activity in promoting the cause of reform was the celebrated Robert
Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. The leading part which he took in the
political troubles of the stormy reign of Henry III. has thrown his
ecclesiastical character somewhat into the shade, and he is better
known as the friend of Leicester than as the untiring churchman.
Notwithstanding his consistent opposition to Henry III. and to the
encroachments of the papacy, he was the inflexible enemy of clerical
irregularities, and he enforced the decretals throughout his diocese
with as firm a hand as that which he raised in defence of the rights
of the nation and the privileges of the Anglican church. Thus, in
1251, he made a rigorous inquisition in his bishopric, forcing all his
beneficed clergy to the observance of the strictest chastity, removing
from their houses all suspected women, and punishing transgressors with
deprivation. It is not easy to approve of his brutal expedient for
testing the virtue of the inmates of his nunneries,[716] the adoption
of which could only be justified and suggested by the conviction that
general licentiousness was everywhere prevalent; and though such
treatment of the spouses of Christ was to the last degree degrading,
yet it was doubtless more efficacious than the ordeal of the Eucharist,
which was frequently resorted to in special cases. Not only, however,
did he thus endeavor to reform the morals of his flock, but he made
the closest scrutiny into the character of applicants for ordination.
In this he was largely aided by his ascetic friend and admirer, Adam
de Marisco, and the correspondence between them shows not only the
importance which they reasonably attached to the subject, but the
sleepless vigilance required to counteract the prevalent immorality of
the clergy, and the incredible laxity with which the patrons of livings
bestowed the benefices in their gift.[717]
The rule was now fairly established and generally acknowledged;
concubinage, though still prevalent—nay, in fact almost universal—was
not defended as a right, but was practised with what concealment was
possible, and was the object of unremitting assault from councils
and prelates. To enter into the details of the innumerable canons
and constitutions directed against the ineradicable vice during the
succeeding half century would be unprofitable. Their endless iteration
is only interesting as proving their inefficacy. A popular satirist of
the reign of Edward II. declares that bribery of the ecclesiastical
officials insured the domestic comfort of the clergy and their female
companions;[718] while in time the canon law seems to have lost all its
terrors. One of the earliest acts of the reign of Henry VII. was a law
empowering the ecclesiastical officials to imprison “priests, clerks,
and religious men” convicted of incontinence, and guaranteeing them
against prosecution by the offenders.[719] That the aid of the secular
legislator should thus have been invoked for protection under such
circumstances showed the audacity resulting from long immunity, and is
the abject confession that the ceaseless labor of four centuries had
utterly failed.
* * * * *
In one part of England, however, the reform seems to have penetrated
even more slowly. We have seen above, on the testimony of Giraldus
Cambrensis, that in the early part of the thirteenth century the
marriage of priests and the hereditary transmission of benefices
were almost universal in Wales. As in the wild fastnesses of the
Principality the ecclesiastical regulations seemed powerless, recourse
was had to the secular law, which was employed to inflict various
disabilities on offenders and their offspring, and the repetition of
these shows how obstinately the custom was adhered to by the clergy
until a comparatively late period. Thus, in the Gwentian and Dimetian
Codes there is a provision that the son of a married priest, born
after the ordination of his father, shall not share in the paternal
estate;[720] and this provision is retained and repeated in a
collection of laws which contains the date of 2 Henry IV., showing it
to be posterior to the year 1400.[721] The same collection enumerates
married priests among “thirteen things corrupting the world, and which
will ever remain in it; and it can never be delivered of them.”[722]
In the same spirit, the Book of Cynog, which is of uncertain date,
declares “nor is a married priest, as he has relinquished his law, to
be credited in law,” and it therefore directs that the testimony of
such witnesses shall not be receivable in court;[723] while another
collection of laws, occurring in a MS. of the fifteenth century,
repeats the provision—“their testimony is not to be credited in any
place, and they are excluded from the law, unless they ask a pardon
from the pope or a bishop, through a public penance.”[724] In fact,
we may, perhaps, almost hazard the conclusion that, notwithstanding
the efforts of both ecclesiastical and secular legislators, sacerdotal
marriage scarcely became obsolete in Wales before it was once more
recognized as legitimate under the Reformation.
