BOOK IV.

FROM THE ELECTION OF GREGORY THE GREAT TO THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE,

A.D. 590-814

CHAPTER IX.

SUPPLEMENTARY.

 

Influence of the Papacy.

 

The preceding chapters have set before us the changes which took place in the position of the patriarchs during the seventh and eighth centuries—the sees of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem reduced to subjection under the Mahometan rule; the bishops of Constantinople becoming more and more tools and slaves of the imperial court; while in the west the power of the Roman bishop is greatly and rapidly increased. This advance of the papacy was much aided by the circumstance that Rome, although often taken by barbarians, never remained long in their possession. It alone retained its ancient character, while in all other quarters the old national distinctions were obliterated by successive invasions. The popes alone kept their ground amid the revolutions of secular powers; and their authority was vastly extended as nation after nation of the barbarian conquerors was brought within the sphere of Christian influence. As in former times the bishop of Rome had been considered by the Orientals to represent the whole western church, so he now appeared to the new nations of the north and of the west as the representative and source of Christianity on earth. St. Peter was regarded as holding the keys of heaven, and as personally connected with his successors. The popes strengthened their position at once by detaching themselves from the Byzantine empire, and by entering into an alliance with the princes of the west on terms such as the empire had never admitted.

They were connected by mutual interest with the Frankish kings, especially with those of the second dynasty, and Charlemagne's conquests gave them a supremacy over the church of northern Italy, which they had in vain desired in the time of the Lombard princes. By the donations of Pipin and of Charlemagne they acquired a new secular power; and it would seem to have been in the latter half of the eighth century, or early in the ninth, that the forged donation of Constantine appeared, to assert for them a more venerable claim to a wider jurisdiction, and to incite the Frankish sovereigns to imitate the bounty of the first Christian emperor. Constantine, it was said, was baptized by Pope Sylvester, and at his baptism received the miraculous cure of a leprosy with which he had been afflicted; whereupon, in consideration of the superiority of ecclesiastical to secular dignity, he relinquished Rome to the pope, conferred on him the right of wearing a golden crown with other ensigns of sovereignty, and endowed the apostolic see with the Lateran palace, and with all the provinces of Italy or the western regions. This forgery seemed to justify the Romans in withdrawing themselves from the empire; it seemed to legitimatize the possession of all that the popes had gained, since this was but a part of what was said to have been bestowed on their see by the first Christian emperor; and the fable retained its credit, although not altogether unquestioned, throughout the middle ages.

The mission of Augustine introduced the papal influence into England, where a new church arose, strongly attached to Rome, and fruitful in missionaries who established the Roman ascendency in Germany and in Gaul. The English church owned subjection to the pope, not so much on account of his supposed succession to St. Peter, as because it derived its origin from Rome, and thus was included in the Roman patriarchate by the same principle which subjected the Abyssinians to the see of Alexandria. But as the papal power increased elsewhere, the subjection of England to it became also greater. The council of Cloveshoo, assembled by Ethelbald, king of Mercia, opened with the reading of two letters from Zacharias, “the pontiff and apostolic lord, to be venerated throughout the world”; and it is acknowledged that the recital of these documents, in which he exhorts the English of every degree to reformation, under the threat of an anathema, was in obedience to his “apostolical authority”. In 785, two Roman legates— the first (as they said) who had been sent into England since the time of Augustine—visited this country, and with a view to the reformation of the church, councils were held in their presence in Mercia and in Northumbria. Offa, king of Mercia, then the most powerful of the English kingdoms, attended the Mercian assembly at Chalchythe. In consequence of some offence which he had taken, on political or other grounds, at Janbert, archbishop of Canterbury, he wished that Lichfield should be erected into an archiepiscopal see. Janbert strongly opposed a scheme by which his metropolitan authority was to be limited to the kingdoms of Kent and Sussex; but it is supposed that the legates at Chalchythe favoured the change, and with the sanction of Pope Adrian, Higbert, who had been bishop since 779, received the title of archbishop. Some years later, however, Kenulph, the second successor of Offa, having annexed Kent to Mercia, and being desirous to conciliate the clergy of his new territory, joined with Athelard, archbishop of Canterbury, in a request that Leo would again reduce the see of Lichfield to its original condition. Athelard went to Rome in order to press the suit; the pope consented, and with his license the new archbishopric was abolished by a council held at Cloveshoo in 803.

Ina, king of Wessex, in 725 resigned his crown, and went on pilgrimage to Rome, where he ended his days as a monk; and his example was followed by other Anglo-Saxon sovereigns. It has been said that the tribute of a penny from every hearth in England, afterwards known as Romescot or Peterpence, was first granted by Ina, and was confirmed by Offa in 794. But it would seem that the donation of Ina is imaginary, and that in the case of Offa a payment of 365 marks towards the lighting of St Peter's and the relief of pilgrims—an eleemosynary grant from the crown—has been confounded with the Romescot of a later time, which was a tax levied on the subject, and was interpreted by the advocates of the papacy as an acknowledgment that this island was held in fee under the successors of St. Peter.

 

Relations of Church and State. 

 

The right of confirming elections to the papacy had been exercised by the Byzantine emperors, either personally or through their representatives, the exarchs, from the reconquest of Italy under Justinian until the iconoclastic disputes led to the omission of the form in the case of Zacharias; and the Carolingian emperors assumed the same privilege as a part of their sovereignty. The story that, during Charlemagne's visit to Rome in 774, Adrian, with a synod of a hundred and fifty-three bishops, bestowed on him and his successors the right of nominating the popes, is now rejected, and, with other such inventions, is supposed to have originated in later times from the wish of the Roman party to represent the superintendence which the Frank princes undeniably exercised over ecclesiastical affairs as if it were derived from the gift of the popes.

In the East, where no political power was attached to the episcopal office, the emperors had not usually interfered in the appointment of bishops, except at Constantinople and other cities in which they themselves resided. The second council of Nicaea enacted that bishops should be chosen by their episcopal brethren, and that any nomination by princes should be invalid. But in the new states of the west, the position of the bishops as great landowners, and the political importance which they acquired, occasioned a remarkable mixture of secular and spiritual things. Although it was again and again laid down by Frankish councils that the elections of bishops should be free, without any other condition than the approbation of the sovereign, the usual practice throughout the period appears to have been that bishops were appointed by the crown, whether the nomination were or were not followed by a formal election on the part of the clergy and people. In 614 a synod at Paris enacted that a bishop should be appointed without any payment, by the concurrence of the metropolitan and bishops of the province with the clergy and people of the city. But Clotaire II, in ratifying the canons, introduced considerable alterations in favour of the royal prerogative; among them, he required that a bishop should be consecrated under a mandate from the crown, and reserved to himself the power of naming a clerk from his household to a vacant see, although he promised in so doing to have regard to the learning and merit of the nominee. It has been supposed that Charlemagne, by a capitulary of 803, professed to restore the ancient usage of election by the clergy and people; but no such enactment was really issued until the reign of Lewis the Pious, while it is certain that in the appointment of bishops the great emperor practically followed the example of his predecessors, and that he was imitated by his descendants.

In Spain, the fourth council of Toledo, in 633, enacted that a bishop should be chosen by the clergy and people of his city, and that the election should be approved by the metropolitan and synod of the province. But at the twelfth council of the same place, in 681, the appointment of bishops by the royal authority alone is mentioned as a matter of settled custom. The process by which this change was effected is unknown.

In England, although Wihtred, king of Kent, in 696, disclaimed the right of appointing bishops the royal authority influenced their appointment, as they were chosen by the witenagemot of each state in the presence of the king. And here, as in other countries, the influence of the crown gradually became more absolute. From letters written by Alcuin, a century after Wihtred’s time, on a vacancy in the archbishopric of York, it appears that the ancient freedom of election was then giving way; that kings assumed an increased control over the choice of bishops, or even disposed of sees by gift. In the ninth century, the nomination of bishops had passed into the hands of the sovereign, while a shadow of the earlier system was kept up in a formal election of the person so appointed, and in the publication of his name from the pulpit of the cathedral, to which announcement the people replied by acclamations and wishes of long life to their new pastor.

The Frankish sovereigns, in their continual movements, required a staff of clergy to attend on them for the performance of divine service. At the head of this body was placed the arch-chaplain, whose office became one of great importance. Sometimes it was filled by a presbyter, sometimes by a bishop, who in such a case required a special dispensation for absence from his diocese; but, whether bishop or presbyter, the arch-chaplain stood next in dignity to the family of the sovereign, and at synods he took precedence even of archbishops. Combining the functions of chancellor with those of chaplain, he acted as a minister of the crown for spiritual affairs; he received reports from the bishops as to the state of their churches, prepared the king's ecclesiastical capitularies and other documents, and conducted his correspondence on matters which concerned the church. Such being the arch-chaplain’s position, it depended on individual character whether he should sway the prince in the interest of the hierarchy, or the prince should by means of him obtain a control over the administration of the church.

The mixture of clergy and laity in the Frankish councils has been already mentioned. The capitularies bear a marked impress of clerical influence; but it was often possible for sovereigns, by the help of their lay vassals, to overrule the proposals of the bishops as to ecclesiastical affairs, or to carry measures notwithstanding their opposition. Sometimes, however, the clergy were assembled by themselves, as at Verne or Verneuil, in 755, where abbots for the first time appear as members of a Frankish council.

In Spain, from the time when king Recared and his nobles appeared at Toledo, for the purpose of arranging the change from Arianism to the catholic faith (A.D. 589), mixed councils of clergy and laity, summoned by the sovereign, were frequently held. At the earlier sessions of these, from the seventeenth council of Toledo, in 694, the affairs of the church were first discussed by the bishops and abbots, without the presence of the laity; but on the fourth day, the nobles, the judges, and others, were called in to take a part in their deliberations.

Among the Anglo-Saxons, the kings and other laymen attended ecclesiastical synods, while the bishops sat in the witenagemots, or national assemblies. The part which the laity took, however, in councils, did not extend to matters purely spiritual, although it was for the witenagemot to confirm, by the authority of law, the decisions of the clergy in such matters. Bishops took precedence of the lay nobility; and sometimes the archbishops signed the acts of synods before the king himself, as was the case at Chalchythe in 785.

The claims of the ecclesiastical and secular judicatures in France were variously settled by successive enactments. It may be said in general, that, while the clergy were not amenable to secular judgment in questions between members of their own order, or in the case of ecclesiastical offences, the trial of questions between clerks and laymen belonged to a mixed tribunal of lay and spiritual judges. Priests and deacons were in no case to be tried except with the bishop's knowledge or co-operation; and in important criminal charges, this privilege was extended to the lower clergy. The principle of mixed tribunals was approved by Charlemagne; and although he seems to have in some of his laws exempted the clergy from all secular judgment in questions which concerned their own persons, this exemption was far short of that for which the high hierarchical party contended at a later time. For in cases which related to the possessions of clergymen, the secular judges still had a share the right of judicature was not regarded as inherent in the episcopal office, but as granted, and therefore revocable, by the sovereign, so that in the ninth century bishops are threatened with the loss of it if they neglect to exercise it rightly; and from metropolitans, as from secular judges, the appeal lay to the emperor, beyond whom there was no appeal. Among the Franks, as formerly under the Roman empire, there were many canons to prohibit clerks from carrying their grievances to the sovereign without abiding the judgment of their immediate superiors, or obtaining the leave of these Clotaire II, in his edict of 614, ordered that no such recourse to the king should be allowed, except in order to sue for pardon; but the royal letter of pardon was a protection against all punishment, and the bishops were bound to obey it.

In Spain, canons are found which forbid ecclesiastics to judge in cases of blood, or to inflict mutilation of the members.

