by Jack Lindsay
Then there were the men of the order of Grandmont, with constitutions as complicated and harsh as those of the Old English houses had been loose; and the order of the Chartreuse which at this time was made up of two different communities: the hermit monks in small houses round a large cloister, and the lay brethren in a group of buildings half a mile or so distant. The first two Carthusian foundations were in Somerset, and they only slowly expanded. Then came the two orders born of the crusades, the Templars and Hospitallers. The Templars were a military order, and by attempting to fuse warfare and monastic discipline they were doing their best to make a single way of life out of the two most hopelessly opposed ideals of the medieval world, and to provide a religious profession for knights and men-at-arms. The originators of the order were two knights, a Burgundian and Godeffroi from St Omer; with six others they took a vow of chastity, obedience and poverty, and guarded the pilgrim ways to Jerusalem. They drew in excommunicated men (after absolution by the bishop) and thus hoped to discipline what St Bernard called the unruly rabble of ‘rogues and impious men, robbers and committers of sacrilege, murderers, perjurers, and adulterers’, who rushed east in search of loot and rapine. This work was to gain them the privilege of immunity from excommunication by bishop or parish priest; it was also liable to stir the suspicions of the papacy. But the order gained the enthusiastic support of St Bernard of Claivaux, and was sanctioned at the council of Troyes in 1128. Very soon it was richly endowed. Henry I gave it lands in Normandy; Stephen gave it the manors of Cressing and Witham in Essex, his wife that of Cowley near Oxford. Templars were exempted, as defenders of the church, from tithes — finally even from the action of general censures and decrees of the papacy, unless specifically mentioned. Soon they were so arrogant that they rejected all episcopal jurisdiction and formed a separate ecclesiastical organization under the pope as supreme bishop. Within twenty-five years of their foundation they were in open feud with bishops and priests, and the popes had to issue decree after decree to protect the order from violence and spoliation. (In the early fourteenth century Philip IV of France did manage to suppress them in order to grab some of their wealth.) So little then did the attempt to harmonize warfare and a meek monastic spirit succeed.
The Hospitallers were formed to help, receive, and heal pilgrims. They too became rich rapidly. Both they and the Templars set up centres for recruitment and for the exploitation of their estates and collection of revenues. But apart from the London Temple and the priory of St John at Clerkenwell the preceptories and commanderies strewn about England were small and had little significance on the religious side. Far more socially important were the quasi-religious bodies, the groups of sisters or brethren (or both) who staffed the hospitals that sprang up in the twelfth century, and who often followed some rule. Before 1066 there seems to have been nothing resembling a hospital, except perhaps in a few monasteries set in towns. The urban growth of the twelfth century, the considerable expansion of trade and of travel, the threat of new diseases, or what were thought to be new diseases, such as leprosy, created an urgent need for such institutions, which acted often as hospice, clinic, and almshouse. The experiences gained by crusaders and pilgrims in the east helped both to spread the idea and to provide forms of organization. However crude the methods, the very existence of such institutions was a great step forward.
