The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  He emphasizes his point by describing Lanfranc as his vassal. He resisted the threat to depose the latter and defeated the pope on the Rouen issue despite the withholding of papal authorization of his nominee for the see; and through his opposition the papal decree against lay investiture, which had precipitated the crisis of 1074 in the German empire, did not reach England till the end of the century. By 1081 Gregory had to give way: his legates were told to restore the Norman bishops who had been suspended after William prevented them from attending a council. Gregory summed up, making the best of a bad job:

  The king of England, though in certain respects he is not as scrupulous about religion as we could wish, still shows himself to be more acceptable than other kings in this: that he neither wastes nor sells the churches of God, that he causes peace and justice to prevail among his subjects, that when he was asked by certain enemies of the cross of Christ to enter into a plot against the apostolic see he refused his consent and that he bound priests by oath to dismiss their wives and laymen to give up the tithes they were withholding. So it is not unfitting that his power should be dealt with more leniently and that out of respect for his upright conduct the shortcomings of his subjects and his favourites should be borne with indulgence.

  Eadmer set out what he saw as William’s innovations. They were all concerned with centralizing church authority in his own hands and preventing the pope from gaining any direct relation with the English church. No pope was to be recognized in England without royal authority; all papal letters must pass through the king’s hands; the primate could issue synodal decrees only after the king approved them, and he could not issue any in the king’s absence; no baron or servant of the king could be excommunicated or proceeded against by a bishop, even when publicly defamed for incest, adultery or any other capital crime, unless the king ordered it; no papal legate could enter England without the king’s invitation; bishops could enter or leave his dominions only with his assent; no appeals were to be made by the church courts to the papal curia without his permission. For the moment there was no great churchman in England who wanted to challenge such rules, and the papacy could not attack them until it had settled the investiture conflict with the emperor.

  The situation changed under Rufus, not because his ideas were different from William’s but because his methods were harsher and more arbitrary. He squeezed the church for money to pay his mercenaries and he made profits out of ecclesiastical estates by delaying the appointment of new prelates. Eadmer describes the situation as the church saw it:

  [After Lanfranc’s death] soon, not to mention other wrongs he committed, he laid hands upon the very Mother of the whole of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of the adjacent isles, that is, upon the Church of Canterbury; and all that rightfully belonged to her within and without he by his agents ordered to be listed and, having estimated what was needed for the bare subsistence of the monks who served God there, all the rest he ordered to be taken into his own hands or let out at rent. In this way he put the Church of Christ up for sale, granting the right of lordship over it in preference to all others to whoever to the church’s detriment outbid his rival in the price he offered. With miserable regularity the price was yearly renewed. For the king would not allow any bargain to be made for a term certain, but he who promised more ousted him who offered less, unless perhaps the former bidder, littering his first bargain be set aside, increased his bid up to the offer of his rival.

  Moreover, you might see daily all the most odious of men, without any respect for the religion of God’s servants, engaged in exacting the king’s moneys, making their way through the precincts of the monastery with grim and threatening looks, giving orders on all sides, uttering threats, displaying to the utmost their dominance and power. What scandals, disputes, and disorders arose...[451]

  Archbishop Anselm, though not very different in his attitudes from Lanfranc, could not but protest. Rufus replied, ‘Are not the abbeys mine? You do as you like with your manors and shall I not do as I like with my abbeys?’ Thus the beginnings of a deep conflict with the papacy appeared, though neither side was ready for some time to push things to a full clash.

  Henry I carried on much the same policy as Rufus and William, but with the more controlled methods of the latter. A compromise was arrived at between king and pope after Anselm had been exiled a second time. ‘The pope,’ says Eadmer, ‘while standing fast on the sentence promulgated on that matter [investitures], had allowed homages, which pope Urban had prohibited equally with investitures, and had by that concession brought the king to agree with him on the investiture question.’ Stephen, we saw, through his insecure position, was driven to make unprecedented concessions to the church. Henry II hoped to turn back the tide by working with Becket as William had done with Lanfranc, but misjudged both the man and the times. Becket, on fleeing to France, widened his protest; the original argument over the powers of church courts turned into a claim to the full freedom of the English church to obey papal laws. On Becket’s murder the claim was half won: Henry allowed appeals to Rome and new extra-territorial jurisdiction was instituted in England.