In England, the judgment of clerks was as yet on the same footing with that of the laity. But this was before a mixed tribunal—the bishop sitting in the county-court with the ealdorman or earl, as the priests of the old Saxon heathenism had done; and the papal legates at the council of Chalchythe objected to the custom, as tending to implicate the bishops too much in worldly affairs. Notwithstanding their remonstrance, however, the practical usefulness of the system secured its continuance, until the spiritual jurisdiction was separated from the secular by William the Conqueror, at the instance of his Norman ecclesiastical advisers.

 

The Hierarchy.—Administration of the Church.

 

The metropolitan organization had originally grown out of an analogy with the civil divisions of the Roman empire. In the Frankish kingdom, where no such division existed, the system fell into decay, and although Boniface, under the authority of Pope Zacharias and with the countenance of Pipin and Carloman, attempted to restore it, his success was very imperfect. Charlemagne, when at Rome in 774, was urged by Adrian to undertake the revival of the metropolitan jurisdiction and established it not only in his original dominions, but in those which he acquired. But the new metropolitans had not the same influence as those of earlier times. In the national assemblies the metropolitan met the suffragan bishops as his peers, and a suffragan might by character or ability become more important than his ecclesiastical superior; while the growing connexion between France and Rome, and the increase of the papal power, drew the Frankish clergy to look beyond their metropolitans to the yet higher authority of the popes.

In the eighth and ninth centuries we find frequent mention of Chorepiscopi—a title which in this period has some variety of application. Of those who were subject to the diocesan bishops, some had episcopal consecration, while the greater number were merely presbyters, enjoying a delegated authority in rural places. But besides these, there are frequent denunciations of chorepiscopi who were in the habit of wandering about, without any local authority, and of interfering with the rights of the established bishops by conferring orders and performing other episcopal acts. The chorepiscopi of this class who disturbed the Frankish church were for the most part from Ireland, where the peculiar system of the church encouraged the multiplication of bishops without local jurisdiction; while others may have been consecrated by chorepiscopi who had themselves received consecration as assistants to the diocesan bishops. But even when the original appointment and consecration were regular, chorepiscopi were often disposed to presume beyond their proper function. Charlemagne, in a letter, states that the proceedings of these persons had caused great trouble and scandal; that priests, deacons, and sub-deacons, who had been ordained by bishops, denied the validity of orders conferred by chorepiscopi; and that Pope Leo had disallowed the acts of these intruders. They are (he continues) not really bishops, since they neither have been consecrated by three bishops, nor possess episcopal titles to sees. Ordination, confirmation, veiling of nuns, consecration of churches and of altars, belong only to diocesan bishops —not to chorepiscopi or presbyters, who correspond to the seventy disciples, and not to the apostles. The emperor says that chorepiscopi had been made by bishops in ignorance of ecclesiastical decrees, and from a wish to devolve their own labour on others; and he forbids that any should be made in future. But in the following century we again meet with notices of this class, most commonly in the way of censure, or of prohibition from exceeding the limits of their commission.

Towards the end of the eighth century, the office of archdeacon acquired a new character and importance. In earlier times, there had been only one archdeacon in each diocese; but, with a view to a better superintendence of the clergy, the dioceses of the Frankish empire were now divided into archdeaconries, in which the arch­deacons, although themselves of a lower degree, had jurisdiction over presbyters, and exercised all the ordinary administration except such acts as especially belonged to the episcopal order. The office became so lucrative that laymen attempted to intrude into it—an abuse which was forbidden by a capitulary of 805, and by many canons of later date. As the archdeacons were not removable except for some grave offence, it was soon found that many of them endeavoured to render themselves independent of their bishops and from canons of the ninth century it would appear that their exactions and the insolence of their followers were severely felt by the clergy subject to their jurisdiction.

The archdeaconries of the new organization were divided into deaneries (decania), each under an archpriest or rural dean (archi-presbyter) The clergy of each deanery met on the first of every month for conference on spiritual and ecclesiastical affairs. The conference was followed by a dinner; but complaints soon arose that these entertainments led to excesses which more than counterbalanced the benefits of the meeting. Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, in his injunctions of 852, found it necessary to denounce the abuse, and to lay down rules for moderation, restricting the allowance of the clergy on such occasions to three cups for each.

The bishops were required to visit throughout their dioceses every year. The expense of entertaining them on their circuits was often complained of by the clergy; with a view to limiting it, the seventh council of Toledo ordered that the bishop should not on such occasions take more than five (or, according to another reading, fifty) horses in his train, and that his stay in each parish should not exceed one day. But even after this limitation, the expense continued to be heavy, as appears from the list of provisions required by a Lombard capitulary of 855, which includes a hundred loaves, four large swine, a lamb, a pig, fifty pints of wine, and a sufficiency of honey, oil, and wax. Lewis the Pious, in 829, charges his commissioners to inquire whether the bishops in their visitations are burdensome to the clergy. A capitulary of Charles the Bald, in 844, denounces the misbehaviour which was common among the attendants of bishops when on visitation, and provides that the clergy of five neighbouring parishes shall combine to supply provisions for the usual hospitality to their diocesan. The priest at whose house the entertainment is held is to contribute in the same proportion as the others, with "perhaps" the addition of firewood and utensils. The third council of Valence, in 855, censures an abuse which some bishops had introduced by exacting visitation-dues of their clergy at times when they omitted to visit.

The parochial system was not yet completely organized in the Frankish church; the people in country places were often dependent for divine offices on the clergy of the cathedral city, or on the chaplain of some neighbouring castle. The division of England into parishes has (as we have already seen) been ascribed to the Greek archbishop, Theodore; but, whatever his share in promoting it may have been, the general establishment of the system appears to have been slowly and gradually effected.

With a view of enforcing ecclesiastical discipline, it was attempted by frequent enactments to bind the clergy by strict local ties. No stranger was to be admitted to officiate without producing letters of license and recommendation from his bishop. Fugitive clerks were to be examined and sent home; wandering clergy or monks, who disturbed the church by teaching error or by raising unnecessary questions, were to be apprehended, carried before the metropolitan, and put to suitable penance; all the clergy of a diocese were to be subject to the bishop’s jurisdiction. Presbyters were obliged to remain in the diocese where they were ordained; some councils required a promise that they would do so, and Charlemagne even imposed an oath to that effect. No bishop was to receive a clerk from another diocese, or to promote him to a higher degree; but, while this was absolutely forbidden in a capitulary for France, the corresponding enactment for Lombardy allows it with the consent of the bishop to whose diocese the clerk had belonged. And it is evident, from facts which continually meet us in history and biography, that with such consent it was not unusual for clergymen to pass from one diocese, or even from one kingdom, to another.

During the earlier ages, ordination had not been conferred without a title (i.e. without assigning a particular sphere of labour), except in rare and extraordinary instances, such as that of St. Jerome. The same rule was now often re-enacted; but an exception was necessarily made in the case of missionaries, and was by degrees extended to other cases. Although the ancient canons as to the requisites for ordination were still in force, an important novelty was introduced, after the sixth century, by means of the tonsure. This was regarded as conferring the character of a clerk, without ordination to any particular grade of the ministry; and thus clerks were made in great numbers, without any regard to the canonical conditions or impediments of ordination. It may easily be conceived that much disorder was introduced by these “acephalous” (or headless) clerks, who enjoyed the immunities of the clerical state without being bound by its obligations.

The example of the royal household in France induced persons of rank to establish domestic chaplains. These were often disposed to set the bishops at defiance; and it appears from the testimony of many councils that the institution had an unfavourable effect on the religion of the people in general. It is represented that the absence of the lord from the parish-church encourages   his dependants to absent themselves; that the clergy have no opportunity of enforcing the duties of the rich and powerful; and there are frequent complaints of attempts to withdraw the ecclesiastical dues from the bishops and parochial clergy, in order to provide for the chaplains by means of them. But in addition to these evils, the chaplains were usually persons of low and disreputable character; they were miserably paid, disrespectfully treated by their employers, and required to perform degrading services. The position and habits of chaplains were found to bring discredit on the whole body of the clergy; and hence Agobard, archbishop of Lyons, in the reign of Lewis the Pious, took occasion to write a treatise in vindication of “the privilege and rights of the priesthood”. After showing from Scripture the estimation in which the clergy ought to be held, he proceeds by way of contrast to describe the abuses of his own time. Every person of any pretension to station, he says, then kept a priest of his own—“not to obey him, but continually to exact obedience from him, and that in unlawful as well as in lawful things”. The chaplains were employed to do the work of bailiffs, butlers, grooms, or dog-keepers, to wait at table, to lead ladies’ horses. As no respectable clergyman would accept such a position, the patrons, whose chief object was to obtain an excuse for deserting the public offices of religion and emancipating themselves from the control of the clergy, cared nothing how gross the ignorance of their chaplains might be, or how infamous their lives. They usually took one of the serfs on their estates, or procured a person of servile birth for the purpose, and were offended if the bishop hesitated to ordain him as a matter of course. Even if we might implicitly believe all that has lately been written against the English domestic chaplains of the seventeenth century, it would appear that the class had lost nothing in dignity between the age of Agobard and that of Eachard.

A new species of ecclesiastical officers arose in Gaul during the sixth and seventh centuries, under the title of advocates, defensors, or vicedomini. Except in name, these bore no resemblance to the defensors of the earlier ages; the new office grew out of the peculiar circumstances of the Frankish church. The bishops and clergy required the assistance of force to protect them against the outrages of their rough and lawless neighbours. Their landed possessions imposed on them duties which, if not altogether inconsistent with their spiritual office, might, at least, be more conveniently performed by laymen—such as the exercise of secular judicature, and the leading of the contingents which their estates were required to furnish to the national army. Moreover, as, by the Germanic laws, none but freemen, capable of bearing arms, were entitled to appear in law-suits, the clergy (like women, old or infirm persons, and children) required substitutes who might appear for them, and, if necessary, might go through the ordeal of battle in their behalf. For such purposes it was found expedient to call in the aid of some neighbouring layman, distinguished by influence or by personal prowess; and his services were usually recompensed by the use of lands belonging to the church, and adjacent to his own, in addition to a share of the fines inflicted in his court, and to other pecuniary dues. The appointment of an advocate was at first a voluntary act; but Charlemagne ordered that every church should be provided with such a champion. The qualifications for the office were very particularly defined, with a view of guarding against misconduct or encroachment; and the advocates were subject to the inspection of the imperial commissioners. The sovereign assigned advocates to churches which were themselves unable to find any. As such grants had the nature of a favour, the advocates thus appointed required higher terms than those whom churches chose for themselves; and from them the others gradually learnt to assume a superiority over the ecclesiastical bodies with which they were connected, to claim dues which absorbed a large portion of the revenues, and to become tyrants instead of protectors, both to the clergy and to their tenants. It was not, however, until after the period which we are now surveying that their relation to the church assumed this character.

Another encroachment on the church arose out of the system of lay patronage, which had become general throughout the west. In some cases, the right of presentation to a church expired with the founder, while in others it was continued to his representatives. But patrons were not always content with the power of nominating clerks. Sometimes the builder of a church reserved to himself a certain portion of its revenues; sometimes the church was built on speculation—the founder expecting to get more than a reimbursement from the oblations, while he made a composition to pay the incumbent a certain allowance. Against this practice canons were directed, which forbade bishops to consecrate churches erected on such conditions; but the patron was considered to have a legal interest in the preservation and right disposal of the property belonging to his church. Charlemagne allows the sale of churches and Lewis the Pious enacted that, if the incumbent of a church should have a surplus of income, he should pay “due service” to his landlord. The division of inheritance was some times carried into the disposal of church-patronage, so that an “altar” might be divided into several portions, belonging to a like number of priests; such partitions were forbidden by a capitulary of Lewis the German, in 851.

A canon of the fourth council of Toledo provides that, if the founder or benefactor of a church, or his descendants, fall into poverty, an allowance shall be made to them out of its revenues.

