by Jack Lindsay
Historians have tended to underestimate the significance and importance of the kindreds. Because they impinged on the king’s peace only in the bloodfeud, they have been treated as if they existed simply to deal with murders of their members. But the solidarity expressed in the feud could only come into existence and continue to exist from quite other causes. The feud was, so to speak, the outward expression of what arose internally from fraternal and co-operative activities; its strength gives the measure of the inner bonds which it sought to protect and avenge.
Notions of commendation and wergild or ransom are embedded deeply in early medieval theology. It was held that Christ’s death was a ransom-payment that ended the devil’s rights over mankind. Anselm argued instead that God by his mercy united himself with mankind through Christ, who, sinless, gave God back much more than was due; so men were saved by identifying themselves with Christ. The Penitentials were based on the idea that a wronged person (God) had to be satisfied (paid) by some form of compensation as in secular law; so they categorized sins and allotted the appropriate penalty. Abelard began a revolution in religious thought by rejecting the concept of a ransom and arguing that the self-giving love of Christ must evoke a corresponding love.[264]
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In considering the early medieval period we must never forget that the essential life of the church lay in the monasteries. In England, despite the triumph of the Roman over the Celtic church, and the attempts of men like Benedict Biscop and Wilfred of Ripon, the Benedictine rule had never been firmly established and the regulations in the monasteries, in so far as they functioned at all, were very diverse. Still, there was the dominant idea that one could live in a truly Christian way only under a system enjoying celibacy, rejection of private property, and communal living with work, meditation and prayer. Celtic monasticism had been a direct growth out of tribal systems, with the abbot as the main official and the bishop of minor importance. The abbot indeed was often the tribal chief or a close relation of his; and the monastery was thus an effort to recreate tribal fraternity on a new level, without any of the elements that had broken the earlier unity. Though English monasticism did not formally carry on the Celtic system, something of the fundamental idea survived in it. (We may compare the ways in which Celtic and feudal ideas merged in Breton knighthood. ‘When a monastic recorder styles a man Miles quidam Daniel Eudoni mattiern (mactiern),’ says Stenton, ‘the French knight and the Celtic chief are brought into close association.’) After the breakdown partly caused by the Norse invasions, it was some time before a new life could be breathed into the reconstituted church. There was no sign of the Cluniac spirit of reform. On the contrary: in 944 King Edmund gave the abbey of Bath to monks of St Bertin who had come as refugees from the discipline of Gerard of Brogne.[265]
However, the second half of the tenth century was on the whole a period of peace and stabilization; and there was a revival in the church, of Benedictine monasticism (The Black Monks), mainly in the south and the eastern midlands, under Eadwig (955-9) and Edgar (959-75). The climax came in 973 when Edgar was crowned at Bath; the ritual included not only the coronation, but also a solemn anointing and a form of coronation oath. The delay in the ceremony was not without its point; Edgar had now reached the age of thirty, the minimum canonical age for ordination to the priesthood. At the close of the rite mass was celebrated and the king was enthroned in company with the archbishops of Canterbury and York. In thus enhancing the priestly role of the king, the church was also celebrating its own revival, its triumphant part in the theocratic state.[266]
Dunstan had been the main agent in these changes. He had been a monk at Fleury on the Loire and knew well what was involved in the Cluniac reforms. Influences from Fleury had been active in England before him through Oda, archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 958 and had been a monk at Fleury, and who sent his nephew Oswald to the same monastery. But it was Dunstan who brought the new forces fully into play in England. Born about 909 near Glastonbury Abbey, he was educated there, and through powerful family connections in both church and state he soon rose in the world, joining the household of his uncle, archbishop of Canterbury, and winning the intimacy of the Wessex kings. About 936 he became a monk and some four years later was made abbot of Glastonbury by King Edmund; he worked there for some fifteen years, reforming its system, refusing to allow entry to married men, and insisting on the use of a common refectory and dormitory. King Edred made him his chief adviser, so that when the king died he was driven into exile by a jealous group of Wessex magnates. When Edgar succeeded to the throne, he returned. Edgar approved of his ideas and appointed him in turn to the sees of Worcester, London and Canterbury (960).