By the end of the century the energies which had been released in and through the new orders were growing stale. More than six hundred houses of monks and canons were flourishing; they had taken over a considerable proportion of the land and potential wealth of England. The stage was set for new orders, which would be better suited to deal with a society that was developing more and more centres of urban population. These new orders were the Friars, Preachers and Minor — later called the Dominicans, the Black Friars, and the Franciscans, the Grey Friars. Now the monks were to yield to the friars the direction and development of theological thought, and so of the emerging universities.[458]
One more point, small in itself but with important repercussions: the monks, as part of their superior collective organization, had led the way in cleanliness. Anglo-Norman kings had a bath at least three times a year, before the great courts; at other times the ewerer, aquarius, who prepared the bath, was paid 4d for his extra duty. John, who bathed twice in 1212, and had a bath at Pentecost, only paid 4d for the two baths; but he took twelve between January and November 1209, and eleven in the next six months. Hot water was carried in jugs to a tub. The ewerer also dried the king’s clothes when they got wet; but we find no reference to their being washed until under John we meet Florence the laundress, who, like other humble household servants, received 18d for shoes. The monastic tradition was against washing; Gregory the Great, following St Benedict, thought baths should seldom be indulged in by the healthy and especially not by the young. But monks were expected to wash their hands before and after meals; and many houses supplied soap and warm water three or four times a year for a bath. The head was shaved every third week and feet washed on Saturdays. In the twelfth century the priory of Christchurch had a good water supply, with settling tanks to purify, a vent to control pressure, pipes connected with the main rooms, and running water to flush the latrines (which normally were mere cesspits). Each cell at the London Charterhouse had its own water tapped from near springs at Islington. By the thirteenth century many towns had learned the lesson and had relatively efficient water supplies.[459]
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A few points about the rich developments in culture during these years may be made here. Monastic libraries were much extended. Lanfranc and Anselm were learned men. They looked back mainly to early medieval ideas, but could not help being affected by the new currents, as we see for example in the Similitudines in which the monk Alexander wrote down an account of Anselm’s conversation. Henry of Blois exemplified quite a different kind of churchman, with a wide and restless range of interests which reflect the opening up of new horizons in the twelfth century. A capable politician and a prince of the church, he was not limited to feudal ambitions as, say, Odo of Bayeux had been. In some respects he was more concerned with art than with canon law — though when he became papal legate, he used his powers to fight his own brother. He suggests the ecclesiastical prince of the Renaissance rather than the monastic magnate of the eleventh century. While intriguing in Rome in the years 1149-50, he bought ancient statues and brought them back to Winchester. None survives, but an inventory of his gifts to the cathedral show how widely he collected works of art: gospel books, crosses, frontals, carpets, embroidered tapestries, reliquaries, a font of carved Tournai marble and copper plaques, products of English, French, Flemish, Roman and Moslem styles.
There was also a strain in religious expression which broke through the more formal theology of the past and stressed a sense of emotional immediacy in worship, the total identification of the self with Christ which illuminated the deep patterns of human growth, involvement and change. Such attitudes largely threw off the old urge to self-abasement before beings of supernal power. Abelard typified this aspect of the century, which was also to be found in England. Thus, it seems sure that the most outstanding utterance of Cistercian piety, the long and ardent hymn of meditation on the name of Jesus, Dulcis Jesu memoria, was composed in England. ‘This piece, which sums up in a few lines what Cîteaux meant for countless nameless people, has an English as well as a Cistercian context, and belongs to a strain of piety discernible in England from the school of Anselm to Richard Rolle’ (Southern).[460]
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The land was not yet divided up into parishes normally comprising the territory of a single village, or pair of villages, each served by a parish priest. The process had been going on for centuries, but was still far from complete. Sometimes churchmen as well as laymen built a church, and some of the evidence derives from disputes about the rights of the mother church. The local church was still rated low in importance next to the cathedral or abbey; and in view of the high estimat
ion of monks, it was common for two parts of the tithe to be transferred to an abbey, one part being left for the incumbent; and besides abbeys, by xenodochia, the sick and the pilgrim might make claims on the grounds that contributions were primarily owed to the clerical militia. ‘The church may hold what it possessed in common with the poor; how much more with those poor [the monks] who have left their own possessions and bearing Christ’s cross not by compulsion, are following the Poor Christ.’[461] Monks thus became professional alms-takers. The early Cistercians, however, reacted against this attitude and attacked the Cluniacs and Benedictines for claiming parts of tithes. About 1160 the abbot of Darley and Lichfield in the Coventry diocese was recognized as a dean over all the churches of the abbey in Derbyshire; he was empowered to hold a decanal council of their secular clergy to stop anyone demanding more than the customary dues. In England the council of Westminster in 1102 declared: ‘That monks do not accept churches without the bishop’s consent nor rob the revenues of those which are given them so that the priests who serve them lack that which they need for themselves and their churches.’ In 1122 the Lateran council forbade monks to take the office of parish priest; they should have their churches served by vicars. Pope Alexander III in 1179 forbade the archbishop and chapter of York to detract from the due income of the clergy serving their churches, and ordered all monks of the Canterbury diocese to present fit priests to their churches; he also wrote to the bishop of Norwich that no vicar was to appoint a substitute to perform the duties of his benefice. Honorius III declared that vicars should be forced to reside on their benefice and become priests, under penalty of losing the profits. We see that secular clerks were non-resident rectors as well as monks. John of Salisbury in the twelfth century declared:
Those who live, not to say luxuriate (as the people reckon) on the altar, don’t want to be burdened with the priesthood or to serve the altar, but have introduced parsonages, the burdens of which belong by law to one man and the emoluments to another. And though the apostle says, ‘He who works not neither shall he eat’ (II Thess. 2), yet he who deserves less gets more, and enters on burdensome and outside labours.