The question of patronage was a fruitful source of disagreements between bishops and secular lords. Canons were passed for the purpose of guarding against abuses on both sides—enacting that no layman should present or eject a clerk without the consent of the bishop, while, on the other hand, the bishop was forbidden to reject a presentee except on good and valid grounds.

In the beginning of the period, we find many denunciations of simony in the writings of Gregory the Great. He complains of this “first of heresies”, this “buying and selling of doves in the temple”, as prevailing in all quarters—in Gaul, in Germany, in Africa, in Greece and Epirus, in the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem; and he continually urges both princes and high ecclesiastics to join with him in labouring to suppress it. But in defiance of all denunciations and penalties, the evil continued, and from age to age there are frequent complaints both against patrons who, for the sake of gifts, nominated worthless persons to ecclesiastical office, and against bishops who corruptly conferred ordinatio.

The Frankish church continued to increase in wealth. Estates, sometimes of very great extent, were bestowed on it with the declared object of securing for the giver the remission of his sins and the salvation of his soul. And the inducements to make such donations were increased by the system of precarious contracts—so called because the giver, in endowing the church with his lands, prayed that the use of them might be allowed him for his lifetime, or perhaps that it might be continued to one or more persons in succession after him. Thus many who would have scrupled to deprive themselves of the income arising from an estate, were enabled to perform an act of bounty without expense to themselves, or even to make a profit by it; for the church, in consideration of the reversion assured to itself, in many cases allowed a donor to enjoy not only his own land, but other lands of perhaps much greater value than that of which his gainful piety was to deprive his heirs. With a view to the limitation of this abuse, it was enacted by the council of Epernay in 846, that a donor of land should not be allowed to receive more than twice the value of his gift by way of addition; that kings should not sanction precarious contracts except at the request of the church ; and that, agreeably to ancient custom, the contract should require renewal every fifth year.

The lands of the church were either cultivated by its serfs for the benefit of the owners, or they were let to tenants, whether free or servile, who paid a fixed proportion of the produce by way of rent. In addition to these lands and to the oblations, the ecclesiastical revenues were now swelled by the general imposition of tithes. Under the old Roman system, a tenth of the produce of land was paid by the coloni to the state as rent; and when lands were granted on this condition to a corporation, a second tenth—a ninth of the remaining produce—was paid by the tenant to whom it was under­let. These two payments were known by the name of “tenths and ninths”. The church, as a large holder of lands under the state, exacted the ninths from its tenants; while sometimes, by special grant, it was excused from the payment of the fiscal tenth, and consequently was entitled to receive tenths as well as ninths for its own benefits.

The ecclesiastical or Levitical tithe was a third charge, distinct from these rent-payments. The earliest canon which required it, was passed by the council of Macon in 585. But it would seem that this canon had little effect, and no attempt to reinforce it was made by the Frankish councils during the remainder of the Merovingian period. Pipin for the first time added the authority of the secular power to that of the church for the exaction of tithes; but little was done until the reign of Charlemagne, who by a capitulary of 779 enacted that they should be paid. The payment was enforced, not only by excommunication, but by heavy civil penalties, graduated according to the obstinacy of the delinquent and the obligation was extended to the newly-acquired territories beyond the Rhine, where (as we have already seen) it had the effect of exciting a strong prejudice against the Christian faith. The council of Frankfort (A.D. 794) represents the opposition to tithes as one of the offences by which a late scarcity had been provoked; devils, it is said, had been seen devouring the hoarded corn of those who refused the church its due, and voices had been heard in the air, uttering reproof of the general sin. The tithe had at first been exacted only for corn. It was then extended to other productions of the soil, such as flax and wine, and in some places to the increase of animals. The enactments of Charlemagne’s time usually speak of it as payable on the “whole property”; but it was long before the clergy succeeded in establishing a general compliance with their claims in this respect.

The capitulary of 829 forbids the receiver of tithe to give the payers food, or any other consideration which might lead them to suppose that the payment depended on their own will.

In England it appears that tithes were not enforced until about the end of Bede’s lifetime. The mention of them in the so-called “Excerptions of Egbert”, archbishop of York, is not to be relied on; but Boniface, whose exertions contributed to the establishment of the impost among the Franks and their dependents, is a witness for the payment of it in his native country.

The abuse by which the Frankish princes granted the beneficial use of church-lands to laymen had defied the efforts of Boniface, and continued throughout the reign of Charlemagne. The holders of such benefices were now required by canons to pay tenths and ninths to the church, and also to repair, or contribute to repair, the churches which were situated on their lands. But it would appear that great difficulty was found in enforcing the canons against this powerful class; the council of Tours, in the last year of the reign, states that complaints had often been made to the missi of their neglect to pay tenths and ninths, but that such complaints met with no attention.

The disposal of the church's income was still in the hands of the bishops; but in the new kingdoms of the west the deacons did not, as such, take the same part in the administration of it by which their order had become so important in the earlier ages. The steward, by whom the bishop was assisted in this part of his administration, might be either a deacon or a priest; his dignity was next to that of the bishop, and he had the guardianship of the see when vacant. In some places the division of the funds was quadripartite—one portion being assigned to the bishop and his household, one to the rest of the clergy, one to the poor and strangers, and one to the fabric and expenses of the church; in other places, it was tripartite—a third to the bishop, one to the clergy, and one to the necessities of the church. The tripartite division was known as the Spanish custom; the quadripartite, as the Roman : and bishops are found announcing that, although entitled to the third part which was prescribed by the canon of Toledo, they will be content with a quarter, agreeably to the usage of Rome. The bishops were sometimes charged by the inferior clergy with taking more than their due proportion, and from the sixth century downwards canons were passed in order to restrain them from doing so. Even where the full amount of the clergy’s share was fairly paid to them as a body, the allowance of each individual still depended on the will of the bishop, who thus had every clerk at his mercy. Where the tithe was paid in kind, it is probable that some composition was agreed on between the local clergy and the bishops, in order to avoid the inconveniences of removing it. The council of Worms, in 829, ordered that bishops who had a sufficient income from other property should relinquish their canonical share of the tithes for the uses of the church and of the poor.

Capitularies were often passed to prevent the payers of tithes from taking the disposal of them into their own hands, instead of leaving it to the bishops; and from making the payment to some church which private reasons might lead them to prefer, rather than to that church which was rightfully entitled to it. In such cases, the missi were to take care that proper restitution should be made.

There is some inconsistency in the enactments of Spanish councils as to the dues which should be paid to the bishops. The second council of Braga, in 572, forbids them to take the third part of the oblations, and instead of it allows them only a yearly payment of two solidi from each parish. The fourth council of Toledo, held in 633, under a different government, in enacting that the bishop should not take more than a third, makes no reference to the canon of Braga. But another council at Toledo, in 646, re-enacts that canon; and one yet later, in 655, reverts to the system of allowing the bishop a third. The exaction of two solidi afterwards found its way into France; but there, in course of time, the bishops, instead of acknowledging it as a substitute for the third part, required it as an additional due, under the name of cathedraticum.

The burdens imposed on the clergy by the expenses of the bishop’s visitation have already been mentioned. The new institution of archdeacons, who claimed dues in right of their office, also contributed to impoverish the parochial clergy.

The estates of the church in France, with the exception of the parish-priest’s mansus or glebe, were subject to the payment of all the ordinary taxes, unless exempted by special privilege. The case was very different in England, where church-land was exempt from all but what was styled the “threefold necessity”—the obligation to contribute towards the national forces, the building of fortresses, and the expenses of bridges and highways.

As in earlier ages, canons continued to be passed forbidding the clergy to engage in secular employments.

In England, the mass-priests were required to learn some handicraft, to practise it, and to teach it to their clerks; not, however, with a view to their own gain, but in order that they might avoid the temptations of idleness, and might have the means of relieving the poor. And similar orders are found in France and elsewhere.

The high social position of ecclesiastics in the Germanic kingdoms appears from the rates at which their lives were valued. The payment known by the name of wehr, an institution common to the whole German race, (but by no means limited to it), was originally intended as a composition which should satisfy the relations of a slain person for his life, and re-establish peace between them and the slayer, so that the nation might not, on account of private enmities, be deprived of the service of its members. The principle by which the female relations of the slain man were excluded from any share of this payment—namely, that they were not capable of carrying on a feud—might naturally have been considered as extending to the clergy; but when these became a powerful order, the church claimed a wehr for their death. In France, the wehr of a presbyter was equal to that of a count; the wehr of a bishop, to that of a duke. In England an archbishop was rated in this respect as equal to an atheling, or prince of the blood; a bishop, to an ealdorman, or earl; a mass-priest, to a thane or lesser noble.

In days when the lay nobles were unable to read or write, the possession of learning marked out ecclesiastics as the only persons qualified for many important offices. The bishops, as men of counsel, got precedence of the counts, the men of the sword. It was the policy of Charlemagne to elevate the hierarchy by way of a counterpoise to the power of his rude vassals. He orders that all shall pay obedience to the bishops, and declares that those who refuse it shall have no home within the empire, “even if they were his own sons”.

As the secular advantages of the clerical profession became greater, it was sought by members of the dominant race, who had before left it in the hands of the conquered. The occurrence of barbaric names among the clergy from the seventh century indicates the time when Franks began to enter into ecclesiastical orders; and very soon after, the effect of the change is seen in the necessity of laws to restrain the clergy from secular habits and occupations. Bishops led to the field the troops which their lands were required to furnish towards the national army, and not only gave their personal attendance (which was a matter of obligation, and might in some respects have been beneficial), but engaged in bodily service. They were unwilling to admit that their spiritual calling could deprive them of the birthright which belonged to every free Frank, to share in the wars of his people; they wished, too, by proving themselves men of action, to show that their property was not to be invaded with impunity by their lay neighbours, and possibly to preserve their estates from being applied by the sovereign to reward the military services of other men. Boniface endeavoured to suppress such practices: it was enacted that the clergy should not carry arms; that only so many of them should accompany the army as might be requisite for the duties of chaplains, and that these should confine themselves to their proper functions. But the reform seems not to have lasted long ; Charlemagne renews the orders of his father’s time, and exhorts the clergy, instead of bearing arms, to trust in God for protection. A suspected document represents him as explaining that the object of such enactments was not, as the bishops had supposed, to deprive them of their honours. But even during the remaining years of his reign fresh prohibitions were necessary; and when the strong hand of the great emperor was removed, the warlike inclinations of the Frank bishops were displayed in a greater degree than ever. In England also the clergy were disposed to bear arms, as a right belonging to their free condition, and canons were passed to check the practice.

While the Frankish laws restrained the pugnacity of the clergy, care was also taken to prevent the owners of property from evading the obligations attached to it under colour of ordination, or of the monastic profession.

Thus we find an order in 799 that no noble should receive the tonsure unless after an examination of his case before the bishop of the diocese, and that if such a clerk should afterwards wish to reside on his own land, he should perform the same military service as others.

With the. carrying of arms other secular habits and amusements are forbidden to the clergy—as the keeping of hounds and hawks, games of chance, noisy entertainments, worldly songs and instrumental music, and the company of minstrels and buffoons.

The most remarkable regulations as to the marriage of the clergy during this period belong to the east—being those of the Trullan council (A.D. 691). This council is strongly opposed to second marriages. Presbyters who persist in such marriages are to be deposed; if the second wife be dead, or if the husband separate from he, he shall be allowed to hold his rank, but shall be excluded from priestly functions. If a priest, a deacon, or a subdeacon marry a widow, he shall separate from his wife, shall be suspended, and shall be incapable of higher promotion. The council forbids, under pain of deposition, the practice of African and Libyan bishops, who were reported to cohabit with their wives; the wife of a bishop is ordered to separate from him, and to go into a convent. It censures the practice of the Armenians, who required that the clergy should be of priestly family, and allowed those who were so born to officiate as singers and readers without receiving the tonsure; and it forbids the clergy to marry after their ordination as subdeacons. But in its 13th canon, after stating that the Roman church exacted of persons ordained as presbyters or deacons a promise to abstain from their wives, the council expressly sanctions the contrary practice, and grounds its sanction on the “apostolical canons”. No promise is to be required, no separation is to be enforced; deposition is threatened against any one who shall deprive priests, deacons, or subdeacons of their wives, and against all members of these orders who under pretence of religion shall forsake their partners. And, while the 29th canon allows the clergy of “barbaric” churches to separate, if they think it their duty to do so, and if their wives consent, the permission is declared to be granted only in condescension to the narrow scrupulousness r which may be expected in such churches.

