1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (23 page)

England was well provided with churches: there were some 9000 parish churches with at least as many chapels situated in new suburbs and markets, or on the private property of the powerful, as well as in less populated parts of the countryside. The clergy were everywhere. As many as one in every twenty adult males was a clerk. Most clerks, however, were not intended for the priesthood or anything like it. A clerk was a man – there were no women clerks – with a tonsure; that is, the crown of his head had been shaved. He was also expected to renounce beard and moustache, colourful clothes, weapons and visits to taverns. He was expected to have some education. It was their clerical education that meant that clerks could act as administrators and secretaries, which is what most of them did. Very few became priests. Many were not ‘ordained’ at all, and many others took only ‘minor orders’, which meant that they stayed on the lower rungs of the clerical hierarchy, as cantors, doorkeepers, and lectors. They were allowed to marry. Marriage was forbidden only for those in major orders, subdeacons, deacons and priests.

By 1215 the English Church had been thoroughly organised. At the top of the hierarchy were the two archbishops of Canterbury and York, and below them their bishops. New bishoprics had been established at Ely in 1108 and Carlisle in 1133, but since then there had been no changes in diocesan structure – and there would be no more until the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Each cathedral had its own chapter, either of monks, as at Canterbury and Winchester, or – more commonly – of canons, each holding a portion of the cathedral’s revenues as his own individual stipend, known as a prebend. Valuable prebends became highly desirable objects of patronage and were often held by men who preferred to remain close to centres of power – the royal court, for example – and who certainly had no intention of performing cathedral services themselves. The usual arrangement was for non-resident canons to employ vicars choral to do their singing for them.

In the years since 1000 a whole new network of archdeaconries had been set up in each diocese. Archdeacons were responsible for enforcing moral standards on both lay and clergy; not surprisingly they were often deeply unpopular. No archdeacon, it was alleged, would ever get to heaven. Below the archdeaconries came the rural deaneries and within them the parishes. The parish system, a kind of administrative grid covering the whole country, had hardly existed at all in 1000 and was still being built up in 1215. There was now a network of ecclesiastical courts in which the Church’s own law, canon law, was applied with increasing precision and subtlety. The system required resources and bureaucrats to run it; there was plenty of work for clerks here. Critics said the Church was ruled not so much by law as by lawyers.

In England there were around seven hundred religious houses catering for about thirteen thousand men and women who had taken vows, roughly three times as many men as women. Since there were approximately six hundred houses for men and only a hundred for women it is evident that a male-dominated society made much better provision for men. Both monks and nuns had taken a vow to dedicate themselves to God by living a life of prayer, poverty, chastity and obedience to their head of their house, abbot, abbess, prior or prioress. They were there, as they saw it, not just to save their own souls, but also to fight for the spiritual welfare of the whole kingdom, and especially for those who had founded or endowed their community. As one twelfth-century monk put it:

As trained and dedicated soldiers of Christ, the monks and nuns in every house chanted each day the full cycle of prayer, the monastic office: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline.

Monks and nuns may have given up sex – though, inevitably, there were a few notorious exceptions – but it sometimes seemed as though they had given up no other pleasures or comforts. Although their vow of poverty meant that they were supposed to have no property of their own, they lived in property-owning communities. In a rich monastery they were poor in name only. Since the Benedictine houses were the most ancient and had accumulated vast estates, Benedictine monks tended to live like rich landowners, even keeping horses and going hunting with hawks and hounds. They acquired a reputation for gluttony. Gerald de Barri claimed that when he visited the cathedral monastery of Christ Church at Canterbury he saw that for lunch (the main meal of the day) the monks were served sixteen dishes, one after the other. On the basis of fifteenth-century monastic kitchen accounts, the earliest to survive, it has been calculated that the monks of Westminster Abbey were allowed two pounds of meat on a meat day, up to two pounds of fish on a fish day, plus a daily ration of two pounds of bread and a gallon of ale. Wine was reserved for the sick and for feast days – of which there were a hundred or so in the year.

The meat allowance is especially revealing. According to the Rule of St Benedict, the flesh of quadrupeds was not allowed in the monks’ refectory (the dining room). Hence the classic monastic diet consisted of poultry, fish, eggs, cereal and vegetables. But by the twelfth century the word ‘meat’ had been interpreted to mean fresh meat cut from the joint, while entrails, offal and meat that had been salted or precooked, were regarded not as meat but ‘meatish’. Hence bacon, fritters (using precooked meat) and ‘umbles’ (sheep’s entrails cooked in ale and breadcrumbs, the origin of the phrase ‘humble pie’) were all allowed. Moreover since the Rule banned eating meat in the refectory, close analysis of the text revealed a loophole. Plainly it was permissible to eat whatever you liked in some other room, just so long as there were enough monks eating in the refectory to maintain the sense of a community observing the Rule. Special dining rooms known as misericords were provided.

In some houses the monks’ interest in food and drink threatened to become an obsession. At Bury, when a fire damaged the shrine of St Edmund, causing pilgrims to put off visiting it, Abbot Samson blamed the disaster on the sinfulness of his monks, and especially, he said, their constant complaints about the quality and quantity of food and drink. When he suggested they cut back on food to save money to repair the shrine, the monks decided that, since he was a saint, Edmund could perfectly well restore his own shrine without their help.

