The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  The priests were almost all of English stock, though no doubt in time there were Norman priests. William of Malmesbury called the Anglo-Saxon clergy illiterate or semi-illiterate; and the same was true of the cleric rustici throughout the Norman period. They were given to tippling. But there were also men like Brichtric of Haselbury, Somersetshire, who, according to John of Ford’s Life of Wulfric, was a simple pietist who painfully felt how dumb he was before the French-speaking bishop and archdeacon. He married Godia whom we meet sewing a linen alb for the anchorite Wulfric; their son Osbern, who succeeded him, was probably not married as he generally slept in the church.

  It was perhaps an expression of the slow rise in the status of the ministering priest that in the twelfth century there came in the custom of giving the laity only the bread in communion, while the priest alone drank the wine from the chalice. The practice widened the gap between layman and priest, though in theory the consecration made the bread and wine each into the flesh and blood of Christ, so that one was concomitant with the other. However, the change may rather have reflected the way in which the church as a whole was separating itself from the secular world and asserting its superiority.

  England had a tradition of monastic preaching at least as far back as Bede, and such oratory flourished under Cluniac and Cistercian revivals. Joscelyn depicts abbot Samson in the twelfth century setting up his pulpit in the abbey of St Edmund’s and addressing the layfolk ‘in the Norfolk tongue’. But he also remarks, ‘How can a man who is unlettered deliver a sermon in chapter or to the people on feast days?’ Bishops, seen as the successors of the apostles, were considered to possess the sole power to grant the right to preach — and that only in their own dioceses. There are many objections to anyone except the learned clergy preaching. Even by 1281 there was extreme doubt about the capacity of a village priest to preach or teach, as we see from the synodal decree of archbishop Peckham:

  The ignorance of the priests casteth the people into the ditch of error; and the folly or unlearnedness of the clergy, who are bidden to teach the faithful concerning the catholic faith, doth sometimes tend rather to error than to sound doctrine.

  Still each priest over a flock should ‘personally or by deputy’ expound four times a year on one or more solemn days

  in the vulgar tongue, without any fantastic texture of subtlety, the 14 articles of the faith, the 10 commandments, the 2 evangelical precepts of charity, the 7 works of mercy, the 7 deadly sins with their progeny, the 7 chief virtues, and the 7 sacraments of grace.[466]

  English nunneries had been few and mainly aristocratic; and though a few were added after 1066, there was no real change until the foundation of a new order, a wholly English creation though the rule was Benedictine. The founder, Gilbert of Sempringham, deserves a few words. He gives us a glimpse of the more humane sort of men in this brutal world: men who sought to find some way out of the impasse without a total surrender to monastic or eremetic seclusion. He was the son of a small Norman knight (who in Domesday held land in some half dozen Lincolnshire villages) and an Englishwoman of lower rank. As a boy he had some deformity: perhaps the reason why he was given a clerkly education. He progressed slowly at home, then went to France where he won ‘the name and degree of a master’. Back home, he taught country children, boys and girls. We are told that he ‘checked them from freedom of jesting and roaming, compelled them according to the statutes of monasteries to be silent in church, to sleep all at the same time (as if in a dormitory), and talk and read only in appointed places’. His father at last provided him with the livings of Sempringham and West Torrington to be held in plurality. The young rector was not yet in priestly orders, and had a chaplain with him at Sempringham. Perhaps he put a chaplain or vicar into the other church. Lodging in the village, he was attracted by his host’s daughter; so he fled and lived with his chaplain, perhaps at first taking only enough from the villagers to live on, giving all he could spare to the poor and turning the parsonage into an almshouse. Ordained priest, he was offered an archdeaconry, but returned to Sempringham, where he set up a nunnery for seven village girls by the church. He thus started off an order, the only English one, to which his name was attached. When he died in 1189, the order had thirteen houses, of which four were of regular canons, and the rest primarily nunneries. We hear that if any Sempringham people went into another church, they were recognized by their devout manner. When a parishioner failed to pay tithes, Gilbert had all his corn taken from the barn while the man counted out the correct number of the sheaves; these sheaves were then burned on the village green, since what was stolen from God was unfit for human use. There were many tales of cures through an old stocking he wore, the cup he drank from and the bread he blessed. His prayers brought about opportune weather changes or halted a fire in London before it reached his lodgings.[467]

  Gilbert, who was an excellent organizer, had added lay sisters to the nuns; later lay brothers were added on the Cistercian system, as were the Cistercian Uses for the exploitation of the nuns’ property, and finally an institute of canons with the rule of Augustine. In the end he reluctantly joined the order himself as its Master; his elaborate constitutions were aimed at preventing any scandals in the double establishment of nuns and canons, where the two families dwelt each round its own cloister and a wall divided the choir between the sexes. The houses were mainly in Lincolnshire, with extensions into the north-east midlands and south Yorkshire, and a few scattered elsewhere.

  There was another double order, that of Fontevrault, which was more aristocratic, with its main house at Amesbury, but it had much less appeal. During the twelfth century the Cistercians and Premonstratensians, against their original intentions, were forced to allow communities of women to use their customs, under chaplains of their order. Also Augustinian canonesses appeared and settled in many houses, multiplying throughout the thirteenth century. We see then that women had intruded far more into religious life than before 1066, though they had a subordinate position to that of the monks and did not play the active roles that came in from the fifteenth century — teaching, nursing and doing works of charity. Also, in the absence of strict enclosure, they enjoyed a certain amount of freedom.

  Revulsion from the corruptions and cruelties of the world more often led to withdrawal than to educational work such as that of Gilbert. A striking example was the Wulfric of Haselbury, whom we mentioned above. He was a man of middling station, who must have had some education, since later he copied out books. Ordained before he reached the canonical age, he was priest of a Wiltshire village, Deverill, where he spent most of his time with hawk and hound. He was converted by meeting a beggar who guessed correctly the amount of money (two silver pennies and a half penny) in his purse and who blessed Wulfric for giving him alms and foretold his future. Invited to be parish priest at his native place, Compton Martin, he suffered at having to dine in the lord’s hall, so went to Haselbury, a village belonging to the same lord near the southern borders of Somersetshire, and spent the rest of his life there as an anchorite in a cell by the church. Giving himself up to extreme mortification, he was famed throughout England for his prophetic and miraculous powers. Henry I and Stephen visited him, and St Bernard asked for his prayers. One day he emerged from his cell into the midst of the congregation and narrated how his sleep had been broken by a sexually exciting dream (which could be considered as inflicted on him by the devil). Once he cursed a mouse for nibbling his clothes; the mouse fell dead and ‘by its death gave glory to God and peace to the saint’. But Wulfric felt remorse, sent for the priest, and confessed. The priest said that he wished Wulfric could curse all the mice of the district.[468]

  Anchorites passed all their life in cells, with the sanction of the local bishop. Hermits, however, were solitaries who might stay in an enclosure or roam about, like Peter the Hermit preaching the crusades or Richard Rolle of Hampole (about 1349); they were generally males, at times hard workers, building or maintaining roads and bridges, cultivating wast
eland, helping lost travellers, collecting alms for good causes, preaching and holding services in their little chapels. Recluses were often females, as we find by a study of the names. They communicated with the world only through a small window. ‘Recluses dwell under the eaves of a church,’ says the Ancren Riwle, ‘so as to understand that they ought to be of a life so holy that all holy church may lean and rest upon them, and for this reason is an ancre called an ancre, and anchored under a church, as an anchor under a ship to hold the ship.’ Ancre is in fact from the Greek anachorein, to withdraw. Before 1066 England had recluses and hermits; thus in 890 abbot Hartmuot was immured in four walls, with a small opening, for good, and we have a Regula Solitariorum by the presbyter Grimlaic, probably of the late ninth century. But the period with most recluses was about 1225-1400. Two later works on the theme were De Vita Eremetica by Ailred, abbot of Rievaulx (mid-twelfth century) compiled at his sister’s request; and the Ancren Riwle, written in Middle English, apparently about 1200-25, for three sisters who in the ‘bloom of life’ took to solitude. But there was no authoritative book of rules. Probably the arrangements depended on the discretion of the bishop’s deputy at the examination or enclosure of the postulant, the control exercised by chaplain, confessor or parish priest, and the recluse’s character. Grimlaic says that youth was no obstacle. Stress was laid on the stillness of life. Ailred forbade beggars. ‘Let not the poor clamour’ around the cell. ‘The orphan wail, the widow lament...When they know they’ll get nothing they’ll soon be off, tired out.’ The Riwle says that any morsel which can be spared should be sent out secretly to the poor. But though the recluses were expected to work hard to escape the lures of lust — making their own dresses, praying and reading, especially praying — the commonest charge against them was that they gossiped. Kindred spirits visited them and they even seem to have carried on the entertainment of guests outside. Later we find them with child. At Pontefract an anchoress went out for a yearly pilgrimage. Grimlac thought it permissable for her to address a gathering from her window, outside or in the church.

  Some recluses lived in a church, at times over the porch, or in a cell built up against the outer wall; some dwelt in the churchyard; others in or near busy thoroughfares of towns, or scattered in the countryside, by highways and near bridges. The cell might be a single room or have several compartments with a garden. The Riwle mentions as a transgression: ‘I went to [the] play in the churchyard.’ Most recluses were of the upper or wealthy classes, and were helpless unless someone looked after them. There had to be at least one servant to attend and cook for them. The sisters of the Riwle had two maidens and an occasional kitchen boy. Julian of Norwich had two servants of her own. It is hard to see how they had any solitude at all; indeed the Riwle goes so far as to say, ‘Who has more facility to commit wickedness than the false ancre?’ They could take fees or gifts from persons consulting them. At times anchorages were supported by endowments; and later came bequests to recluses. The Exeter ceremony treated the postulant as dying (to the world) with the office of extreme unction and a suggestion that the cell was heaven; the antiphon, ‘May angels escort you to paradise’, was sung as the woman went to her cell.[469]