A council which in this and other points directly and avowedly contradicted the principles and usages of Rome was not likely to find favour with the popes, and as we have seen, it was rejected by Sergius I. But the sanction which it gave to the marriage of the clergy has ever since continued to regulate the discipline of the Greek church.

In the west, the period presents us with many enactments against the marriage of the clergy. The Merovingian kings added their authority to confirm the ecclesiastical canons which forbade it. But it would seem that, notwithstanding the frequency of the prohibitions, many of the clergy continued to marry—more especially where the authority of the popes was not fully established, as in Lombardy, Spain, and some parts of Gaul and of Germany. The see of Chur, in the Grisons, was hereditary in a family of bishops who combined the powers of spiritual and civil government. The wife of one of these, about the middle of the seventh century, in signing documents, styled herself episcopa; and the marriage of the bishops implies that the clergy were also at liberty to marry.

A question put by Augustine to Gregory the Great seems to show that marriage had been usual among the British clergy. The law of the Anglo-Saxon church on this subject was the same with that of Rome; but here too there is frequent proof that the clergy continued to enter into the married state; nor was their marriage annulled or the issue of it declared illegitimate until the latter part of the twelfth century.

As in the earlier periods, the canons for the enforcement of celibacy are accompanied by many which indicate the disastrous effects of such measures. There are very frequent enactments as to the entertainment of women in the houses of the clergy. The fourth council of Toledo (A.D. 633) renews the orders of earlier Spanish councils that the concubines of clerks shall be sold; the ninth council of the same place (A.D. 655) adds that their children shall be serfs of the church. Some canons forbid the clergy to have as inmates of their houses even those nearest female relatives who had been allowed by the council of Nicaea,—alleging by way of reason that other persons had often been introduced under the pretence of relationship, and that even the laws of nature had been violated. The councils of Charlemagne’s reign in general, however, are content with renewing the Nicene rule.

An important attempt at reform was made about the year 760 by the institution of the canonical life. The title of canons (canonici), which had formerly been given to all the clergy, on account of their being enrolled in the canon or register of the church, and entitled to maintenance from its funds, was now applied in a new meaning, to designate clergy who lived under a canon or rule, resembling that of the monastic communities. The idea of such an institution was not new; for in earlier times Eusebius of Vercelli, Hilary of Arles, and the great Augustine had shown the example of living together with their clergy; and more recently a like practice had been usual in missionary bodies, where the bishop lived with his staff of clergy and monks. But it was now reduced to a regular system by Chrodegang, a nephew of Pipin, and archbishop of Metz.

Chrodegang’s scheme was in great measure an adaptation of the Benedictine rule to the different circumstances of the clergy. The bishop held a place corresponding to that of the Benedictine abbot, the archdeacon answered to the provost or prior, the seniors had the same oversight in both systems. Like Benedict, the father of the canonical institute prescribed a common dwelling, an uniform dress, a common table, a common dormitory, unless where the bishop should be pleased to allow an exception. The clergy were required to attend certain services daily. Every day they were to practise manual labour, and were to devote certain portions of their time to study. The younger members of the society were to show respect to the elders, as by rising and bowing when they passed, by asking their benediction, and by standing in their presence, unless specially permitted to sit down. All were to confess to the bishop in Lent, and again in autumn; stripes or imprisonment were threatened as the penalties for going to any other confessor. All who were not prevented by sin were to communicate every Sunday and on other chief festivals. Articles of clothing were to be supplied at stated times; the elders were then to give up the clothes which they had worn, and these were to be transferred to the juniors. All were to take their turns in the services of the house; each was in his order to cook for a week, the archdeacon and the cellarer being the only exceptions. Laymen were not to be admitted, except for some special purpose, such as that of assisting in the kitchen and they were to leave the house as soon as their work was done.

The dietary of the canons was more liberal than that prescribed by the Benedictine rule. They were permitted to eat flesh, except during penitential seasons. They had an allowance of wine (or of beer, if they preferred it), graduated according to their rank—for priests and deacons, three cups at dinner and two at supper; for subdeacons, two at each meal; for the lower orders, two at dinner and one at supper. There were to be seven tables in the hall, appropriated respectively to the bishop, to the various orders of canons, to strangers, and to the clergy of the city, who on Sundays and other festivals dined in the college, and partook of the instruction which was given in the chapter-house. Edifying books were to be read at meals, and, in order that they might be heard, silence was to be kept, “because it is necessary that, when one taketh his bodily food, then also the soul should be refreshed with spiritual food”.

The most important difference from the Benedictine rule was, that the canons were allowed to enjoy individual property—whether that which they had possessed before entering into the society, or such fees and presents as they might receive for the performance of religious offices. They were, however, obliged at their death to leave all to the brethren

From Metz the rule of Chrodegang soon made its way to other cities. The number of its chapters was increased by additions from 34 to 86. Charlemagne even wished to reduce the whole of the clergy to this system; and, although the attempt failed, and the great majority of the clergy continued to live as seculars, many colleges of canons were formed under the government of abbots, in addition to the cathedral bodies for which the scheme had originally been intended. The rule was sanctioned for general use by a great council at Aix-la-Chapelle under Lewis the Pious, in 816; and by the middle of the ninth century it was established in almost all the cathedrals of France, Germany, and Italy, and had also been adopted in England. The clergy found their account in the apparent strictness of the new system, as a means of recovering much of that popular admiration which the monks had long enjoyed to the prejudice of the hierarchical orders; and in consequence of this strictness, donations were largely bestowed on the canonical societies. The cathedral chapters became wealthy and powerful, and soon began to assert a claim to act as the bishop's advisers, and to share in the administration of the diocese.

 

Monasticism

 

During these centuries the monks played an important part in western Christendom. The missions to the Germanic nations were chiefly their work; they planted colonies in lonely places, where towns soon grew up, as at Fulda, St. Gall, Eichstedt, and Fritzlar; and with the knowledge of religion they spread that of agriculture and civilization among the people. Through the employment of monks in missionary labour, ordination was more largely introduced into their ranks, as a necessary qualification for missionary duties. In some cases, sees were usually filled with monks from certain abbeys—an arrangement the more natural because learning was chiefly cultivated in the monastic societies. Thus Strasburg received its bishops from Munster in Alsace, Spires from Weissenburg, Constance from Reichenau or St. Gall.

The reputation of sanctity continued to wait on the monks. The term religion, which had been specially applied to the monastic profession by a council at Orleans as early as 549, became more and more restricted to it. Entrance on the monastic state was regarded as a second baptism. The Penitential ascribed to Theodore of Canterbury curiously follows out this idea by ordering that the novice shall for seven days have his head covered with the cowl, as the head of the newly-baptized was covered with the chrism or veil; and a like order, although with an abridgment of the time to three days, was made under Lewis the Pious in 817. Persons of high rank flocked into the cloisters; it was no unusual thing even for kings and queens to resign their royalty and to assume the monastic habit.

During the earlier part of the period there was a considerable variety of rules. That of St. Columban for a time appeared to rival the Benedictine code in popularity. It became not uncommon to combine the two; but by degrees the rule of St. Benedict triumphed, as being marked in a greater degree by practical sense, less rigorous, and more elastic than the others. With slight modifications in particular cases, it was commonly adopted in France, where a great excitement in its favour was produced about the middle of the eighth century by the alleged relics of the founder, which were said to have been translated to Fleury on the Loire about a hundred years before, when the parent monastery of Monte Cassino had been laid waste by the Lombards. In England, too, where the Benedictine rule was introduced by Wilfrid, it soon became general, although not without some mixture of the old national usages. But the Spanish monasteries continued until the ninth century to be governed by rules which had been compiled, partly from eastern sources, by Isidore of Seville, Fructuosus of Braga, and other native bishops.

The monasteries in general continued to be subject to the jurisdiction of their diocesan bishops; but exemptions, of which we have already seen traces in the sixth century, now became more common, and the authority of Gregory the Great had an important share in advancing the practice. It would appear, however, that the reason of such exemptions in this period is not to be sought in any ambition or assumption on the part of the monks, but in the oppressive conduct of bishops. These from the seventh century began to claim a share in the gifts bestowed on monasteries. They exacted unreasonable payments from the monks for the dedication of their churches, for the consecration of chrism, for ordaining their clergy and installing their abbots. A large part of the revenues was absorbed by the expense of visitations; and in addition to this, the bishops extorted heavy fees under the names of cathedralicum and the like. Where the choice of an abbot belonged to the monks, the bishops often endeavoured to wrest it from them, and exercised it without any regard to the welfare of the house, or to the pretensions of the more eminent members, who might have reasonably expected to succeed to the headship. The grossness of the tyranny practised by some prelates may be inferred from the fact that the monastic bodies often appealed against it to synods, and that these, although composed of bishops, felt themselves obliged to condemn it in strong terms, and to forbid its continuance. In some cases during the eighth century, it was provided that, if the diocesan bishop would not perform his functions with respect to a monastery on reasonable terms, the abbot might apply to another. On the whole, it may be said that the exemptions of this period were sought not so much for the sake of emancipation from the rightful authority of the bishops, as for relief from their rapacity. The bishop still retained his general supervision of religion and morals in the exempt monasteries; he was even entitled to inquire into the administration of the temporalities, while he was restrained from acts of plunder and oppression.

When some monasteries had obtained such privileges, it became usual with founders to insist that those which they established should stand on a level with others in this respect. There were, too, certain monasteries which were styled royal—either from having been founded by princes, or from having obtained their special protection; and these were exempt from all jurisdiction except that of the sovereign, which was exercised through the missi and the bishops. Some monastic houses, of more than ordinary dignity, had bishops of their own, resident within their walls, as was the case at St. Denys. And in addition to these, it appears that the popes had already commenced a practice of granting exemption from all authority but their own. The first instance is commonly said to have been a grant from Zacharias to the abbey of Fulda; but the genuineness of the document is much questioned. If genuine, it was granted at the request of Boniface himself, and therefore not with an intention to injure the rights of the diocesan. But when the archbishopric and the abbacy which had been united in the apostle of Germany were separated, the privileges conferred on Fulda, and the renown which it acquired as the resting-place of his remains, excited the jealousy of Lull, his successor in the see of Mayence. The archbishop complained that the exemption wrongfully interfered with his jurisdiction. He is said to have persecuted the abbot, Sturmi, by unscrupulous means—even inducing Pipin, by a charge of treason, to banish him for two years; and the enmity between the two continued to the end of the abbot’s life, so that, on his death-bed, in declaring his forgiveness of all men, he thought it necessary to mention Lull by name, as being the person who most especially needed it.

Exemptions existed also in the patriarchate of Constantinople, where some monasteries were discharged from the bishop’s authority and subject to the metropolitan, while others were subject to the patriarch only. In token of these privileges, the metropolitan or patriarchal crosier was erected over the altar in the chapel of the monastery. The second council of Nicaea allowed abbots, if they were presbyters, to ordain the lower clergy of their monasteries. The rule was adopted in the west, and from this and other circumstances it came to pass that the inmates of a monastery, instead of being mostly laymen, as in earlier ages, now belonged, with very few exceptions, to some grade of the hierarchy.