XVIII.
IRELAND AND SCOTLAND.
In a previous section it has already been shown that the rule of
celibacy was observed by the Celtic churches of the British Islands
during a period in which their Christianity was a model for the rest
of Europe. Their religion, however, could not preserve its purity and
simplicity amid the overwhelming barbarism of those dreary ages. From
an ancient commentary on the “Cain Patraic,” or Patrick’s Law, of
uncertain date, but probably belonging to the ninth or tenth century,
it would seem as though there were at that time two classes of bishops,
one bound by monastic vows, the other permitted to marry; and, what is
somewhat singular, the law appears to favor the latter, for the “cumad
espuc,” or virgin bishop, is condemned to perpetual degradation or to
the life of a hermit for offences which the “bishop of one wife” can
redeem by prompt penance.[725]
The Feini, prior to the advent of St. Patrick, were far in advance of
the contemporary barbarian tribes, and their conversion to Christianity
introduced a new and powerful element of progress. It was not lasting,
however, and they lapsed into a condition but little removed from
that of savages. The marriage-tie was virtually unknown or habitually
disregarded among the laity.[726] What was the condition of the clergy
may be inferred from the fact that the episcopates were regarded as
the private property of certain families in which they descended by
hereditary succession. Thus, in the primatial see of Armagh, fifteen
archbishops were of one house, the last eight of whom were married. At
length Celsus, who died about the year 1130, bequeathed the dignity to
his friend St. Malachi. The kindred rose in arms at this infringement
of their rights, and two of their members successively occupied the
position, which Malachi was not able to obtain until the anger of God
had miraculously destroyed the whole family.[727]
During all this period the Irish church had been completely independent
of the central authority at Rome, but the extension of influence
resulting from the labors of Hildebrand and his successors soon began
to make itself felt. In the quarrels concerning the succession of
Archbishop Celsus, there figures a certain Bishop Gilbert, who is
described as being the first papal legate seen in Ireland.[728] When
Malachi abandoned Armagh and revived the extinct episcopate of Down, he
resolved on a pilgrimage to Rome to obtain the _pallium_, a powerful
instrument of papal authority, until then unknown on the island; and
perhaps the opposition manifested to his wishes by his friends as well
as by the authorities may be attributable to a repugnance towards the
gradual encroachments of Romanizing influence.[729]
Malachi returned from Rome armed with legatine powers, and proceeded
vigorously with the reforms which he had long before commenced. He
held numerous councils, extirpating abuses everywhere, renovating the
ancient rules of discipline and introducing new ones, bending all
his energies to abrogating the national institutions and replacing
them with those of Rome.[730] The earnest asceticism of his nature,
exaggerated by the training of his youth, led him to give a strongly
monastic character to the church of which he was thus the second
founder. On his journey homeward from Rome, he had tarried a second
time at Clairvaux to see his friend St. Bernard, and had left there
four of his attendants to be exercised in the severe Cistercian
discipline that they might serve as missionaries and as models for his
compatriots, who had heard, indeed, of monkhood, but had never seen
it.[731] His efforts, in this respect, were to a considerable extent
successful, at least in a portion of the island, though his death in
1149, at the comparatively early age of 54, cut short his labors before
they could yield their full fruit.[732]
The incongruous character thus imparted to the Irish church is
described by Giraldus Cambrensis some forty years later. The prelates
were selected from the monasteries, and the church was completely
monastic. Chastity was the only rule of discipline thoroughly
preserved, and Giraldus confesses his wonder that it could be
maintained, in contradiction to all former experience, when gluttony
and drunkenness were carried to excess. The monastic principle of
selfishness was all-pervading, and the pastors took no care of their
flocks. Among the people, marriage was still unknown, incest was of
common occurrence, even the rudiments of Christian faith were left
untaught, and the church was regarded without reverence.[733] His
account of the absence of regular stipends and tithes is confirmed
by the fact that an Irish bishop attending the council of Lateran in
1179, in complaining of the condition of his native church, stated that