In a decretal letter of 1199 to the archbishop of Canterbury, Innocent III protested against the usage by which the laity gave two thirds or the whole of tithes to other institutions, not to their own parish church; he required the archbishop to annul all pensions recently imposed on parish churches of his province, contrary to the canons. Canon 32 of the Lateran council of 1215 was the magna carta of the parish priest:
A vicious custom that must be extirpated has grown up in certain parts, where patrons of parish churches, and certain other persons claiming the profits for themselves leave to the priests deputed to the service of them, such a scanty portion that from it they cannot be suitably sustained. For as we have learned for certain, there are some regions where the parish priests have for their sustenation only the fourth of a fourth, to wit, the sixteenth part of the tithes; whence it comes that in those regions scarce any parish priest can be found who is even moderately well-educated. Since therefore the altar should live of the altar: we have ordained that by a certain custom of the bishop or patron, not withstanding any other, a sufficient portion be assigned for the priest.[462]
This canon was often ignored, misinterpreted or misapplied, yet stood as the basis of the vicarage system. The perpetual vicar, instituted by the bishop and removable only by force of judicial procedure, with a separate endowment of his own, was the typical vicar of the system; even to resign a benefice without special permission was difficult. The bishops, if friendly, now had a strong weapon with which to defend the parish church against usurpations and attempt to raise it from the lowly status to which it had so long been submitted.
The abuse most generally attacked in twelfth-century councils was the inadequate service given by untrained clerks whom the monks hired. There were often grants of tithes that did not amount to the whole proceeds of a church, but which were confirmed by bishops to the monasteries as yearly pensions, e.g. of half, one, two, three or four marks, four shillings, a pound of wax or of pepper. When there was a vacancy, there was liable to be a dispute as to who got the revenues, the bishop or the monks; the monks of Evesham transcribed in the cartulary a bull to the archbishop of Canterbury, which stated that churches belonging to monastic houses were never vacant and that till parson or vicar was instituted the monks got all the fruits. The monks thus had a temptation to leave churches vacant; and churches granted to cathedral chapters were used as prebends for the canons. We can find few genuine examples of vicarages in the twelfth century; the system seems to have grown in the early thirteenth century and then rapidly expanded. In 1204 the bishop of Ely sent Innocent III, a good lawyer, a number of queries about the relations of monks and bishops. The preponderance of English examples among the decretal letters of Alexander III and Lucius III shows that canon law as a whole had only recently been absorbed in England and regarded as universally valid. The monks greatly resented the extension of the vicarage system. Matthew Paris, speaking for the abbey of St Albans, called the bishop of Lincoln the ‘persecutor of the monks and the hammer of the canons and the religious’, because of his zeal for the vicars. The Liber Antiquus, compiled about the same time, records nearly three hundred cases of vicarage ordinations in churches of monasteries and of absentee rectors; and that was not all. Thus, in October 1220 Hugh of Lincoln visited Dunstable priory and ordained vicars in five of its churches. In 1222 the Council of Oxford took up the cause of the parish priests and laid down rules by which the bishops might carry on the struggle; but even so there was still a hard fight ahead.