The age of admission to the monastic community was variously fixed. The Trullan council lays down that it ought not to be under ten. Theodore of Canterbury names fifteen as the age for monks, and sixteen or seventeen for nuns. The capitularies of 789 re-enact the old African canons which forbade the reception of women before the age of twenty-five, unless for some special reason. But besides those who took the vows on themselves, children might be devoted by their parents to the monastic state; and in this case, as in the other, there was no release from its obligations. Charlemagne, however, endeavoured to put some limit to the practice, by ordering that, “saving the authority of the canons”, girls should not be veiled until they were old enough to understand their engagement.

Many orders are found against the admission of serfs into monasteries without the consent of their masters, and of freemen without licence from the sovereign. It was not unusual to make a false profession of withdrawing from the world, for the sake of escaping from military service. In order to check this abuse, Charlemagne orders, in 805, that those who forsake the world shall be obliged to live strictly according to rule, either as canons or as monks.

Although the observance of the same rule was a bond of union between monastic societies, no more intimate connexion was as yet organized in the west. Some of the greater monasteries had cells or priories dependent on them; but, except on this very limited scale, there was no affiliation of one religious house to another, nor was there any subjection of many to a common head, as had been the case in the system of St. Pachomius. It was usual for an abbot, in sending forth one of his monks to found a new community, to release him from the vow of obedience so soon as he should be able to establish a footing. During the earlier part of the period, it was forbidden to an abbot to have more than one monastery, although Gregory the Great allowed it in some cases; but this rule was afterwards disregarded. Pluralities, both ecclesiastical and monastic, became frequent, and sometimes both kinds were held by the same person. Thus about the year 720, Hugh, a member of the Carolingian family, was at once bishop of Paris, Rouen, and Bayeux, and abbot of Fontenelle and Jumieges. In the instances where a see was usually filled from a particular monastery, the bishops often united the abbacy with their higher dignity; and where bishops were able to usurp the power of nomination to an abbacy, they sometimes took the office for themselves. In this manner Sidonius, bishop of Constance, who had already got possession of the abbey of Reichenau, resolved in 759 to make himself master also of that of St. Gall; and, although we are told by the monastic historians that his rapacity was punished by a death like that of Arius, the next bishop, John, not only engrossed the same rich preferment, but towards the end of his life formed a scheme of providing for his three nephews by transferring the bishopric to one of them, and an abbacy to each of the others.

Many of the monastic societies were specially exempted by sovereigns from all public imposts and tolls. But such exemptions were as often tokens of poverty on the part of the house as of extraordinary royal favour. Thus in a list of the Frankish monasteries, drawn up at Aix-la-Chapelle in 817, where they are ranged in three classes, as owing to the prince both gifts and military service, as owing gifts only, or as free from all duty except prayer, the most distinguished foundations are for the most part included in the most heavily burdened class.

As monasteries grew rich, some evil consequences followed. The vow of poverty was considered to be satisfied by the renunciation of individual property. Where its obligation was felt as matter of conscience, the monks retained their original simplicity of dress and food, while their superfluous wealth was spent on other objects, such as the erection of costly buildings. But very commonly the possession of the means of luxury introduced the enjoyment of it. In the east, the confessor Maximus, in the middle of the seventh century, denounces the disorderly lives of monks, and says that their profession of piety was no better than hypocrisy. Charlemagne in 811 censures the abbots as caring only to swell the numbers of their monks, and to obtain good chanters and readers, without any solicitude as to their morals. He sarcastically asks how the monks and clergy understand the text against entangling themselves with the affairs of this life; whether they suppose the only difference between themselves and secular men to consist in their being unmarried and carrying no arms; whether those can be said to have forsaken the world who are incessantly striving to increase their possessions by all sorts of means—who use the hopes of heaven and the terrors of hell, the names of God and the saints, to extort gifts not only from the rich but from the poor and ignorant, and by diverting property from the lawful heirs drive many to theft and robbery. How, he continues, can they be said to have forsaken the world who suborn perjury in order to acquire what they covet? or those who retain their secular property, and are surrounded by bands of armed men?

Abbots, as well as bishops, were addicted to war, to hunting and hawking, to games of chance, to the company of minstrels and jesters. There are many ordinances against irregularities of this kind—some of them extending to abbesses also; and there are frequent complaints of gross immorality among recluses of both sexes, with attempts to restrain such practices.

The wealth of monasteries, like that of churches, suffered from the exactions of their advocates, and from alienation to laymen. A remarkable instance of such alienation is recorded as to the abbey of Stablo, in the diocese of Liege, where, in consequence of the conversion of the revenues into a lay “benefice”, there were two successions of abbots, the one line being generally made up of the bishops of Liege, while the other consisted of powerful laymen.

Towards the end of the period, a remarkable reformer of the monastic life appeared in France. Witiza, afterwards known as St. Benedict of Aniane, was of Gothic descent, and son of the count of Maguelone in Septimania. When a boy, he was placed in the court of Pipin, to whom he became cupbearer, and he continued in the service of Charlemagne. In 774 he accompanied his master to Rome; and on his way homeward he narrowly escaped from drowning in a vain attempt to save his brother, who had rashly plunged into a swollen ford. In gratitude for this preservation, he carried out a thought which he had already for some time entertained, of embracing a monastic life, by entering the monastery of St. Seine, in Burgundy. Although he had assumed the name of Benedict, the rule of the Nursian monk appeared to him fit only for weak beginners and he rushed into the austerities of eastern monachism. He macerated his body by excessive fasting; his dress was of rags, swarming with vermin, and patched with a variety of colours; he took very little sleep, and that on the bare ground; he never bathed; he courted derision and insult as a madman, and often expressed his fear of hell in piteous outcries; and, although his abbot repeatedly urged him to relent from these severities, Benedict's resolution was inflexible

On the death of the abbot, Benedict was chosen as his successor; but he fled from St. Seine, and built himself a little hermitage on his father's estate, by the bank of the river Aniane. Some monks who attempted to live with him, found themselves unable to support the excessive severity of his system; but in course of time a considerable society was gathered around him, and a monastery was erected near his cell. Benedict himself took part in the building of it; he and his monks were obliged to carry the materials, as they were unable to provide oxen for the work. The walls were of wood; the roof was thatched with straw the vestments for divine service were coarse, whereas silk was usually employed for such purposes; the eucharistic vessels were of wood, afterwards of glass, and finally of pewter. The monks lived chiefly on bread and water, varied sometimes by milk, and on Sundays and holydays by a scanty allowance of wine. If the rigid simplicity of Benedict’s first arrangements was partly dictated by fear lest richness of architecture and of ornament should prove injurious to monastic discipline, he must afterwards have changed his opinion on the subject; for in 782 the humble wooden buildings made way for a splendid monastery. The church was adorned with marble pillars; there were several costly chapels; and all that belonged to the furniture and to the services was of unusual magnificence. Charlemagne, who had contributed to the expense, exempted the monastery from all taxes, and from the jurisdiction both of bishops and of counts.

Benedict became a man of great note and influence. His name has already come before us, as one of the commissioners employed by Charlemagne to reclaim the adherents of Felix of Urgel; Lewis the Pious, while king of Aquitaine, employed him to reform the monasteries of that country; and the effect of his institutions was widely felt. He collected into two books the monastic rules of the east and of the west; in a third book he added the rules for nunneries; and from the whole he composed a “Harmony of the Rules”, in which the precepts of the earlier St. Benedict on every subject are illustrated by those of other monastic legislators. In his reforms he was content to enforce the Benedictine system, which experience had shown him to be better suited for general use than the rigours of oriental monachism. In his own practice, he was obliged to abate somewhat of the violence with which he had begun; but his life continued to be strictly ascetic, and he shared with his monks in the labours of ploughing, digging, and reaping. Soon after the accession of Lewis to the empire, Benedict resigned the abbacy of Aniane, and removed to a new royal foundation on the bank of the Inda, near Aix-la-Chapelle; and, after having played an important part during the earlier years of his patron’s reign, he died at the age of seventy, in 821.

In England, monachism fell into decay from the earlier part of the eighth century. The monasteries were often invaded and occupied by secular persons, and although a canon of Cloveshoo was directed against this evil, the terms which are used significantly prove that the council had little hope of being able to suppress it. Boniface in his letters to Archbishop Cuthbert, and to Ethelbert. king of Mercia, complains that the English monasteries are oppressed beyond any others in Christendom; that their privileges are violated, that they are heavily and unjustly taxed, that they are ruined by the expense of entertaining the king and his hunting train; that the monks are forced to labour at the royal buildings and other works.

But much blame is also laid on the communities themselves. The monks are often charged with riotous living and with drunkenness, which Boniface describes as a peculiarly national vice; and the fondness for gay clothing, which was another characteristic of the English, defied all monastic rules. Aldhelm strongly reproves the indulgence of this taste. Boniface complains of it to Cuthbert; the council of Cloveshoo censures it in clergy, in monks, and in nuns, denouncing especially in men the affectation of a laical headdress, and the fashion of adorning the legs with fillets of various colours; the council of Chalchythe desires monks and canons to use the same habit with those of the continent, and not dyed with Indian dye, or very costly. But some years later Alcuin is found continuing the complaint against such vanities; and the love of them was not to be overcome.

In addition to the causes which have been mentioned —the secular oppression to which the monks were subjected, and their own unwillingness, when the first period of fervour had passed away, to bear the restraints of the monastic rule—the introduction of the canonical life contributed to the decline of English monachism. The occupants of religious houses became canons instead of monks; and about the middle of the ninth century the Benedictine order was almost extinct in England.

The regulations of this period as to female recluses correspond in general character with those for monks. Abbesses are required to be subject to their bishops; they are censured for interfering with the sacerdotal function by presuming to veil virgins, and to give benedictions and imposition of hands to men—apparently by way of ordination to the lower grades of the ministry. There are frequent complaints of dissolute life in nunneries, and the abbesses themselves are sometimes charged with a share of the guilt. Other canons are directed against the practice of allowing widows to take the veil during the first agitation of their bereavement, as it had been found that such nuns often relapsed into worldly business or gaieties, and endeavoured to secure at once the privileges of the monastic and of the secular life.

The Benedictine rule was adapted to the use of female societies; and towards the end of the period the example of Chrodegang's rule led to the institution of canonesses, who lived together under a less rigid code than nuns, and without being obliged to give up their private property.

 

Rites and Usages.

 

Throughout the west, Latin had from the first been used as the language of divine service. As it was spoken in all the western provinces of the empire, there was no necessity for translating the liturgy into other tongues; and after the barbarian conquests Latin remained as the language of superior civilization, and especially as that of the clergy, whose ranks were for a long time generally filled from among the Romanized inhabitants. It was the medium by which nations carried on their official intercourse; it alone remained stable, while the dialects of the invaders were in a course of fluctuation and change; and where new languages were formed on its basis—a process in which the ecclesiastical use of the Latin contributed greatly to secure its predominance—the formation was gradual, so that it would have been impossible to fix on any time at which the ancient Roman tongue should have been disused as obsolete. The closer connexion established with Rome by Pipin and Charlemagne confirmed the use of Latin in the Frankish church. And thus an usage which originally arose out of circumstances, came at length to be regarded as necessary, and at a later time to be justified by theoretical argument, although confessedly as contrary to the practice of the early church n as it appears to be to reason. Charlemagne, however, notwithstanding his attachment to the Roman ritual, combated the growing opinion on this point. “Let no one”, it is said in his capitulary at the council of Frankfort, “suppose that God may not be prayed to except in three languages; forasmuch as in every tongue God is worshipped, and man is heard if he ask the things which are right”.”

The chanting was now left to the choir, and the people joined only in the Kyrie eleison. But Charlemagne and others were careful that preaching—which by means of missions regained an importance which it had once appeared likely to lose—should be frequent, and in the vulgar tongue. His measures for the instruction of the people in the creed and in the Lord's prayer have been noticed in a former chapter.

