II. stepped from the archiepiscopal see of Vienne to the chair of
St. Peter. His first great object was to end the quarrel with the
empire on the subject of investitures, the vicissitudes of which
rendered the papacy at the time of his accession an exile from Italy;
his second was to carry out the reforms so long and so fruitlessly
urged by his predecessors. To accomplish both these results he lost
no time in summoning a great council to assemble at Rheims, and when
it met in November, 1119, no less than fifteen archbishops, more
than two hundred bishops, and numerous abbots responded to the call,
representing Italy, France, Aquitaine, Spain, Germany, and England.
The attempted reconciliation with the Emperor Henry V. failed, but
the vices and corruptions of the church were vigorously attacked and
sternly prohibited for the future. All commerce with concubines or
wives was positively forbidden under pain of deprivation of benefice
and function. No choice was granted the offender, for continuance
in his sin after expulsion was punishable with excommunication; and
the hereditary transmission of ecclesiastical dignities and property
was strictly prohibited.[652] Whether it was the lofty character
of the new pope, his royal blood and French extraction, or whether
the solemnity of the occasion impressed men’s minds, it is not easy
now to guess, but unquestionably these proceedings produced greater
effect upon the Transalpine churches than any previous efforts of the
Holy See. Calixtus was long regarded as the real author of sacerdotal
celibacy in France, and his memory has been embalmed in the jingling
verses which express the dissatisfaction and spite of the clergy,
deprived of their ancestral privileges.
O bone Calliste, nunc clerus odit te;
Olim presbyteri poterant uxoribus uti;
Hoc detruxisti quando tu papa fuisti,
Ergo tuum festum nunquam celebratur honestum.[653]
Calixtus was not a man to rest half way, nor was he content with an
empty promise of obedience. Under the pressure of his influence, the
French prelates found themselves obliged to take measures for the
vigorous enforcement of the canons. What those measures were, and the
disposition with which they were received, may be understood from the
resultant proceedings in Normandy. Geoffrey, Archbishop of Rouen, on
leaving the council of Rheims, promptly called a synod, which assembled
ere the month was out. The canon prohibiting female intercourse roused
abhorrence and resistance among his clergy, and they inveighed loudly
against the innovation. Geoffrey singled out one who rendered himself
particularly prominent in the tumult, and caused him to be seized and
cast into prison; then, leaving the church, he called in his guards,
whom, with acute anticipation of trouble, he had posted in readiness.
The rude soldiery fell upon the unarmed priests, some of whom promptly
escaped; the rest, grasping what weapons they could find, made a
gallant resistance, and succeeded in beating back the assailants. A mob
speedily collected, which took sides with the archbishop. Assisted by
this unexpected reinforcement, the guards again forced their way into
the church, where they beat and maltreated the unfortunate clerks to
their heart’s content; when, as the chronicler quaintly observes, the
synod broke up in confusion, and the members fled without awaiting the
archiepiscopal benediction.[654]
The immediate effect of the reformation thus inaugurated may perhaps
be judged with sufficient accuracy by the story of Abelard and
Heloise, which occurred about this period. That Abelard was a canon
when that immortal love arose, was not, in such a state of morals, any
impediment to the gratification of his passion, nor did it diminish
the satisfaction of the canon Fulbert at the marriage of his niece,
for such marriages, as yet, were valid by ecclesiastical law. In her
marvellous self-abnegation, however, Heloise recognized that while the
fact of his openly keeping a mistress, and acknowledging Astrolabius
as his illegitimate son, would be no bar to his preferment, and would
leave open to him a career equal to the wildest dreams of his ambition,
yet to admit that he had sanctified their love by marriage, and had
repaired, as far as possible, the wrong which he had committed,
would ruin his prospects forever. In a worldly point of view it was
better for him, as a churchman, to have the reputation of shameless
immorality than that of a loving and pious husband; and this was so
evidently a matter of course that she willingly sacrificed everything,
and practised every deceit, that he might be considered a reckless
libertine, who had refused her the only reparation in his power. Such
was the standard of morals created by the church, and such were the
conclusions inevitably drawn from them.
Nor were these conclusions erroneous, if we may judge by an incident of
the period. An archdeacon of Angoulême had committed the unpardonable
crime of seducing the abbess of a convent in the district under his
charge. When the results of the amour could be no longer concealed,
and the Count of Angoulême ventured to remonstrate with Gérard, the
bishop of the diocese, that worthy prelate protected the offender by
dismissing the charge with a filthy jest. Yet so far was Gérard from
forfeiting the respect of his contemporaries by this laxity, that he
was soon afterwards appointed papal legate.[655] Somewhat similar is
the conclusion to be drawn from an occurrence about the same time in
the diocese of Comminges, where a deacon was entangled in a guilty
connection and was summoned with his paramour before the bishop, St.
Bertrand. The reproof of the holy man reduced the deacon to contrition,
but the woman was defiant. He escaped punishment, while she was seized
by demons and expired on the spot.[656]
Yet there are evidences that the efforts of Calixtus, and of the
fathers whose assembled authority was concentrated at Rheims, did not
by any means eradicate a custom which had now become traditional. Soon
afterwards King Louis-le-Gros, in granting a charter to the church
of St. Cornelius at Compiègne, felt it necessary to accompany the
privileges bestowed with a restriction, worded as though it were a
novelty, to the effect that those in holy orders connected with the
foundation should have no wives—a condition which shows how little
confidence existed in the mind of the sagacious prince as to the
efficacy of the canons so portentiously promulgated by the rulers, and
so energetically resisted by the ruled.[657] That he was justified
in this lack of confidence is evident when we see, further on in the
century, an epistle of Alexander III., undated, but probably written
about 1170, complaining of the canons of St. Ursmar and Antoin who
openly kept concubines in their houses, while some of them did not
hesitate to marry;[658] while as late as 1212 a council of Paris was
obliged to adopt canons forbidding clerks married in the lower orders
to hold parishes while retaining their wives, and suspending from
benefice and functions all those who marry while in holy orders.[659]
XVII.
NORMAN ENGLAND.
We have already seen what was the condition of the Anglo-Saxon
church when William the Manzer overran the island with his horde
of adventurers. Making all due allowance for the fact that our
authorities are mostly of the class whose inclination would lead
them to misrepresent the conquered and to exaggerate the improvement
attributable to the conquest, it cannot be doubted that the standard
of morality was extremely low, and that the clergy were scarcely
distinguishable from the laity in purity of life or devotion to their
sacred calling.
If the reformatory efforts of the popes had not penetrated into the
kingdom of Edward the Confessor, it was hardly to be expected that
they would excite attention amid the turmoil attendant upon the
settlement of the new order of political affairs and the division of
the spoils among the conquerors. Accordingly, even the vigilance of
Gregory VII. appears to have virtually overlooked the distant land of
Britain, conscious, no doubt, that his efforts would be vain, even
though the influence of Rome had been freely thrown upon the side of
the Norman invader, and had been of no little assistance to him in his
preparations for the desperate enterprise. In fact, though William saw
fit to aid in the suppression of matrimony among the priests of his
hereditary dominions, and had thereby earned the grateful praises of
Gregory himself,[660] he does not seem to have regarded the morals of
his new subjects as worthy of any special attention. It is true that in
his system of transferring all power from the subject to the dominant
race, when Saxon bishops were to be ejected and their places filled
with his own creatures, it was necessary for him to effect his purpose
in a canonical way, and to procure the degradation of his victims
by the church itself, as it was impossible for him to lay unhallowed
hands upon their consecrated heads, or to remove prelates from their
sees on questions of mere political expediency. To accomplish this,
the scandals and irregularities of their lives afforded the promptest
and most effective excuse, and it was freely used. The vigor with
which these changes were carried into effect is visible in the synods
of Winchester and Windsor in 1070, where numerous bishops and abbots
were deprived on various pleas; and the character of the prelates
removed may be assumed from the description of the Bishop of Litchfield
(Chester) by Lanfranc, in a letter of the same year to Alexander
II., where his public maintenance of wife and children is alleged,