Aethelwold, after staying at Fleury, was in fact the man who did the most zealous work for monastic reform. Bishop of Winchester in 963, he set himself to rebuild monasticism in the south Danelaw; and among the houses which he reorganized were Peterborough, Thorney and Ely. A regular system of services was ensured by the Regularis Concordia which he drew up with aid from Cluny and Lorraine, and which was authorized by a royal council at Winchester. The strong monastic trend appeared in the arrangement that tended to bring cathedrals under the control and government of monks, as at Winchester and Worcester, and by about 1000, at Canterbury, Sherborne and elsewhere. At Worcester, however, Oswald did not abolish the secular clergy but set a community of monks beside them. The systems of cathedral organization thus remained varied and confused till after 1066, indeed till the end of the twelfth century. In some cathedrals, to which the secular clergy were attached, the latter were brought together in a community or chapter of canons under a dean.[267]
The main trend was thus to exalt the monks afresh at the expense of the secular clergy, though Dunstan seems to have been concerned with the church as a whole, convoking ecclesiastical councils of his province, trying to get decayed churches rebuilt, and discouraging (with little effect) the marriage of country priests. He, like Oswald (bishop of Worcester 961, archbishop of York 972), preached regularly; and Oswald, a careful administrator of church lands, also made frequent visitations throughout his dioceses. But though the development of what we may call the church-in-the-world was not wholly neglected, it is notable that all the leaders of reform were monks and that monks filled the sees, including the metropolitan ones, for many years. The rebuilding of schools and the revival of literature was also the work of the monks at Glastonbury, Winchester and Canterbury. Book decoration reached such a high level that it influenced continental scriptoria; the so called Winchester style was a local creation with its acanthus leaf scrolls as initial letters and its outline drawings. The artists developed fine animated patterns out of the old designs, figures with craned necks and fluttering drapes; the style, agitated, expressive, yet controlled, spoke of new energies trembling on the edge of liberation. At Worcester a splendid organ was installed about 980.[268] The peasant priest of the parish seemed an almost negligible part of the church, though the bishops had prestige as magnates. It was the monks who were the ‘religious’, the true followers of Christ.
After Edgar came an odd episode of anti-monastic reaction, with strong popular support. A monk writer, Oswald’s biographer, admits that the monks were ejected with ‘the counsel of the people and the noisy support of the vulgar’; in those days, ‘if one of the ignoble vulgar caught sight of a man in our habit, he yelled out as if he’d glimpsed a wolf among sheep’. The outburst was made possible by the confused situation after Edgar’s death, when Edward and Aethelred (then a child) disputed the succession, and conflicts broke out between the two most powerful men of the realm, Aelfhere of Mercia and Aethelwine of East Anglia. Aethelwine supported Dunstan, who had backed Edward, and Aelfhere expelled the monks from houses founded largely by Dunstan and his associates. But behind the political cleavages there were many social grievances over Edgar’s policies. It seems sure that during the period of decay in the eighth century the properties of the monasteries had often been swallowed up by the royal f
isc, as at Abingdon and Ely, or taken over by lay lords; the houses that survived, with the possible exception of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, were occupied by clerks; and clerks did all they could to resist the reforms which entailed the return of the monks. When Edgar restored to Winchester the parts of the great Taunton estate that had fallen into his hands, he ‘commanded every one of his thegns who had any land on the estate that they should hold it in conformity with the bishop’s wish, or else give it up’. What the bishop wished, we have no idea. Even the intervention of Queen Aelfthryth merely gained for one of the thegns a life interest in the estate; after the death of the thegn and his wife, ‘the land should go to Taunton, with produce and with men, just as it stood. And with great difficulty we two brought matters to this conclusion.’ When monastic lands had come into the hands of lay lords, they seem to have been simply confiscated for the monks’ benefit. Thus Edgar restored to Malmesbury two estates which had been ‘unjustly’ held by the ‘contentious Adelnoth’, and the Gesta Pontificum tells how the king ordered an inquiry into the former possessions of Chertsey to discover what lands had fallen into lay hands, so that they might be recovered. We find Edgar violently dispossessing magnates so as to return the land to the monks, and we can imagine how lesser holders were treated. Later pleas against the monastery of Ely declared that lands had passed to it by forceful dispossession of the holders. Many lawsuits occurred (as the records of Ely and Ramsey show) on the grounds that monasteries had persuaded pious layfolk to make gifts or grants of land and so had alienated the kinsmen of the grantors; and it seems clear that the Ely monks took advantage of the embarrassments of smaller landholders in their area.[269]