In England, Latin was employed as the ritual language, not only by Augustine and his followers, but by the Scottish and Irish teachers, who had been accustomed to it in their native churches. The epistle and gospel, however, were read in the vernacular tongue, and in it sermons were delivered. The Scottish or Irish liturgy was suppressed by the council of Cloveshoo in those parts of southern England where it had before been used; but, notwithstanding the influence of Wilfrid, it kept possession of the church of York until the time of Alcuin, who is found recommending that it should be abandoned. It would, however, seem that, in the adaptation of the Roman ritual for England, some use was made of that license of selection from other formularies which had been granted by Gregory to Augustine.

In the east, Greek had been the usual language of the church, and continued to be so under the Mahometan rule, where Arabic was used for the ordinary business of life. The monophysites of Egypt, however, employed the Coptic in their service, and the Nestorians the Syriac.

The use of organs was now brought into the service of the Latin church. The earliest mention of such instruments (as distinguished from the ancient hydraulic organ, of which the invention is by some ascribed to Archimedesa) is perhaps in a passage of St. Augustine. Venantius Fortunatus, bishop of Poitiers about the year 600, compares the voices of boys and men in a choir to the smaller and the larger pipes of an organ respectively, but does not speak of the instrument itself as used in churches; so that his words are not inconsistent with the opinion which ascribes the introduction of organs into churches to Pope Vitalian (A.D. 65 7-672) . It appears from the testimony of Aldhelm that they were known in England at the beginning of the eighth century; but it would seem that, after the age of Venantius, the organ had again become a novelty to the Franks when one was sent by Constantine Copronymus as a present to Pipin in 757. The St. Gall biographer of Charlemagne tells us that a similar instrument, “emulating at once the roar of thunder and the sweetness of the lyre”, which was brought by some Greek ambassadors to the great emperor, excited the imitative talent of the Franks. Under Lewis the Pious, a Venetian priest named George was employed by the emperor to build an organ at Aix-la-Chapelle, and is said to have performed his task “with marvellous skill”; but it would seem that the instrument was of the hydraulic kind. So skillful, however, did the Franks become in the manufacture of organs, that about a century after the date of Constantine’s gift to Pipin, Pope John VIII is found requesting a bishop of Freising to send him one, with a person skilful in the use of it, because the organs of the north were superior to any that could be made in Italy. Some of the great organs of those days must have been very formidable instruments, if we may take literally the poetical description of one which was erected in Winchester cathedral by Bishop Alphege (afterwards archbishop of Canterbury), in the end of the tenth century; for it is said to have been blown by twenty-six pairs of bellows, which required the hard labour of seventy men to work them.

To this period also is ascribed the introduction of church bells. The belief which was long current, that they were invented by St. Paulinus of Nola in the end of the fourth century, is without historical support, and rests only on a mistaken etymology. According to some writers, they were first used in churches by Sabinian, the successor of Gregory the Great in the see of Rome; but in any case it is certain that in the course of the seventh and eighth centuries the use of them spread widely throughout France and other countries. Bells are familiarly mentioned by Bede, and in St. Boniface’s letters. Under Charlemagne, we find the legendary St. Gall biographer relating that a monk of his own community, named Tancho, having received a commission from the emperor for a great bell, substituted tin for silver in the composition of the metal, and was punished for his fraud by a miraculous death; and in the capitulary of 789 there is a prohibition of the baptism of bells—a superstition which was afterwards carried further, by conferring baptismal names on them, and furnishing them with sponsors.

The history of the eucharistic doctrine during this period has been disputed with as much zeal and partiality as if the question between modern Rome and its opponents depended on the opinions of the seventh and eighth centuries. The word figure, when it occurs, is hailed by one party, and such words as body, blood, or changed, by the other, as if they were sufficient to determine the matter. But the truth seems to lie between the extremes. Both in language and in opinion there was a progress towards the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the feeling of individuals may have closely bordered on it; but there was no acknowledgment, nor apparently even any assertion, of more than an effective grace, by which the consecrated elements, while retaining their original substance, convey to the faithful receiver the benefits of the Saviour’s death. Some passages of Bede and of Alcuin, for example, which are produced by Romanists as favourable to their views, appear really to maintain nothing beyond the doctrine of the English Reformation. Thus, when Alcuin speaks of a bishop as consecrating bread and wine into the substance of our Lord's body and blood, it would seem that by “substance” he does not mean anything material; that he does not even use the word in the scholastic sense, as denoting that by which a thing is what it is, but that he intends only a virtual efficacy. And after this, the Caroline Books, in which Alcuin himself is supposed to have been largely concerned, express themselves in a manner entirely accordant with our own eucharistic doctrine.

John of Damascus appears to have gone further than any of the western teachers. He rejects the term “figure”, as unauthorized by Scripture, and declares the consecrated elements to be “the very deified body of the Lord”. Yet the sense of this startling expression may be reduced by a comparison with the language then current as to the union of our Lord’s natures or wills—where it was said that the flesh or the human will was “deified” by its connexion with the Godhead. If the meaning were more than this parallel would warrant—if John intended to maintain that the material elements were changed, instead of being united with something higher—it is certain that the eastern church did not adopt his view. The Eucharist was mentioned in the controversy as to images by the hostile synods of Constantinople and Nicaea. The iconoclastic assembly declares that the only true image of the Saviour is the Eucharist—meaning that the union of the Divine grace with the earthly elements represents that union of Godhead and manhood in his person which images failed to convey, inasmuch as they could only set forth the humanity. The Nicene council, in answering this, finds fault with the term image, as being one which no father had applied to that which is His body and blood. Yet no objection is made to the substance of the comparison; nor do we find anywhere in this controversy the distinction which must have occurred if the modern Roman doctrine as to the sacrament had been then received—that the consecrated elements are unlike images, forasmuch as they are not a representation, but are really Christ Himself.

Instead of the common bread in which the Eucharist had originally been administered, wafers were now substituted in the west. They were of very fine flour unleavened, round in shape, and stamped with an instrument. The communion of infants appears to have been still in use, and many superstitions were practised with the consecrated bread—such as giving it to the dead and burying it with them. The cup continued until the twelfth century to be administered to all communicants

The height to which the idea of a sacrifice in the Eucharist was carried (an idea which appears in the earliest ages of the church, although with some indefiniteness of meaning), now led to some important consequences. The sacrifice was supposed to avail not only for those who were present but for the absent; for the dead as well as for the living. One result of this was, that the obligation of receiving the sacrament was less felt, so that there is much complaint as to the rarity of communion, and that canons are passed for restoring the three recep­tions yearly which had been prescribed by the council of Agde. At length masses came to be celebrated privately, and by the priest alone. This practice was forbidden by Theodulf of Orleans; it is censured, although not in absolute terms, by the council of Mentz in 813, is more decidedly condemned by the sixth council of Paris, in 829, and in the following century is again forbidden by Atto, bishop of Vercelli.

From the time of Gregory the Great, the doctrine of Purgatory spread and was developed. In the English church, the offspring of Gregory’s own exertions, it appears to have especially taken root. Bede relates stories of persons who had been transported in vision to the regions of the dead; they returned to consciousness with a sad and awestruck air, told their tale, and soon after died. Thus Fursey and Drithelm were permitted to see the punishments of hell and purgatory, and the bliss of the righteous who were awaiting their consummation in paradise. The vision of Drithelm was versified by Alcuin; other narratives of the same kind appeared; the idea of such visions became familiar to men's minds; and, six centuries later, the dreams of the obscure Irish or Northumbrian monks issued in the great poem of the middle ages.

With the belief in purgatory, that in the utility of the masses for the departed advanced. Fraternities were formed, especially among monks, with the obligation to say a certain number of masses for the soul of every brother at his death, and on the anniversary of it, or to provide for the purchase of them by a payment which in England was called soulscot. The performance of these masses became an important source of income to the clergy. It is recognized as such by Chrodegang’s rule; and for this purpose additional altars were erected in churches which before had only one. Masses were also used in order to obtain temporal benefits, such as fair weather or seasonable rain.

A greater strictness in the observance of the Lord’s-day had gradually been introduced into the church, and occupations which councils of the sixth century had vindicated against a judaizing tendency. were now forbidden as contrary to the sanctity of the day, which it became usual to ground on the fourth commandment. Many canons throughout this period, and shortly after, enact that it should be kept by a cessation from all trade, husbandry, or other manual labour. No law-courts or markets may be held, men are to refrain from hunting, women must not sew, embroider, weave, card wool, beat flax, shear sheep, or publicly wash clothes. No journeys were to be taken except such as were unavoidable; and these were to be so managed as not to interfere with the duty of attending the church-service. The Penitential ascribed to Theodore of Canterbury states that the Greeks and the Latins agree in doing no work on Sunday; that they do not sail, ride, drive except to church, hawk, or bathe; that the Greeks do not write in public, although at home they write according to their convenience. Penalties were enacted against such as should violate the sanctity of the day. Thus the council of Narbonne, in 589, condemns a free­man to pay six solidi, and a serf to receive a hundred lashes. Ina, king of Wessex (A.D. 688-725), directs that, if a serf work on the Lord’s-day by his master's order, he shall be free ; if at his own will, he shall pay a fine or shall “suffer in his hide”. The council of Berghamstead (A.D. 696), enacts that a freeman breaking the rest of the day shall undergo the healsfang and imposes a heavy fine on any master who shall make his servant work between the sunset of Saturday and that of Sunday. The authority of pretended revelations was called in to enforce the observance of the Lord’s-day. It appears that this was the object of a letter which was said to have fallen from heaven in 788, and of which Charlemagne, in his capitulary of the following year, orders the suppression; and the same pious fraud, or something of the same kind, was employed in England. Under Lewis the Pious, councils are found speaking of judgments by which persons had been punished for working on the Lord’s-day—some had been struck by lightning, some lamed in their members, some reduced to ashes by visible fire. The clergy, the nobles, and the emperor himself, are desired to show a good example by a right observance of the day.

But notwithstanding the increased severity as to the Lord’s-day, the idea of identifying it with the Jewish Sabbath was condemned. Gregory the Great speaks of this as a doctrine of Antichrist, who, he says, will require the observance of both days—of the Sabbath for the sake of Judaism; of the Lord’s-day, because he will pretend to rival the Saviour’s resurrection. Gregory goes on to notice the scruples of some who held that it was wrong to wash the body on the Lord’s-day. It is allowed, he says, for necessity, although not for luxury, alike on this and on other days, and he adds a curious attempt at scriptural proof. The councils of Lestines and Verne censure an extreme rigour in the observance of the day, as “belonging rather to Jewish superstition than to Christian duty”.

The Lord’s-day was commonly considered to begin on Saturday evening, and to reach to the corresponding hour on Sunday. Such, as we have seen, was the length of the labourer’s rest in England at the time of the council of Berghamstead (A.D. 696); but by the middle of the tenth century it was extended, and reached from nones (3 p.m.) on Saturday to the dawn of Monday

The festival of All Saints (which was intended to make up for the defects in the celebration of saints individually) has been generally connected with the beginning of this period, when Boniface IV obtained a grant of the Pantheon at Rome from Phocas, and consecrated it as the church of St. Mary ad Martyres in 609. It would, however, appear that a festival of martyrs, on May 13, which arose out of the consecration of the Pantheon, has been confounded with All Saints’ day (Nov. 1), and that the latter was not observed at Rome until the eighth century. It was raised to the first class of festivals, and was recommended for general celebration, by Gregory IV in 835. In the east, the Sunday after Whitsunday had been connected with the memory of all saints as early as the time of St. Chrysostom.