in addition to other crimes of which he was accused.[661] Though a
puritan, like Lanfranc, bred in the asceticism of the Abbey of Bec,
might seek to enforce the canons in an individual case, as when he
orders Arfastus, Bishop of Thetford, to degrade a deacon who refused
to part with his wife,[662] yet that no general effort was made to
effect a reform in the ranks of the clergy is evident from an epistle
addressed in 1071 to William by Alexander II., in which, while praising
his zeal in suppressing the heresy of simony, and exhorting him to
fresh exertion in the good work, no mention whatever is made of the
kindred error of Nicolitism, which is usually inseparable in the papal
diatribes of the period.[663] Equally conclusive is the fact that when,
in 1075, Lanfranc held a national council in London for the purpose of
reforming the English church, canons were passed to restrain simony,
to prevent incestuous marriages, and to effect other needful changes,
but nothing was said respecting sacerdotal marriage, at that time the
principal object of Gregory’s vigorous measures.[664]
How thoroughly, indeed, clerical marriage and the hereditary descent of
benefices was received as legitimate by common consent is manifested by
a case quoted by Camden from the MS. records of the Abbey of St. Peter
and St. Paul of Shrewsbury. Under the Conqueror, Roger de Montgomery in
founding that house bestowed upon it the church of St. Gregory, subject
to the life estate of the canons then holding it, whose prebends as
they died should fall within the gift of the monks. The children of the
canons, however, disputed the gift, claimed that they had a right to
their fathers’ holdings, and actually gave rise to a great lawsuit to
defend their position.[665]
* * * * *
The first steps to check the irregularities of the priesthood appear to
have been taken in 1076, at the council of Winchester, and the extreme
tenderness there displayed by Lanfranc for the weakness of his flock
shows how necessary was the utmost caution in treating a question
evidently new, and one which deprived the English clergy of a privilege
to which no taint of guilt had previously been attached. We have seen
by the instance related above that when Lanfranc could act according
to his own convictions, he was inclined to enforce the absolute rule
of celibacy, and we may therefore conclude that on this occasion he
was overruled by the convictions of his brother prelates that it was
impossible to obtain obedience. All that the council would venture upon
was a general declaration against the wives of men in orders, and it
permitted parish priests to retain their consorts, contenting itself
with forbidding future marriages, and enjoining on the bishops that
they should thereafter ordain no one in the diaconate or priesthood
without a pledge not to marry in future.[666]
Such legislation could only be irritating and inconclusive. It
abandoned the principle for which Rome had been contending, and thus
its spirit of worldly temporizing deprived it of all respect and
influence. Obedience to it could be therefore invoked on no higher
ground than that of an arbitrary and unjustifiable command, and
accordingly it received so small a share of attention that when, some
twenty-six years later, the holy Anselm, at the great council of London
in 1102, endeavored to enforce the reform, the restrictions which he
ordered were exclaimed against as unheard of novelties, which, being
impossible to human nature, could only result in indiscriminate vice,
bringing disgrace upon the church.[667] The tenor of the canons of
this council, indeed, proves that the previous injunctions had been
utterly disregarded. At the same time they manifest a much stronger
determination to eradicate the evil, though they are still far more
lenient than the contemporary Continental legislation. No archdeacon,
priest, or deacon could marry, nor, if married, could retain his wife.
If a subdeacon, after professing chastity, married, he was to be
subjected to the same regulation. No priest, as long as he was involved
in such unholy union, could celebrate mass; if he ventured to do so,
no one was to listen to him; and he was, moreover, to be deprived of
all legal privileges. A profession of chastity was to be exacted at
ordination to the subdiaconate and to the higher grades; and, finally,
the children of priests were forbidden to inherit their father’s
churches.[668]
One symptom of weakness is observable in all this. The council
apparently did not venture to prescribe any ecclesiastical punishment
for the infraction of the rules thus laid down. If this arose from
timidity, St. Anselm did not share it, for, when he proceeded to put
the canons in practice, we find him threatening his contumacious
ecclesiastics with deprivation for persistence in their irregularities.