There was more than piety in Edgar’s policy. The monasteries as landholders in close dependence on the crown made for cohesion in the body politic; by strengthening them Edgar was seeking to offset the growing power of the great ealdormen. (The Chroniclers of the time even refer to the earldoms as regna, kingdoms.) We may compare with Edgar’s policy that of the kings of Germany in the same century; they ‘bound the churches of the realm to themselves by the immunity and thus acquired a new means of unifying the realm’ (Barraclough). We see that England, though free from the endless petty anarchy of somewhere like Normandy, had its own problems of keeping a balance between the central power and the regions, and that in this matter its affinities were with the Germanic area.[270]
By 1066 there were forty monasteries and twelve nunneries. As the English church was rudimentary in its institutions, the monks had provided most of the bishops for over a century; they were the source of all religious and historical literature, and of most religious art; with their wide estates, jurisdictional immunities and treasures, they played an important part in economic and administrative life. Self-contained and self-governed, they owed allegiance to no prelate outside their walls, to no community (apart from the post-1066 Cluniacs). They often housed a number of children, ranging from infants to adolescents, who had been brought in by parents who wanted them educated. Some, ‘offered to God’, became monks; indeed recruitment in the tenth and eleventh centuries was largely from such young folk.
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If then the monks were the respected and dominant element in the church, what of the parish priest? The position here was complicated by the claims of the local lord.[271] On the basis of Mosaic law, tithes had been demanded since the fifth century when Ambrose and others identified bishop, priest and deacon with highpriest, priest and levite of the older dispensation. Gradually parishes grew up inside dioceses (modelled on the Roman administrative framework), and parish tithes were seen as the normal endowment of a parish church. Not that such a humble person as the priest could hope to get the whole of such a contribution. A papal letter of 494 (later called a decretal) divided the tithe into four parts, to be shared among bishop, ministering priest, the poor and the church fabric. This scheme was brought to England by St Augustine and applied to parochial as well as episcopal churches; then the bishops dropped out and a triadic system appeared. But the situation grew confused when the lay lords claimed a dominium over parish priests. The church tried to whittle the claim down and after long struggles a compromise left the patronage to the lord as a piece of property, but (in theory) denied his other rights over the church. Assertions of lay control, however, went on right to the end of the Middle Ages. The parish was usually part of the lord’s domain. No doubt in some areas he set up the church in place of a pagan temple and held power over it as he had over the latter; the glebe was then a legacy from heathen days, to which Christian tithes were added.[272]
Till about 1000 the power of the local lord over the parish was hardly challenged; but it is not clear how far the lord took the tithes or controlled their use by others. There was thus a tendency to deprive tithes of religious significance, and by the eleventh century in England their payment was enforced by king’s law. When lay lords granted tithes to monasteries, they were doubtless arrogating the right; they looked on the priests as their men and assumed they had the right to give away their fees when the offices fell vacant. We know more of the way that monks singly or corporately took over parish churches on the continent; but things must have been the same in England, where the boundaries of manor and parish tended to coincide.[273] But boundaries must at times have been unclear; Wulfstan in the eleventh century forbade one priest to lure away another’s parishioner with his tithe and dues.