The growing reverence for the blessed Virgin led to an increase of festivals dedicated to her. The“Presentation in the Temple” became the “Purification of St. Mary”. Her Nativity (Sept. 8) was already celebrated both in the east and in the west, and her own “Presentation” (i.e. her supposed dedication to the service of the temple) was established as a festival in the Greek church (Nov. 21), although it was not adopted in the west until the fourteenth century. In Spain, the appearance vouchsafed to Ildefonso of Toledo led to the institution of the “Expectation of St. Mary” (Dec. 18). The Assumption (Aug. 15) was also now introduced. In the silence of Scripture as to the blessed Virgin’s death, legends on the subject had arisen. At the time of the council of Ephesus (A.D. 431), she was supposed to have spent her last years with St. John in that city, and to have been interred in the church where the council met. But afterwards it came to be believed that she had been buried in the valley of Jehoshaphat, and thence had been caught up to heaven. From this tale, which originated in a conjecture of Epiphanius that she never died, and was afterwards supported by sermons falsely ascribed to Jerome and Augustine, the festival of the Assumption took its rise. In one of the capitularies it is mentioned as a subject for inquiry; but the observance of it is sanctioned by the council of Mayence (Mainz), in 813. The other festivals named in the same canon are—Easter with the week following, Ascension-day, Whitsunday and the week after it, the Nativity of St. John Baptist, St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Michael, St. Remigius, St. Martin, St. Andrew, four days at Christmas, the Circumcision, the Epiphany, and the Purification with the dedication of each church, and the feasts of the martyrs and confessors whose relics are preserved in the diocese or parish. This last provision contained the germ of a great multiplication of festivals, which naturally ensued as saints of local fame became more generally celebrated, and as their relics became more widely dispersed.

The council of Mayence also sanctions the celebration of the Ember-weeks, which was now generally established

The superstitions connected with an excess of reverence for saints were continually on the increase. Stories of visions in which saints appeared, and of miracles performed by them, are found in immense profusion—so great, indeed, that even some contemporaries began to murmur. Thus we are told by the biographer of St. Hildulf, abbot of Moyen-Moutier, in the Vosges, who died in 707, that the death of one of his monks named Spinulus was followed by a number of miracles. Three mineral springs burst forth in the abbey garden, and crowds of people were attracted to the place. Hildulf understood the advantages which his house was likely to derive from the offerings of pilgrims; but he feared that the monks might be drawn away from their proper work to attend to earthly business. He therefore knelt down at the tomb of Spinulus, and, after having thanked God for the assurance of his brother's beatification, charged the deceased monk, by the obedience which he had owed him while alive, to save the society from the threatened danger. Spinulus complied; the springs dried up, and the miracles ceased. Other stories might be produced, which show that some persons felt the general craving after miracles to be unwholesome in its effects, even where they did not venture to question the reality of the wonders which were reported.

The passion for relics was more and more developed. The second council of Nicaea orders that no church should be consecrated without some relies, and imputes a disregard of them to the opponents of images; but these, as we have seen, were eager to relieve themselves of the odium. Relics of our Lord and his virgin mother, the most precious class of all, were multiplied. The seamless coat and the napkin which had bound the Saviour’s head in the sepulchre were each supposed to be preserved in more than one place. Among the treasures of the monastery of Centulles, under abbot Angilbert, who died in 801, were fragments of the manger in which our Lord was laid, of the candle lighted at his birth, of his vesture and sandals, of the rock on which he sat when he fed the five thousand, of the wood of the three tabernacles, of the bread which he gave to his disciples, of the cross, and of the sponge; with portions of the blessed Virgin's milk, of her hair, her dress, and her cloak. In honour of the cross were instituted festivals of its Invention and Exaltation.

Other relics were also diligently sought for, and were highly prized. Not only are saints said to have appeared, as in former ages, for the purpose of pointing out the resting-places of their remains, but it was believed that sometimes, in answer to earnest prayer, relics were sent down from heaven. A great impulse was given to this kind of superstition when, on the approach of the Lombards to Rome in 761, Pope Paul removed the bodies of saints from their tombs outside the city to churches within the walls. The Frankish records of the time abound in accounts of the translation of relics to various places in France, and of the solemnities with which they were received. The mere connexion with Rome was supposed to confer a sanctity and a miraculous power. Thus it is related that Odo, duke of Aquitaine, a contemporary of Charles Martel, having got possession of three sponges which had been used in wiping the pope’s table, divided them into little morsels, which he caused his soldiers to swallow before a battle; that no one of those who had partaken was wounded, and that, while 375,000 Saracens were slain in one day, the duke’s losses throughout the war amounted to only 1500 men

Charlemagne repeatedly condemns some ecclesiastical superstitions, as well as those of the heathens whom he subdued. He forbids the veneration of fictitious saints and doubtful martyrs the invocation or worship of any saints except such as the church had approved, or the erection of memorials to them by the wayside; the circulation of apocryphal or questionable narratives; the introduction of new names of angels, in addition to those for which there is scriptural authority—Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. The council of Mayence forbids the translation of the bodies of saints, unless with permission from the sovereign and the bishops.

Legendary lives of saints were now produced in wonderful abundance, and were the most popular literature of the times. In addition to their falsehood (which, where consciously introduced, may have been held excusable by the writers for the sake of the expected good effects) and to their enforcement of all the errors which had grown upon the church, they were blameable as teaching men to look for visible prosperity and chastisement according to individual desert in the ordinary government of the world. Yet the evil of such legends was not with-put a large compensation of good. They set forth the power of religion, not only in miracles but in self-denial and renunciation of earthly things. In contrast with the rudeness and selfishness which generally prevailed, they presented examples which taught a spirit of .gentleness and self-sacrifice, of purity, of patience, of love to God and man, of disinterested toil, of forgiveness of enemies, of kindness to the poor and the oppressed. The concluding part of the legend exhibited the saint triumphant after his earthly troubles, yet still interested in his brethren who were engaged in the struggle of life, and manifesting his interest by interpositions in their behalf. And above all there was the continual inculcation of a Providence watching over all the affairs of men, and ready to protect the innocent, or to recompense and avenge their sufferings.

Even as early as the fourth century, some of the evils attendant on the general practice of pilgrimage had been noticed by Gregory of Nyssa and others; and strong complaints of a like kind continue to be found from time to time. Gregory the Great tells Rusticiana, a lady of the imperial court, that, while she had been on a pilgrimage to Sinai, her affections had been at Constantinople, and expresses a suspicion that the holy objects which she had seen with her bodily eyes had made no impression on her heart. But the idle spirit in which pilgrimages were often undertaken was not the worst mischief connected with them. Boniface writes to archbishop Cuthbert that of the multitude of English women who flocked to Rome, only a few escaped the ruin of their virtue; that it was rare to find a town of Lombardy or France in which some dishonoured English nun or other female pilgrim had not taken up her abode, and by her misconduct brought disgrace on the church of her native land. Another unhappy effect of pilgrimages was, that for the sake of it bishops and abbots absented themselves for years from their proper spheres of labour, to the great injury of religion and discipline among those committed to their care.

From Britain pilgrimages were most commonly made to Rome, where the English had, in the neighbourhood of the Vatican basilica, a quarter of their own, which was known by the Saxon name of Burg,—the Borgo of later times. Some pilgrims from our island even found their way to the Holy Land. In France the chief place of pilgrimage was the shrine of St. Martin, at Tours; but the resort from that country to Rome became greater after the accession of the Carolingian dynasty. The lives of pilgrims were regarded as sacred, and many hospitals were built for their reception; among these was one founded at Jerusalem by Charlemagne for the benefit of Latin pilgrims. The emperor in 802 orders that no one, whether rich or poor, shall refuse to pilgrims a roof, fire, and water, and encourages those who can afford more to greater hospitality by a consideration of the recompense which Scripture promises. There are, however, canons against some of the abuses connected with pilgrimage. The council of Verne, in 755, orders that monks shall not be allowed to wander to Rome without their abbot's consents The council of Châlons, in 813, forbids the clergy to go either to Rome or to Tours without leave from their bishop; and, while it acknowledges that pilgrimage is profitable for those who have confessed their sins and have obtained directions for penance, who amend their lives, give alms, and practise devotion, it denounces the error of such as consider pilgrimage a licence to sin, and begs the emperor to take measures against a common practice of nobles, who extorted from their dependents the means of paying the expense of their own pilgrimages.

In some cases, persons who had been guilty of grievous sin were condemned by way of penance to leave their country, and either to wander for a certain time, or to undertake a pilgrimage to some particular place. These penitents were furnished with letters from their bishops, which at once made known their guilt and bespoke the charity of Christians for them. Many of them were loaded with chains, or with rings which ate into the flesh and inflicted excessive torture. Ethelwulf, the father of Alfred the Great, at his visit to Rome in 855, obtained from Benedict III the privilege that no Englishman should ever be obliged to leave his own country for this sort of penance; but long before his time impostors had found their account in going about naked and in irons under the pretence of having been sentenced to pilgrimage for some fearful crime. The capitulary of 789 forbids such vagabonds to roam about the country, and suggests that those who have really been guilty of some great and unusual offence may perform their penance better by remaining in one place

The discipline of the church in dealing with sin was now regulated by penitential books. These books were of eastern origin; the earliest of them was drawn up by John, patriarch of Constantinople, the antagonist of Gregory the Great; the first Penitential in the western church was that which is commonly ascribed to Theodore, the Greek archbishop of Canterbury. As the impossibility of fulfilling the requirements of the ancient canons had led to a general evasion or disregard of them, a scheme of commutation was introduced; for example, a certain amount of fasting might be redeemed by the recitation of a prescribed number of psalms. From this the transition was easy to a system of pecuniary commutations—a system recommended by the analogy of the wehr. That institution had been extended from its original character of a composition for life to the case of lesser bodily injuries, so that the loss of a limb, an eye, a finger, or a tooth was to be atoned for by a fixed pecuniary fine; and the principle was now introduced into the penitentials, where offences were rated in a scale both of exercises and of money nearly resembling that of the civil damages. As yet, however, these payments were not regarded as a source of profit to the church, but were to be given to the poor, according to the penitent’s discretion. In England, the rich were able to relieve themselves in their penance by associating with themselves a number of poor persons for the performance of it. By such means it was possible to clear off seven years of penitence within a week; and, although the practice was condemned by the council of Cloveshoo, it was afterwards formally sanctioned.

The necessary effect of the new penitential system was not only to encourage the fatal error of regarding money as an equivalent for sin—an error against which some councils protested in vain, while the language of others seems to countenance it—but to introduce a spirit of petty traffic into the relations of sinners with their God. In opposition to this spirit Gregory III said that canons ought not to lay down exactly the length of time which should be assigned to penance for each offence, forasmuch as that which avails with God is not the measure of time but of sorrow. The council of Châlons denounces the penitential books, of which it says that “the errors are certain and the authors uncertain”; it charges them with “sewing pillows to all arm-holes”, and requires that penance should be restored to the footing of the ancient canons; and there are similar passages in other French councils of the ninth and tenth centuries.

Confession of secret sins was much insisted on; but the priest was regarded rather as an adviser than as a judge, and the form of his absolution was not judicial but precatory. Absolution was usually given immediately after confession, and the prescribed penance was left to be performed afterwards, so that, whereas in earlier ages the penitents had been excluded for a time from the full communion of the church, they now remained in it throughout.

The penalty of excommunication became in the Frankish church much more severe than it had formerly been. The council of Verne lays down that an excommunicate person “must not enter the church, nor partake of food or drink with any Christian; neither may any one receive his gifts, or kiss him, or join with him in prayer, or salute him”. It has been supposed that the new terrors of this sentence were borrowed from the practice of the druids, with a view to controlling the rude converts who would have disregarded a purely spiritual penalty. The power of wielding it must doubtless have added greatly to the influence of the clergy, although this effect did not yet appear so fully as at a later period.

