard, and his disciple Peter of Poitiers.

Other writers, who were no enemies to letters or philosophy, agreed in censuring the dialectical arts which, from having been regarded with suspicion in the preceding century, were now the great weapon of the most popular teachers. John of Salisbury complains of the modern systems of study as ruinous to solid knowledge, and describes a professor whom he styles Cornificius as teaching his pupils to despise all that was ancient, to neglect the old methods of learning, and to consider themselves accomplished philosophers after a course no longer than the time in which young birds become fledged. Other writers of the age agree with John in their complaints as to the waste of time in speculations, the fondness for words rather than things, the abuse of dialectical art in mere quibbling, the too prevalent separation between knowledge and practice in those who professed themselves followers of literature, the tendency to hurry on to the higher subjects without having laid a substantial foundation. It was complained that Scripture was neglected in comparison of the new and showy kinds of knowledge, that the study of law drew men away from that of other literature; and, useful as the labours of Gratian and Peter Lombard were, when rightly employed, they tended, by offering a short and easy way to an appearance of familiarity with earlier writers, to discourage any endeavour after a deeper acquaintance with the original works from which their materials were derived.