  But in fact a much wider series of conflicts had been opened up than the direct one between crown and church: conflicts that were to have repercussions in all spheres of medieval life. First we must note that the Hildebrandine reforms, aimed at strengthening the papacy and extending its organizational controls, were not at all identical with the aims of the monastic or Cluniac movement, which were to exalt the monastic ideal and find grandiose means of expressing it. In some respects the Cluniacs preferred the theocratic system to the Hildebrandine stress on the supremacy of the pope. And indeed a wide resistance was stimulated throughout the church, which had effects in the secular world and on political theory. The lesser clergy objected, and the bishops argued that Gregory had usurped powers of legislation and powers of determining doctrine, which belonged only to general councils; he had thus lapsed into heresy and was no true pope. Then the cardinals, who had gained a strong position through the reform movement, which gave them the right to nominate the pope, wanted to extend their powers to include the right to judge all bishops. The lesser cardinal clergy were not consulted by Gregory on the investiture issue; they reacted by proclaiming that supreme power was vested, not in the pope alone, but in the pope together with the college of cardinals. Finally came the protesters who noted that, in calling on the populace to abandon corrupt priests, Gregory was in effect stimulating secular forces. The German bishops in an edict of deposition directed against him declared, ‘Through you all administration of ecclesiastical affairs has been handed over to the madness of the people.’ Bishops had lost their powers; discord had been ‘stirred up through terrible factions’ and ‘spread with raging madness through all the churches of Italy, Germany, Gaul, and Spain’. (It was a long time, however, before the full results of the appeals to the people became apparent — though the new ferment did in time lead to the ideas of men like Marsillio of Padua and William of Ockham: that complete sovereignty in both state and church lay with the commons.) The position of the schismatic cardinals had further ramifications; for Gregory’s attempt to turn Augustine’s mystical concept of the Congregation of the Faithful into the basis for a power system led to the general relating of the various church levels to feudal hierarchies, with each group, from pope and cardinals down to the lesser clergy and the laity, possessing its own rights and dues that could not be infringed.[452]

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  Though 1066 brought in some sort of a diocesan secretariat and the church court, it was some time before there was much advance on the rough and ready system previously existing; the bishop and his household clerks did most of the work. By mid-twelfth century, secretariat and archives were better organized; but administration was still not much regularized and a great deal depended on the personal and direct activity of a bishop or his clerks, who were often able and cultivated men, later to become bishops or curialists themselves. At Canterbu
ry the familia had an unusual character, since the monastic chapter carried out some of the duties of the see’s regular officials; but from York and Chichester we see the same close association of bishop and clerks in an unformalized way. The decisive change came after the Lateran Council. Wider and more clear-cut duties emerged, with the application of the new developments in canon law; professional lawyers and secretaries appeared, bringing an end to the old kind of freelance literary man, half scholar, half ecclesiastic, such as Peter of Blois and John of Salisbury.

  The new set of officials varied from diocese to diocese, and from time to time; there was not a full crystallization till the fourteenth century. Though the officials were still called the bishop’s clerks, they could act as his council and executive, and they had clearly defined spheres of action.[453]

  Occasionally we catch a glimpse of a bishop in his daily life. Wulfstan worked a miracle while at one of his episcopal manors, where he was consuming food rents on the spot. In one of his vills he had a cell or humble dwelling where he retired to study or contemplate, but he built no halls in his vills. Instead he restored village churches. We see that it was usual for a bishop to spend much time on his manors; what was unusual here was Wulfstan’s asceticism. In the next generation we meet very different churchmen. Roger of Salisbury built so lavishly that William of Malmesbury doubted if his successors could maintain the edifices. Lanfranc built many houses in his vills, and Anselm seems to have lodged in one of them while deliberating whether to accept his see. Some monastic leases laid down that the grantee was to provide lodging and hospitality when an abbot was in the neighbourhood; such systems went back to Anglo-Saxon days.[454]