The rites most coveted by the priest were baptism, confession and burial; if he performed them he got a source of revenue and the local folk had the least trouble. Most lords drew revenue from their churches; the value that Domesday assigned to the larger churches was the rent taken by the feudal superior. To the commissioners a church was merely a bit of property, differing in no significant way from other estates or valuable buildings; all were subject to lords who expected to get a profit from them. But their economic and tenurial variety was considerable. The lord had the right to appoint the priest; the bishop had the right to investigate a candidate’s suitability, but we know of no case where a lord’s man was turned down. To interfere with rights of patronage was a serious matter in a world where all persons of property depended on them. At times a new lord tried to throw a priest out and install his own man; but this was against canon law. The king normally treated churches like any other dominical estate; they provided similar services and revenues. No doubt he also owned demesne manors with small churches. Most lords drew revenues from churches; clerical estate-owners enjoyed both transferred royal rights and revenues, and ecclesiastical ones. When an estate was booked to a church, feorm and other customs went to the beneficiary; so bishop or monastery drew feorm or its commutation from the churches thus owned. What was the benefice’s value to the incumbent is not clear, nor who paid the amount to the bishop. Later it was the parson and the payment was known as a pension. If he himself served, he was the church’s rector; if he was an absentee or not in priestly orders, he put in a vicar. Even in the thirteenth century there could be confusion between a rector burdened with a pension and a vicar farming the church for an owner.[274]
Monasteries were the worst and most callous exploiters. Churches were often made over to them as gifts, as well as some minsters in totality. A few grantors tried to safeguard the tenures of the priests; but on monastic estates priests and churches were liable to fade out. There seems to have been a clear policy of taking individual endowments into monasteries and of repressing lesser churches. The East Anglian houses, greedy for land, no doubt wanted to exploit their churches as capably as they did their agricultural holdings, but they found local customs hard to break or get around. In this region priests were more likely to be freemen or sokemen than villeins. Cathedral chapters, if monastic, behaved as badly as did the monasteries, unless the bishop, wanting to have churches available for his clerics, prevented them. The easiest way for a monastery to exploit a church was to rackrent it to a farmer (in practice not unlike a parson). Unless monks or canons themselves serv
ed a church, they had to put in a vicar and share the proceeds with him. That meant they usually took the tithes (or the greater tithes, those from corn) and left other payments and dues to the priest in charge as altalage.[275]
One argument, attacked by reformers, was that the church building could be considered apart from the altar. The abbot of Fleury wrote:
There is another grave error by which the Altar is said to belong to the bishop and the Church to a certain other lord; since from the consecrated house and altar is made a certain thing called a church, as a man consists of body and soul. See, most just princes, whither avarice leads us, while charity grows cold.[276]
Important in the English system were the minsters. Mynster comes from monasterium; and many ancient parish churches certainly represented early monasteries which had disappeared. Such monasteries were no doubt missionary centres, as we know Breedon in Leicestershire was. But we must also recall that in the eighth century and later the term monasterium could be used of a church served by a group of clergy sharing a communal life. Thus the larger parish churches came to be called minsters. The earliest parishes seem to have been wide districts served by clergy from the bishop’s familia, who were grouped round a central church. At one time there seems to have been one of these mother churches for each hundred or set of hundreds, which was in turn connected with a royal tun or vill. Well endowed, their parochial rights often reached out over a large area.[277] Many had now been alienated by the crown, especially to monasteries proper. At Elstead we see how a minster could be broken up to reward royal clients and give pickings for an earl. The early system had been confused or destroyed by the intrusion of many small churches set up by bishops, abbots, lesser nobles, even groups of freemen, for private estates or newly colonized areas. So we find the old minster parishes based on hundreds together with new church parishes based on manors or vills. But the first set was given fresh strength by the advent of rural deaneries in the twelfth century. Gifts made to minsters show the regard people kept for them; even in Domesday some minsters held all their rights intact. But generally they were archaic and decaying by 1066. Vainly they tried to assert a paramount right to baptism, and royal laws protected their claim to church-scot and tithe. On the continent, however, the filching of rights from old baptismal churches by lords had gone much further.[278]