A letter of instruction from him to William, Archdeacon of Canterbury,
shows the earnestness with which he entered upon the reform, and also
affords an instructive insight into the difficulties of the enterprise,
and the misery which the forcible sundering of family ties caused
among those who had never doubted the legality and propriety of their
marriages. Some ecclesiastics of rank sent their discarded wives to
manors at a distance from their dwellings, and these St. Anselm directs
shall not be molested if they will promise to hold no intercourse
except in the presence of legitimate witnesses. Some priests were
afraid to proceed to extremities with their wives, and for these weak
brethren grace is accorded until the approaching Lent, provided they
do not attempt meanwhile to perform their sacred functions, and can
find substitutes of undoubted chastity to minister in their places. The
kindred of the unfortunate women apparently endeavored to avert the
blow by furious menaces against those who should render obedience,
and these instigators of evil are to be restrained by threats of
excommunication.[669] Another letter to the Bishop of Hereford, who
had applied for instructions on the subject, directs him to replace
recalcitrant priests with monks and to stir up the laity to drive from
the land the obstinate parsons and their wives.[670] In the enforcement
of these reforms he seemed to meet with questions for which he was not
prepared, for about this time we find him seeking instructions from
Paschal II. on several knotty points: whether a priest living with his
wife can be allowed to administer the viaticum at the death-bed in the
absence of one professing continence; and what is to be done with him
if he refuses his ministration on the ground that he is not allowed to
celebrate mass. Paschal replies, sensibly enough, that it is better to
have the ministrations of an unchaste priest than to die unhouselled,
and that a priest refusing his offices under such circumstances is to
be punished as a homicide of souls. This abandoned the Hildebrandine
theory and practice, and Anselm was more consistent when he assumed
that a layman could perform baptism in preference to an unchaste
priest.[671]
Notwithstanding these zealous efforts of the primate, and the
countenance of Henry Beauclerc, in whose presence the council had been
held, Eadmer is forced sorrowfully to admit that its canons received
but scant respect. Many of the priests adopted a kind of passive
resistance, and, locking up their churches, suspended the performance
of all sacred rites.[672] Even in Anselm’s own diocese, ecclesiastics
were found who obstinately refused either to part with their wives
or to pretermit their functions, and who, when duly excommunicated,
laughed at the sentence, and continued to pollute the church with
their unhallowed ministry.[673] Soon after this Anselm fell into
disfavor with the king and was exiled. His absence promised immunity,
and the clergy were not slow to avail themselves of it. In 1104 one of
his friends, in writing to him, bewails the utter demoralization of
the kingdom, of which the worst manifestation was that priests still
continued to marry; and two years later another letter informs him that
those who had apparently reformed their evil ways were all returning
to their previous life of iniquity. Finally, Henry I. resolved to turn
to account this clerical backsliding, as a financial expedient to
recruit his exhausted treasury. All who were suspected of disobedience
to the canons of the council of London were seized and tried, and
the property of those who could be proved guilty was confiscated. By
this time Anselm had been reconciled to the king, and he promptly
interfered to check so gross a violation of ecclesiastical immunity.
His remonstrances were met by Henry with well-feigned surprise, and
finally the matter was compromised by discharging those who had not
been fined, while those who had been forced to pay were promised three
years’ undisturbed possession of their positions.[674]
That it was impossible to effect suddenly so great a change in the
habits and lives of the Anglican clergy was, indeed, admitted by
Paschal II. himself, when, in 1107, he wrote to Anselm concerning the
questions connected with the children of priests. While reminding him
of the rules of the church, he adds that as, in England, the larger and
better portion of the clergy fall within the scope of the prohibition,
he grants to the primate power of dispensation, by which, in view of
the sad necessity of the times, he can admit to the sacred offices
those born during their parents’ priesthood, who are fitted for it
by their education and purity of life. A second epistle on the same
subject attests the perplexity of the pope, recalling to Anselm’s
recollection his former injunctions, and recommending that, as there
was no personal guilt involved, those of the proscribed class who were
in orders should, if worthy of their positions, be allowed to retain
them, without the privilege of advancement.[675] The question, indeed,
was hotly debated. There is extant a letter written about this time by
Thibaut of Étampes, a dignitary of Oxford, to a certain Rosceline, who
with more zeal than discretion had promulgated the doctrine that the