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  The monasteries of the Black Monks continued to be self-governing. They lay mainly in Sussex, the Fens and the Severn valley, with some nine hundred monks in all. In Domesday their revenues amounted to almost a sixth of the kingdom’s (£11,066). Incomes varied however, from Ely with £768 to Horton in Somerset with £12. Of the nine nunneries, Wilton and Shaftesbury were the richest; they at this time expanded through the influx of ladies in distress. Nuns and monks came from the ruling class of landowners, and abbots were men of the highest rank. The monasteries were centres of wealth and political influence as well as nurseries of future leading churchmen. The last thing that monks or nuns normally did was any manual work. Far back, St Maur, who had been Benedict’s pupil, remarked that since monasteries had become well endowed, monks no longer needed to work like labourers. The original idea of withdrawing — throwing off the entire network of subjections to power and money, property and possessive emotions — was thus not merely perverted: it was turned upside down, since the monks became parasites dependent on endowments and estates. Reformers kept on over the centuries trying to revive the old rule of manual labour, but their effects were always short-lived. Apart from a talented few who were devoted to illuminating manuscripts and similar work, it had become exceptional well before 1300 for a monk to work at a craft, let alone in the fields. Later, accounts rolls show that they could not even shave themselves; they had long since given up any idea of working in a kitchen or mowing the cloister garth. They kept accumulating private property, apart from the corporate property of the monastery, though just before and after 1200 popes decreed that a monk found at his death to have owned things should be buried in a dunghill in token of his damnation. To escape the interdiction of meat, monks built a chamber halfway between refectory and infirmary, where they ate meat and still claimed that it was banished from the refectory; such a room was often called a misericord.

  The Normans disliked the independence and laxity of the English houses, and wanted to bring the abbeys and their estates into the feudal structure. The houses founded in Normandy under William were certainly not outside ducal control. Now the sometimes unruly English houses were subdued under Norman abbots. Many Normans were selected for the office, from such houses as Fécamp, Jumièges, Mont St Michel and Caen; Bec wielded great influence through Lanfranc; but no attempt was made, as under Edgar, to develop uniformity of observances. The rebuilding of monasteries, which often involved destruction of hallowed edifices linked with revered saints, must have deepened the gulf between Norman abbot and English monks. A side effect was to drive out the most devout, who then made new foundations. Monks from Evesham and Winchester moved north in 1074; they or their recruits refounded or created Jarrow, Wearmouth, Tynemouth, Whitby and Melrose. Houses were relatively sparse in the north, and it was at Fountains that the new White Monks, the Cistercians, made their first English foundation in 1132.[455]

  There was little legislation about monks. Lanfranc’s constitutions for Christ Church, Canterbury, were not meant for general use but were copied. They drew on the customs of several continental houses, modifying them to suit English conditions, but they differed little from the Regularis Concordia of a century earlier. Monks still kept the highest prestige in the church. It had long been held that only a very few persons would be saved, and that that few would doubtless be monks. Anselm said that heaven would more likely be inhabited by monks than by secular priests or laymen. The idea of a middle state between heaven and hell, Purgatory, seems to have been first elaborated in the writings of Gregory the Great. It was useful to the church, as it alleviated the pessimistic view that handed heaven over to a handful of monks and ascetics; it brought the mass of mankind into the scheme, in a chastened but not wholly hopeless position, in which they would surely be ready and eager to pay for masses and prayers on behalf of the dead, and to give land and property to the church. St Hugh of Flavigny set out the graded hierarchy of blessed and sinful when he said that at the Last Judgment hermits and monks would come immediately after the apostles and saints, followed by the bishops, priests, and laity.[456]

  The growing prestige and administrative importance of the bishops was reflected in a premature effort, recorded by Eadmer, on the part of the bishops who had been clerks, to break the links between cathedral and priory; the Normans with their drive for clear-cut definitions seem to have disliked the system of some of the reformed minsters, where the clergy were not distinctly monks or secular priests.