Norman lords detached peasants from demesne work and its obligations, and set them to collect tithes; such men were granted lands and churches, even foreign abbeys and alien priories. Walter de Lacy, who died in 1081, gave or bequeathed to St Peter’s church in Hereford, which he had founded, two thirds of the tithe and a villanus in each of ten villages. The man granted with a tithe was at times called a hospes; and it has been suggested that the name derived from his function of acting as host and entertaining monks as they travelled round to collect rents. One deed of 1177-87 seems to support the idea; but there is no proof that even here, at Harlton, the hospes was originally given for such a purpose. The Longueville monks, who held the grant, had begun to lease out their tithes, so they no longer needed a peasant tithe-collector. In Normandy a hospes in a town might be a man obliged to provide his lord with lodgings, among other duties; but the term was simply used for tenant. In Normandy and elsewhere on the continent it meant a settler: hospites were men brought in from outside, generally in groups, and given lodging, especially on newly cleared land or land waiting to be cleared. In Normandy they had all sorts of odd duties, such as catching fish.[463]
In England tithe grants were often made without any mention of peasants, and no doubt there was often no such transfer; but at the same time there were probably many more tithe-collecting villeins than we can trace. The peasant put in a role of authority had risen in the world and grown independent of the village community. The lord or abbey to which he was responsible might be far off; and he would have to go over the demesne arable at harvest time, undeterred by bailiff or farmer, to see that one sheaf in ten was taken out and (where the usual system operated) to ensure that the parish priest got only a third of the seized sheafs. He might have had to deal with tithes of livestock as well. Such an agent would hardly have been popular with his fellows, and he would have had chances of enriching himself. In the records we find these peasant agents owning two virgates or perhaps one and a half (land for one ox); the rustics granted to Hurley were to have eight acres each, but others have only five and there are bordars with only two.
Domesday shows Suffolk and Huntingdonshire well supplied with churches, but we cannot check if other areas were on the same footing. We would expect the ‘free men’ and sokemen of Lincolnshire and East Anglia to judge communal needs and control resources
for building churches in villages, while in more manorialized areas the thegn, lord of several vills, might build a church only on his chief site of residence. But Huntingdonshire had very few liberi homines or sokemen in 1086, and we do not find here the subdivisions of rights in village churches we would expect if men had clubbed together to build them. Certainly it is odd to find an unusual number of churches in areas that had suffered from heathen attacks — more than in the counties south of the Thames and west of Watling Street. We can only assume that Domesday scribes used differing principles for various parts. In Cornwall they seem interested only in collegiate churches; but clearly there must have been churches at the seven places named after Celtic saints, the twenty-four starting with lan-, the one that starts with eglos-, and the one that ends with -circa.[464]
Domesday is confusing also about the priests. Sixty churches in Surrey are mentioned with no reference to priests; now and then we meet a priest serving two villages or a church with two priests; a manor may be cited with two priests but no church. In such cases we may be dealing with the remnant of a collegiate minster, or one of the priests may be the landowner who did no duty in the church. Once in Leicestershire parson and curate seem to appear. Tithes are rarely mentioned; only for Suffolk (and to a lesser extent for Norfolk) do we learn much about the parson’s glebe, which tends to fall into the general pattern of peasant holdings. These churchlands are similar to the holdings of the villeins, but a fair amount are humbler, akin to those of bordars or cottars. One, however, at Long Melford was an estate comparable to a small manor. Elsewhere village churches seem rather better endowed, though there are many variations and a tendency for the churchland to approximate to some regular agrarian unit. We have no way of estimating what dues came in from plough alms, burial fees, and the like. At times even a resident incumbent might have to pay rent for his glebe to a lord or a monastery. Churches were often linked with mills as a source of manorial profit; we find property in a church divided like that of a mill in the same manor. Though a parson occasionally had a glebe approximating to a small manor, in general the priest was reckoned as a member of the peasant community; often, but for dues, he would have been on the lower levels. A rare example of independence appears at Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire, where Aisculf the priest gave up his holding of inland and joined with four other peasant tenants to make up the whole manor, apart from woodland, to farm, on a twenty years’ lease, with a rent of 100s.[465]