sons of priests were canonically ineligible to ordination. Thibaut
characterizes this as not only an innovation, but a blasphemy, and
seems utterly unconscious that there was any authority for such a
rule.[676]
* * * * *
It may be remarked that thus far the proceedings of the reformers were
directed solely against the marriage of ecclesiastics. It may possibly
be that this arose from general conjugal virtue, and that, satisfied
with the privilege, no other disorders prevailed among the clergy; but
it is more probable that the heresy of marriage was so heinous in the
eyes of the sacerdotalists, that it rendered all other sins venial,
and that such other sins might be tacitly passed over in the endeavor
to put an end to the greater enormity. Be this as it may, the stubborn
wilfulness of the offenders only provoked increasing rigor on the part
of the authorities. We have seen that the council of 1102 produced
little result, and that when the secular power interfered to enforce
its canons, the church, jealous of its privileges, protested, so that
many priests retained their wives, and marriage was still openly
practised. King Henry, therefore, at length, in 1108, summoned another
council to assemble in London, where he urged the bishops to prosecute
the good work, and pledged his power to their support.[677] Fortified
by this and by the consent of the barons, they promulgated a series
of ten canons, whose stringent nature and liberal denunciation of
penalties prove that the prelates felt themselves strengthened by the
royal co-operation and thus able to compel obedience. The Nicene canon
was declared the unalterable law of the church; those ecclesiastics who
had disregarded the decrees of the previous council were debarred from
performing their functions if longer contumacious; any priest requiring
to see his wife was only to do so in the open air and in the presence
of two legitimate witnesses; accusations of guilt were to be met by
regular canonical purgation, a priest requiring six compurgators, a
deacon four, and a subdeacon two, each of his own order. Disobedience
to these canons was declared punishable with deprivation of function
and benefice, expulsion from the church, and infamy. Only eight days of
grace were allowed; further persistence in wrong-doing being visited
with instant excommunication, and confiscation to the bishops of the
private property of the transgressors and of their women, together
with the persons of the latter. A very significant clause, moreover,
shows that grasping officials had discovered the speculative value
of previous injunctions, and that the degrading custom of selling
indulgence was already in common use, for the council required of all
archdeacons and deans, under penalty of forfeiture, an oath that they
would not receive money for conniving at infractions of the rule, nor
permit priests who kept women to celebrate mass or to employ vicars to
officiate for them.[678]
From the account of the historian, we may assume these to be rather
acts of parliament than canons of a council, and that the assembly was
convened for the special purpose of devising measures for subduing the
recalcitrant clergy. The temporal power was thus pledged to enforce
the regulations, and as so enterprising and resolute a monarch as
Henry had undertaken the reform, there can be little doubt that he
prosecuted it with vigor. Anselm died in 1109, and the clergy rejoiced
in the hope that their persecution would cease with the removal of
their persecutor, but the king proceeded to enforce the regulations
of the council of London with more vigor than ever, and soon obtained
at least an outward show of obedience. Eadmer darkly intimates that
this resulted in a great increase of shocking crimes committed with
those relatives whose residence was allowed, and he is at some pains to
argue that Anselm and his attempted reforms were not responsible for an
effect so little contemplated in their well-meant endeavors. Finally,
the ardor of the king cooled off; ecclesiastical officials were found
readily accessible to bribes for permitting female intercourse,
and those who had grown tired of the wives from whom they had been
separated found no difficulty in forming more desirable unions with new
ones. Eadmer sorrowfully adds that by this time there were few indeed
who continued to preserve the purity with which Anselm had labored so
strenuously to adorn his clergy.[679]
The evil influences of this laxity in the Anglican church were not
altogether confined to Britain. At that period the Swedish bishoprics
were frequently filled by Englishmen, and it is quite possible that
from them was derived the laxity which, as we have seen, at a later
period, caused the Swedes to be regarded as heretics adhering to the
Greek schism. An incident occurring about this time shows the wisdom
of the church in her endeavors to sunder the earthly ties of her
ministers. An English priest named Edward was promoted to the Swedish
episcopate of Scaren. Unluckily, he had left a wife behind him in
England, and, after a short residence in his new dignity had enabled
him to collect together the treasures of his see, he absconded with
them to his spouse, leaving his diocese widowed and penniless.[680]