The trial of guilt or innocence by means of a solemn appeal to heaven had been practised among many heathen nations, including those of the north. The Mosaic law had sanctioned it in certain cases; it fell in with the popular appetite for miracles, and the church now for a time took the management of such trials into her own hands. The ordeal, or judgment of God, was not to be resorted to where the guilt of an accused person was clear, but in cases of suspicion, where evidence was wanting or insufficient. The appeal was conducted with great solemnity. The accuser swore to the truth of his charge; the accused (who for three days had been preparing himself by fasting and prayer) asserted his innocence in the same manner; and he was adjured in the most awful terms not to approach the Lord's table if he were conscious of any guilt in the matter which was to be submitted to the Divine judgment. Both parties then communicated; and after this, the clergy anointed the instruments with which the trial was to be made.

The ordeal was of various kinds. That by judicial combat or wager of battle was employed, not only for the discovery of crime but in civil matters, such as disputes relating to the boundaries of property. Otho the Great even resorted to it as a means of determining a legal principle—whether at a man's death the children of a deceased son should share in the inheritance with their surviving uncles. This manner of appeal to the Divine judgment was introduced into the Burgundian law by the Arian king Gundobald, the contemporary of Clovis, against the remonstrances of Avitus, bishop of Vienne. It was not uncommon among the Franks, but appears to have been unknown in England until after the Norman conquest. Persons who were disqualified for undergoing this ordeal by age, sex, bodily weakness, or by the monastic or clerical profession, were allowed to fight by champions, who were usually hired, and were regarded as a disreputable class. In like manner corporations or societies committed their interests to champions. In the trial by hot iron, the accused walked barefoot over heated ploughshares, or (which was the more usual form), he carried a piece of glowing iron in his hand nine times the length of his foot. The foot or the hand (as the case might be) was then bound up and sealed until the third day, when it was examined, and according to its appearance the guilt or innocence of the party was decided. The trial of hot water consisted in plunging the arm into a boiling caldron, and taking out a stone, a ring, or a piece of iron, which was hung at a greater or less depth in proportion to the gravity of the offence in question. That of cold water was performed by throwing the accused into a pond, with a cord attached to him, by which he might be drawn out. If he were laden with weights, sinking was a proof of guilt; if not, it was held to prove his innocence. In the ordeal of the “cross” (which, notwithstanding the name which it acquired, was probably of heathen origin), the accused or his proxy held up the right arm, or both arms y psalms were sung during the trial, and the sinking or trembling of the arms was evidence of guilt. Among other kinds of ordeal were—holding the hand in fire; walking in a thin garment between two burning piles; eating a1 cake, which in England was called the corsned; and receiving the holy Eucharist.

Some of these practices were condemned after a time. Lewis the Pious, after having in 816 prescribed the trial of the cross as a means of deciding between contradictory witnesses, abolished it in the following year, “lest that which hath been glorified by the passion of Christ should through any man's rashness be brought to contempt”. Under the same emperor, the ordeal of cold water was forbidden in 829, although in 824 it had been sanctioned by Eugenius II—the only pope who ever countenanced the system of ordeals. Agobard, archbishop of Lyons, a strenuous opponent of popular superstitions, addressed to Lewis two tracts against the judicial combat. He reflects on the heresy of the Burgundian king who had sanctioned it. He denounces such duels as unchristian, and as involving a breach of charity more important than any good which could be expected from them. He argues that, if truth might be thus ascertained, all judges are superfluous; that the system holds out a premium to brute strength and to perjury; that the idea of its efficacy is contrary to Scripture, since we are there taught to despise the success of this world—since God suffers his saints to be slain, and has allowed believing nations to be overcome by unbelievers and heretics; and he appeals to instances in which the vanity of such trials had been manifested. The ordeal, however, continued to be supported by the popular feeling, and the cause which Agobard had opposed soon after found a powerful champion in Hincmar.

The privilege of asylum in the Germanic kingdoms differed considerably from that which had existed under the Roman empire. It arose out of the ancient national usages; the object of it was not to bestow impunity on the criminal, but to protect him against hasty and irregular vengeance, to secure for him a legal trial, to afford the clergy an opportunity of interceding for him, and, if possible, of mitigating his punishment. The operation of this institution was aided by the system of pecuniary composition for wrongs. The clergy were usually able to stipulate for the safety of the offender’s life and limbs on condition that he should pay a suitable fine, or perhaps that he should submit to a course of penance. Charlemagne in 779 limited the right of sanctuary by enacting that murderers or other capital offenders should not be allowed to take refuge in churches, and that, if they gained admittance, no food should be given to them. According to the ancient Roman idea of asylum, the denial of food would have been an impiety sufficient to draw down some judgment from the patron saint of a church; but it was not inconsistent with the German view. The clergy, however, soon discovered a way of evading this law, by construing it as applicable to impenitent criminals only—i.e. to such as should refuse to confess to the priest and to undergo ecclesiastical penance—a refusal which was not likely to be frequent, where it involved the choice between death by hunger and the forfeiture of sanctuary. The prohibition of food does not appear in later enactments of the reign.

The church could not fail to derive popularity from the power of offering shelter within its precincts against the lawlessness of which the world was then so full. With a view of investing it with such popularity among his new subjects, Charlemagne ordered, in his capitulary for Saxony (A.D. 785), that any person who should take sanctuary should, for the honour of God and His church, be safe in life and limb, and should be unmolested until the next court-day, when he was to be sentenced to make suitable amends for his offence. In legislating for the country after it had been reduced to a more settled state, this privilege was withdrawn, and the church was required to surrender up persons convicted of capital crimes

Among the Anglo-Saxons, the earliest law on the subject of asylum was that of Ina, in 696, which ordered that fugitives guilty of capital crimes should have their life protected by the church, but should be bound to make legal satisfaction; and that delinquents who had "put their hide in peril"—i.e. who had incurred the penalty of whipping—should be forgiven. But the shelter of the church was only to be granted for a certain time. The laws of Alfred (A.D. 877) limit it in some monasteries to three days; but it was afterwards extended, and even in the same laws a longer term is allowed to other places. Persons guilty of murder, treason, or crimes against religion, might ordinarily be dragged even from the altar; but some churches of especial sanctity, among which that of Croyland enjoyed the most extensive immunities, had the right of protecting all fugitives whatever. The effect of such a privilege was probably felt as a serious hindrance to the execution of justice; for when Croyland, after having been laid waste by the Danes, was restored in the reign of Edred by his chancellor Turketul, the aged statesman declined to accept a renewal of its ancient rights of sanctuary.

 

Slavery.

 

Instead of absolutely condemning slavery as an unlawful institution—a course which would probably have introduced anarchy into society, and would have raised a serious hindrance to the progress of the Gospel—the New Testament had been content to prepare the way for its gradual abolition by exhorting both master and slave to the performance of their mutual duties on the ground of their common brotherhood in Christ. And as yet the church aimed only at a mitigation, not at an extinction, of slavery.

Servitude was of two kinds—that of slaves properly so called, and that of the coloni. The slaves were individually liable to removal and sale; they were incapable, under the Roman empire, of contracting a legitimate marriage, and their property belonged to their master. The coloni were regarded as freeborn, so that, unlike slaves, they might become soldiers; they were attached to the land, so that they could not be separated from it, nor could it be sold without them. They were capable of marriage and of possessing property; for the land which they cultivated they paid a fixed rent, generally in kind, and they were subject to the land-tax and to a poll-tax. It would, however, seem difficult to distinguish thoroughly between these classes in the canons which relate to the subject.

The Penitential ascribed to Theodore of Canterbury notes it as a point of difference between the eastern and the western monks, that, while the Latins have slaves, the Greeks have none. The oriental monks themselves performed the labour which was elsewhere devolved on slaves; it was usual for persons entering on the monastic life to emancipate their slaves; and some teachers, as Isidore of Pelusium in the fifth century, and Theodore the Studite in the ninth, altogether questioned, or even denied, the lawfulness of having such property. In the west there are occasional appearances of a like kind. Thus Wilfrid, on getting possession of the isle of Selsey, emancipated all the serfs who were attached to the soil, and Benedict of Aniane, whose ideas were chiefly drawn from the eastern monastic rules, on receiving gifts of land for his monasteries, refused to accept the serfs with it. Somewhat in the same spirit was the enactment of the council of Chalchythe, in 816, that a bishop at his death should liberate such of his English slaves as had been reduced to bondage in his own time. But the usual practice of the west was different. In donations of land to the church, the serfs passed with the soil, as in other transfers. Bishops were restrained by a regard, for the property of their churches from emancipating the serfs who belonged to these; the fourth council of Toledo (A.D. 633) declared such emancipation to be a robbery of the church; it enacted that the next bishop should assert his right over any persons whom his predecessor had thus wrongfully liberated, and that any bishop wishing to emancipate a slave should indemnify the church by providing another in his stead. An earlier council— that of Agde, in 506—had restrained the power of bishops to alienate slaves; and, in a spirit curiously opposed to the oriental principles, it forbade monks to manumit their slaves, “lest they should keep holiday while the monks work”. It was even found that some persons—whether from a reckless spirit of mistaken devotion, or from a calculation of the advantages and disadvantages of the two conditions—voluntarily made over themselves and their descendants in servitude to some church; and for such an act special forms were provided.

Yet with all this the church did very much to abate the evils of slavery. It insisted on the natural equality of men and on the brotherhood of Christians, as motives to kindness towards slaves; and in the treatment of its own dependants it held out an example to lay masters. It threw open its sanctuaries to those who fled from cruelty; it secured their pardon before surrendering them to their owners; it denounced excommunication against any master who should break a promise made to a fugitive slave.

It placed the killing of a slave without judicial authority on the same footing of guilt as the killing of a freeman. It endeavoured to restrain the sale of slaves, by limiting the power which parents among the heathen nations exercised over their own offspring, and by prohibiting that any should be sold to Jews or heathens. It encouraged the redemption of captives, and declared the enfranchisement of slaves to be a work conducive to salvation; and it was through the influence of the church that innumerable masters directed by their wills that their slaves should be set free “for the deliverance of their own souls”. The liberation was often, as under the Roman law, visibly associated with religion by being performed at the altar, where the master resigned his slave to the church, with which the freedman was thenceforth connected by a peculiar tie—he and his descendants paying some slight acknowledgment to it, while, in the failure of posterity, the church was heir to his property.

There was also another way by which the church signally contributed to raise the estimation of the servile classes. As the freemen of the conquering nations were prevented from becoming clergy or monks without the sovereign’s leave, in order that he might not lose their military service, the bishops were obliged to recruit the ranks of their clergy chiefly from the classes which were below the obligation to such serviced The fourth council of Toledo requires that serfs ordained to be clergymen should be emancipated; but it was not until the year 817, in the reign of Lewis the Pious, that a similar law was established in France, although before that time the clergy of servile race had been exempted from servile duties. The serf, when ordained, became capable of rising to honour and power; when promoted beyond the minor orders, he was assessed at a wehr corresponding to that of high secular rank; and this rose with each step to which he was advanced in the hierarchy. The clergy who had thus been raised from a servile condition to dignity and influence felt themselves bound (apart from all religious motives) to labour for the benefit of the class to which they had originally belonged, and a general elevation of that class was the result.

The advancement of persons servilely born to high ecclesiastical station was not, however, unattended by a mixture of bad effects. Thegan, the biographer of Lewis the Pious, gives a very unfavourable representation of such clergy. He tells us that, when they have attained to offices of dignity, the gentleness of their former manners is exchanged for insolence, quarrelsomeness, domineering, and assumption; that they emancipate their relations, and either provide for them by church-preferment or marry them into noble families; and that these upstarts are insufferably insolent to the old nobility. The picture is no doubt coloured both by Thegan’s prejudices as a man of high birth, and by his indignation at the behaviour of some ecclesiastics towards his unfortunate sovereign; but the parallels both of history and of our own experience may assure us of its substantial truth.