  Urged by the same desire, engaging in a like attempt, with one consent and accord, the bishops who were not bound to the monastic order began to exert themselves to root out the monks at any rate from the primate’s see of Canterbury, thinking that if this were done, they’d have very little trouble in turning out others elsewhere...The king and other princes of the realm had been won over to this view, but Lanfranc opposed it.

  At the cathedrals the bishops set up individual houses and prebends for the canons, and in time installed the system of dean, treasurer, precentor and chancellor.

  Monasteries, with their often scattered estates, had stewards who went round to collect produce and rents. The office rose in importance and often became hereditary; for its holders, who had little direct control over them when they worked in distant districts, were able to extend their own profits. The Cluniac houses developed a system of deans who administered properties, sometimes with stewards, sometimes without; and at times small groups of monks were sent to perform the rites on an estate church and live on part of the income. A good example of the monastic dean is provided by the activities of Osbert of Lewes priory, resident in Norfolk about 1170. Inefficiency and a weakening of controls resulted, with a breakdown of Cluniac economy in the twelfth century. The Cistercian movement thus did not merely represent a refurbishing of pieties; it also revealed the need for a more workable system of monastic economies, with increased centralization and (where sheep were brought in) a ruthless depopulation of an abbey’s lands. But though the Cistercians were keen on good estate management and on sheep-farming, the monks did not do the manual work. Thus, Walter Daniel tells of Ailred of Rievaulx (1147-67) that he doubled all things in it: ‘monks, conversi, laymen, farms, lands, and every kind of equipment’, so that when he died there were 1140 monks and 500 conversi and laymen’.[457]


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  For a century and a half after 1066 the invasion of England by monks from the continent went on. We have noted some of the orders in our narrative, but we need now to consider them in more detail. First came the monks from Normandy. Some were picked men, sent to govern existing houses; others were colonizers for new foundations such as Chester (Bec) and Battle (Marmoutier), or were put in to strengthen existing communities or their daughter houses, Canterbury, Rochester and Colchester. Yet others went into the small priories or cells, of which by 1200 there were at least two hundred. Lesser lords established them in a castle or near a hall, or where owners of churches felt that monks would be more edifying than a married peasant priest. But often their religious duties were few or non-existent, and their main task was to channel wealth out of England. Hence their common name, Alien Priories, and the way they later fell victims to the rising national emotions of the Hundred Years War.

  Lanfranc, Father of Monks, was always ready with counsel. Foremost of the new orders were the Cluniacs. William of Warenne founded a house at Lewes, and they branched out into a number of houses directly or indirectly connected with the Burgundian mother house. Most of them were small and remained outside the general life of the land, free from feudal dependence on the king. However at Lewes, Thetford, and Much Wenlock they carried on the rich liturgical traditions of their order. After the monks came the Austin or Black Canons, based on the brief Rule of St Augustine and bringing the customs of some important church of Flanders or north France. They too were taken up by the landowners, but they concentrated on their liturgical offices in their semi-monastic groups with little concern for apostolic work. The Cistercians, the White Monks, were very different, with an austere programme of following the Rule of St Benedict ad apicem litterae, to the last letter. They began in Yorkshire, but spread over England and then Wales, as they were ready to tackle wastelands and remote districts. They aimed at clearing woodland, draining marshes, and introducing crops of flocks into wild places; they recruited cottars and small freeholders as lay brethren; and they thus acted as a powerful economic force in a period when concerted and informed efforts to advance productivity on the land were badly lacking. After them came the White Canons or Premonstratensians, who developed from apostolic preachers into a semi-monastic order with a Cistercian type of drive, gathering their flocks in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.