Some monks reacted to their fellows’ lax ways and sought a less comfortable way of life. They abandoned their old Benedictine communities and either joined a group of hermits or set up new monasteries. One new monastery, at Citeaux in Burgundy, became the well-spring of a new order, the Cistercians, who saw themselves as the only true followers of the Rule of Benedict. In every way they aimed at a more austere lifestyle in less luxurious accommodation. They gave up the linen underwear and black woollen top garment (or ‘habit’) of the Benedictines, the Black Monks, and wore nothing but an undyed woollen habit. They became known as the White Monks. To avoid collecting rents from their estates, they farmed them themselves – or rather, they took in people much poorer than the gentrified Benedictines would accept, and allowed them to take the vow and wear the habit in return for working as ploughmen, shepherds and carpenters. These ‘lay brothers’ lived in separate buildings. According to a chronicler from the first Cistercian house founded in England, Waverley Abbey in Surrey, by 1187 his monastery contained seventy monks and 120 lay brothers. The Yorkshire Cistercian houses of Fountains and Rievaulx were even bigger than this. The austerity of Cistercian life impressed potential benefactors and the new order rapidly became an immensely popular order all over Europe. Seven Cistercian abbeys in 1118 had become well over 500 by 1200. In 1205 King John himself founded a Cistercian house, at Beaulieu in Hampshire.

By this time there were other recently established religious orders from which an aspiring monk or nun could choose: Augustinian, Carthusian, Templar, Hospitaller, and Gilbertine. In 1066 there had been only about fifty religious houses in England, all of them following – more or less – the Rule of St Benedict. By 1215, in addition to more than two hundred and fifty Benedictine houses, there were over four hundred other religious communities offering a wide choice of different rules, each with its own particular emphasis.

The most dramatic development was the abandonment of the system of ‘child oblates’. In 1066 and earlier the ancient Benedictine houses had recruited their monks largely from children handed over or offered – in Latin
oblatum
means offered – by aristocratic parents. Usually a gift of property accompanied the child in order to cover the cost to the monastery of bringing him or her up. Most monks and nuns were, in effect, child conscripts who had known no other way of life. But the Cistercians prohibited entry to anyone under the age of sixteen and insisted upon a year’s novitiate. In this they were followed by the other new orders, and by the end of the twelfth century even the Benedictines had been forced to abandon their age-old system. Conscripts had been replaced by volunteers – and there were now many thousands more volunteers than there had ever been conscripts. In the religious life of the nation, more people had the freedom to choose and a greater variety to choose from.

Some volunteers were prepared to give up everything to live a life of Christian poverty. Francis of Assisi, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, started a brotherhood, the Franciscans, which owned nothing. The brothers, known as friars, were to wander the world, preaching penance and begging for their daily food. In 1210 Francis went to Rome and obtained Innocent III’s approval of his way of life. A Spanish priest called Dominic, impressed by his radical step, founded a similar order of his own. Many thousands of idealists all over Europe joined the new orders, often to the dismay of well-off parents who were shocked to see their children begging. Both orders used houses known as friaries as bases from which to preach and beg. In 1221 the Dominicans reached England, where they became known as the Black Friars. Three years later the first Franciscans, the Grey Friars, arrived. The earliest friaries were in London, Canterbury and Oxford. Whereas the Cistercians had ‘fled the world’ by locating their houses far away from people, in the Yorkshire moors, for example, the friars went straight for towns, where their preaching was badly needed – and where begging was easier. By 1300 there were around 150 friaries in England, eighty in Ireland, more than twenty in Scotland and nine in Wales. In the history of religious institutions the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were indeed an age of faith.

Of all these new orders only one, the Gilbertines, founded by Gilbert of Sempringham, had its origins in England. Twelfth-century Christianity was organised on a pan-European basis and the English Church was just one part of the Latin Church under the pope. The other new orders were brought to England from the continent, and some of them, the Cistercians, Dominicans and Franciscans, were conceived on an international basis from their inception. All Cistercian houses were dedicated to the same saint, Mary, the mother of Christ. Representatives of each house were obliged to travel to an annual chapter at Citeaux. All of the houses of the Military Orders, the Templars and Hospitallers, no matter where they were in Europe, were intended to be parts of two great networks of assistance for the crusader states in Palestine and Syria.

For many centuries pilgrims had gone to Rome to pray. The pope had long been the guardian not only of the shrines of St Peter and St Paul but also of those of hundreds of other early Christian martyrs. During the twelfth century, however, he also became the effective head of the Latin Church in the sense that from now on churchmen throughout the West looked to him to decide local quarrels. Litigation took English churchmen to the papal court, usually at Rome, time and time again. Having finished his education, John of Salisbury entered the service of the archbishop of Canterbury. His job was to represent the interests of Canterbury and, to some extent, the interests of the whole English Church, at the papal court. This involved him in frequent journeys to and from England and the curia. Gerald de Barri went to Rome three times between 1199 and 1203 in the hope of persuading Innocent III that the church of St David’s should be freed from its subordination to Canterbury and become an independent archbishopric of Wales.

Litigation was expensive. All too often it seemed as though the only people who profited from it were the Romans. The officials of the papal curia won for themselves an unenviable reputation for avarice. ‘Money is the root of all evil.’ In Latin this was, as Walter Map pointed out,
Radix omnium malorum avaritia
– R. o. m. a. A twelfth-century satirical parody of the scriptures made the point nicely: