Church and People in the Medieval West, 900-1200

Sarah Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317325321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

During the middle ages, belief in God was the single more important principle for every person, and the all-powerful church was the most important institution. It is impossible to understand the medieval world without understanding the religious vision of the time, and this new textbook offers an approach which explores the meaning of this in day-to-day life, as well as the theory behind it.

Church and People in the Medieval West gets to the root of belief in the Middle Ages, covering topics including pastoral reform, popular religion, monasticism, heresy and much more, throughout the central middle ages from 900-1200.

Suitable for undergraduate courses in medieval history, and those returning to or approaching the subject for the first time.

chapter 1

Introduction

Rejoice, O Mother Church! Exult in glory!
The risen Saviour shines upon you.
Let this place resound with joy,
echoing the mighty song of all God’s people!¹

Since the seventh century this verse has been sung at the beginning of the liturgical celebrations for Easter as part of the Exultet hymn. It avows that the Church is made up of all God’s people, and that they all participate in the celebration of Easter, the most important feast in the Christian calendar. But at the same time as the text calls on everyone to celebrate Christ’s resurrection, we need to note that the singing of this hymn was reserved to a single member of the clergy, the deacon. On the one hand, clergy recognised that the laity played an important part in the rites of the Church, and on the other they preserved a monopoly over their conduct. It articulates one of the paradoxes of the Church’s relationship with the laity, which was at once all embracing and exclusive. It thus makes a fitting start to a text in which I explore the various ways in which the institutional Church related to the peoples of Western Europe in the years between c. 900 and c. 1200. In doing so I will seek to reinterpret the ways in which Christianity was experienced by ordinary men and women, and to redefine the nature of the relationships between members of the clergy and the laity across three hundred years.

The focus on these three centuries is a reflection of the fundamental significance historians of western society attribute to the central Middle Ages.² The religious developments which are the subject of this text took place in a world of changing political, social and economic circumstances. The differences between the Latin world of the early tenth century and that of the early thirteenth century are marked. The collapse of the ninthcentury Carolingian polity in which members of a single family ruled much of Western Europe was followed by one in which authority in many areas became more localised. Some scholars, particularly those who work on the regions which are now France and Italy, believe a further socio-political change, the ‘feudal transformation’, took place in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries as the authority of the monarch became weakened and usurped by local lords with much smaller spheres of influence.³ Royal law courts ceased to be held in the localities, and instead the jurisdiction of local lords held sway. Local lords took the opportunity to increase the taxes and other dues demanded of their tenants, and the less powerful lost the opportunity to appeal to a higher authority against such demands; consequently a diminution in the rights and incomes of the less well-off accompanied these changes amongst the ruling elite. The poor and less powerful became even poorer and less powerful. The picture is somewhat different elsewhere in Europe. In the Germanic lands of east Frankia royal power continued to be strong throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries, but overlay that of very powerful regional lords. Although the Carolingians never directly ruled the kingdoms which came, in the course of the tenth century, to make up England, its Church and people had come within their sphere of influence, with exchanges of texts and personnel as well as political alliances. Here too royal power grew over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries at the same time as that of local lords. In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries a growth in the powers of royal and papal governments at the expense of local secular and ecclesiastical autonomies followed these developments. Demographic and economic change accompanied this socio-political transformation: populations grew, the number of towns mushroomed, the level of trade increased, and the amount of land under cultivation, both within and on the periphery of the heartlands of ninth-century Europe, expanded. Peoples moved out from the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of early medieval Christian Europe in modern day France, northern Italy, the Low Countries, Switzerland, much of Germany and Austria, and England into the newly Christianised areas to the east, in Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, to the north in Scandinavia, and to the south in Spain, Sicily and Palestine; at the same time the peoples living in those areas adopted the culture of the heartlands. All these areas came under the nominal control of the Church of Rome. It is this wider area which comprises the medieval west of this text’s title. Its main focus, however, will centre on developments in Europe’s heartlands, in France, Germany, Italy and England, and on placing them in their broader context.

Of the great religious and ecclesiastical changes unfolding between the end of the ninth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, three in particular are worth highlighting here. They are the papal reform movement, the growth in monastic foundations, and the explosion in the popularity of pilgrimage and the cult of the saints. The first factor, and one of the most famous, if contentious, features of the central Middle Ages is the radical renegotiation of the relationship between secular and spiritual authority sought by the ecclesiastical reformers of the eleventh century, the so-called ‘Gregorian’ (after Pope Gregory VII (1073–85)) or papal reforms. Churchmen sought the independence of ecclesiastical personnel and institutions from lay authority, accompanied by attempts to define the clergy as a group separated from the laity with their own codes of dress and behaviour as well as law. This ideological revolution has conventionally been set against wider socio-political developments. Some scholars interpret it as the result of the growth in the authority of both secular and ecclesiastical rulers, kings and popes, whilst others view it as a consequence of the wider social transformation which resulted in an increased emphasis upon defining the different roles played by nobility and peasants, men and women, clerics and lay people.⁴

Secondly, the establishment of a very large number of new religious institutions transformed the European landscape.⁵ These new ecclesiastical establishments are a product of demographic and political change which altered how and where peasants lived, leading to the establishment of new villages, changes in the location of centres of power, the emergence of powerful local lords, and the establishment of new centres of authority. Numerous local churches were founded in rural settlements, next to manor houses, and in the burgeoning towns; numerous abbeys were established in both existing settlements, and in areas newly opened up to cultivation; new cathedrals were set up to reflect changes in lordship and settlement patterns and the opening up of new areas on the periphery of Europe. Many of these buildings were built or rebuilt in stone, and some still survive today. They are a testament to the investment made by, and demanded of, Christians living at the time; their very existence is a product of the increase in overall wealth.

Finally, against this background of a greater economic prosperity increasing numbers of the laity, drawn from all social levels, began to develop and explore their own religious autonomy within a Christian framework.⁶ There are increasing numbers of records of ordinary Christians flocking to the shrines of individual saints, travelling to local and more distant shrines in search of intercession. The cult of the saints had long played an important role in Christian life, but new movements also accompanied this growth of lay piety. This period saw the evolution of the idea of crusading, that is, travelling to fight on behalf of Christianity for the atonement of personal sins. At the same time the adoption of a way of life based on that of Christ’s apostles became increasingly popular. Imitating the life of Christ’s apostles as described in the New Testament, men (and occasionally women) chose to follow a life of voluntary poverty whilst living in community, but with a strong emphasis on Christian mission and charity: preaching, and looking after the sick and vulnerable in hospitals. Some scholars have linked the widespread support for those following the apostolic life to the increasing wealth of society in this period: prosperity generated widespread anxiety about salvation and antipathy towards the dominant values of this world.⁷ Recognising the continual interplay between ecclesiastical and religious change, on the one hand, and social and political transformation on the other, is one of the most important developments in recent scholarship, and will be a central premise of this text.

Both the start and end dates of this study represent significant moments when various of these factors came together at what are regarded as key changes in the secular and spiritual spheres. It begins around 900 with the implosion of the Carolingian polity of the ninth century.⁸ The Carolingians’ rule had been marked by a great concern with Christian education, and had produced a considerable body of writings intended to ensure that the practices of both the clergy and the laity conformed to the Christian teachings of the Bible and the Church Fathers. The evidence of surviving episcopal legislation and liturgical and legal collections shows how they set out to train local priests in Christian doctrine and the correct delivery of Christian rites, and admonished them to educate and minister to their own lay flocks so that they lived their lives according to a Christian framework.⁹ The Carolingians’ successors in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe inherited this bold programme to educate all those living under their rule in Christian doctrine and practice. In this text I will explore the afterlife of the Carolingians’ pastoral ambitions. One of the questions I will consider is how far the churchmen of the tenth and eleventh centuries took up and used the writings of their ninth-century predecessors. How influential were these ideals, composed in a time when rulers and churchmen worked together to promote pastoral care, in the more politically fragmented worlds of the tenth and eleventh centuries?

The text ends in the early thirteenth century with the Fourth Lateran Council held in Rome in November 1215. The most widely attended of all the Church councils held in the medieval west, it is a testament to the successful realisation of the pope’s claims to authority over the clergy of the western Church, and the separation of clerical from lay authority. The seventy-one decrees published at its conclusion are thus a product of a very different time to the writings produced by the Carolingian Church, and reflect the growing independence of the Church as a political body.¹⁰ Yet the agenda they set out has much in common with that of ninth-century churchmen. Fourth Lateran prescribed a programme to educate and train local priests, and thus their lay flocks, in Christian discipline and doctrine with the aim of ensuring a minimum level of observance of Christian knowledge and practice amongst all those living in Western Europe. The ways in which local bishops working with the new mendicant clergy, the friars, quickly set out to implement this programme across the medieval west have been described as a pastoral revolution.¹¹ The investigation of its earlier roots thus draws on, and emerges from, tracing the aftermath of the Carolingian reforms and is another of the central aims of this text.

Moreover, thirteenth-century churchmen, like their ninth-century counterparts, were not particularly ambitious. They were content to try to ensure that Christian practice was followed and the authority of Church doctrine accepted. They were not especially concerned to investigate the extent to which people believed, or did not believe, the tene...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Publisher's acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• part 1 Churches, churchmen and people
• part 2 People and churches
• part 3 Church and people
• Glossary
• Bibliography of primary works
• Bibliography of primary works
• Index