  At least to some extent the recluses of the Anglo-Norman period seem to have been withdrawing from an alien world that repelled them. Thus Christina of Markyate, born near the end of the eleventh century and dying about 1150, had to repel an attempt at seduction by Flambard when bishop of Durham; his mistress was her maternal aunt. Like most of these recluses she was of Anglo-Saxon descent; her father was one of the submerged native landowners, who combined a moderate landed wealth with commercial interests and town properties. She and her friends were patronized by powerful men and felt the hostility of their own kindred; we can understand how a sense of guilt and revulsion took the form of becoming an anchoress.[470]

  We may then summarize by saying that the Norman period saw both a closer integration of the church into the state and the creation of powers in the church which were certain to lead to deepened conflicts between the two — especially when we realize that at the same time the papacy was rapidly developing its own catholic organization and its demands for independence from state controls. The growth of the parish system meant that in due time the priest, not the monk, would become the typical representative of religious self-dedication. This growth was linked with the increase in state organization as well as with the detachment of the bishop from the monastic system, since the monasteries were no longer the recruiting ground for the episcopacy or the centres of erudition. The advent of the friars left the old kinds of monasteries more and more out of the main picture, since it was they who played the main role in the universities and in missionary work among the new urban populations. The friars may thus be said to represent the transition from the monk to the priest as the key representative of the church, and to foreshadow the day when the role of the Christian would be seen to lie in his capacity to function in the world — with the Protestant conscience and direct relation to God as the final concomitant of such a role, disrupting the catholic church and its all-pervading claims. The Cistercians also represented something of a halfway house from the old monasticism to the new concept of religion in the world; they dropped alike the primitive monastic concept of a group of men living simply by their own work, and the parasitic concept of a group living on its granted or bequeathed estates; they introduced the idea of a group increasing its assets and income by economic development and exploitation. The increase of recluses we may take as a minor by-product of the dislocations we have been analysing, a by-product in which, despite the apparently greater immolation of the self, there was in fact a new wilful and self-assertive element, very different from the spirit that in the early eighth century drove Guthlac, of royal lineage, into the fens, where he saw devils in all sorts of animal forms and one night devils talking like Britons — ‘at a time when the Britons, the troublesome enemy of the Saxon race, were invading and harrying the English’.[471]

  Chapter Thirteen – County, Town, Trade

  We have already looked at the countryside, but mainly from the angle of tenures. Domesday worked on the assumption that the land was divided up into estates of a manorial kind. The inquisition was meant to be made hundred by hundred, with each village finding a priest, a reeve or six villeins to provide the evidence. The name of the place was given as that of the manor, which was held by a lord. The manor was normally made up of two main sections. There was the lord’s demesne: the homefarm, often small in size and generally composed of a number of strips scattered about the manor. The primary duty of the tenants was to cultivate the demesne. Administration was centred in the manor house, with steward and bailiffs directing the staff and cooperating with the reeve who represented the tenants; arrangements and regulations as to agricultural duties were made at the manorial court, which also saw that they were performed. Secondly, there were the dependent holdings of peasants with ploughs of their own. The peasants comprised liberi homines (free men) and sokemen, villeins, cottars, and servi or slaves. The first group was less closely linked with the demesne and owned property that needed to be separately considered.

  The sokemen were small landowners who acknowledged a lord’s soc (the term is Danish); in return for his protection they paid him dues which had come to be identified with rents in kind or money, or light labour services. But the lord was not lord of their land; they paid any taxes on it direct to the king. Domesday has some references to the obligations of sokemen and liberi homines, escort, guarding and carrying services owed (or once owed) to king or sheriff, and it mentions small payments due if these services were not required. Now and then the men are said to render money payments; but the reasons are obscure, since even when the sums are clearly related to the area at which the land was assessed, the figures vary a great deal. But serfdom was the essential basis of the manorial system; the manor was the means found most effective for managing an estate through compulsory labour service. I
t was the agricultural unit, largely self-sufficient, which brought together the exacting lord and the peasant producers in a way that enabled the lord to obtain both services and surplus. Villein was a term brought in by the Normans; Domesday seems to use it for the dependent peasants who had a share in the field system, while using cottar for those who lacked such a share and provided an indispensable reserve labour force for agricultural and other needs.[472]

  Domesday also aimed at recording woods, meadows, pasturages, mills and fisheries. But the neat pattern did not fit. The Norman concept of the manor was, as we saw, the result of a remarkable effort of abstraction. Domesday itself gives much evidence of the artificial nature of the construct. Liberi homines have been ‘added’ to this or that manor in King William’s time. A demesne team is at times shown to be an intruder by the fact that without it the peasants’ teams exactly equal in number both the carucates at which the land is assessed and the estimated ‘teamlands’. Further, there are many examples of fair-sized manors formed by the combination of small properties, which in fact must have differed little from the holdings of substantial sokemen and were probably called manors only because of the thegnly rank of their holders.[473] Apart from Domesday we have to rely for evidence about the countryside mainly on manorial records, which by their nature deal only with manors and which come only from part of the midlands and southern districts — in addition they largely derive from the conservative and rather static estates of ecclesiastics.