his only revenues were derived from three milch cows, which his flock
were bound to replace as they became dry.[734] This poverty, however
apostolic in itself, can only, in an age of magnificent sacerdotalism,
be regarded as an indication of a church whose degradation could
command neither the respect nor the support of its children. That
the reforms of Malachi, one-sided as they were, extended only over
a portion of the island, is evident from the inquiry which, a few
years later, the Archbishop of Cashel addressed to Clement III. as
to whether the children of bishops could receive orders and hold
benefices; and the exceptional character of the Irish establishment
was recognized by the pope when he decided that they could, provided
they were born in wedlock, and were otherwise worthy of position.[735]
This requisite of legitimacy was apparently not imposed in ignorance,
for at the council of Cashel in 1171 we find an effort made to enforce
Christian marriage among the people, who are still described as
indulging in unrestricted polygamy and disregarding the nearest ties of
consanguinity.[736]
When about this period the English commenced the conquest which was
to lead to five centuries of cruel anarchy, they of course carried
with them their civil and ecclesiastical institutions. The original
conquerors—the Butlers, the Clares, and the Fitzgeralds—speedily
became incorporated with the native race, and were as Irish as the
O’Briens and the McCauras. Although the royal authority was limited
practically to the confines of the Pale, and embraced little beyond the
Ostman ports, yet it is easy to understand that the clerical license
habitual to the English spread beyond the political boundaries, and
the monastic spirit of the Hibernians was grievously wounded by the
unchastity which was disseminated like a contagion from the dissolute
priests who followed in the wake of Strong-bow and Prince John.[737]
Not twenty years after the first invasion, a council, summoned in 1186
by John in Dublin, was troubled by a quarrel between the Saxon priests
of Wexford, who mutually accused each other of publicly marrying and
keeping wives. This being duly proved, they were promptly degraded, to
the intense satisfaction of the Irish clergy, triumphant in their own
comparative purity of morals.[738] When, therefore, in 1205, Innocent
III. specially ordered his legate, Cardinal Julian, to put an end to
the hereditary transmission of benefices common in Ireland, the abuse
to which he referred was probably confined to the English Pale.[739]
The church establishments, in fact, were distinct, and consequently
when an Irish synod was held in Dublin, in 1217, its canons cannot be
considered as having authority beyond the narrow territory through
which the king’s writ would likewise run. Those canons show us that
the morality of the Saxon priesthood had not improved by the example
made of the priests of Wexford. The denunciations of concubinage
indicate the prevalence of that vice, and the severities threatened
against the unfortunate women contrast strangely with the lenity shown
to their more guilty partners.[740] A century later, if we may believe
the declaration of the synod of Ossory in 1320, the evil continued to
flourish, open, avowed, and universal, resisting alike the authority
of the church and the efforts to repress it by severity.[741] Whether
the offenders dismissed their consorts after the thirty days’ grace
allowed by the synod may well be doubted. With the spread of English
domination, the purity of the native church disappeared, and so great
became the general disregard of the canons that shortly before the
Reformation it was not an unusual thing for Irish priests to be openly
married, nor do those who did so seem to have thereby forfeited the
esteem of their neighbors.[742]
* * * * *
In Scotland, the Christianity introduced by St. Columba had fallen
into the hands of the Culdees. These were originally monks of a more
than ordinary strictness of discipline, to whom the earliest recorded
allusion occurs in Ireland towards the close of the eighth century—the
name, Céle-dé (Keledeus, or Servus Dei) meaning simply Servant of
God. In the course of time the Culdees had so relaxed their rule that
they reappear in the eleventh century as an order nominally of monks,
yet fulfilling the functions of the secular clergy, and enjoying free
permission to marry, only abstaining from their wives when employed in
the actual ministry of the altar. With marriage had come the hereditary
transmission of the endowments of the church to their children, so that
the ancient abbeys and churches were well-nigh stripped of all their
possessions, and the distinction between clergy and laity was rather in
term than in fact. It may please the poet to construct a world of his
own, peopled by imaginary beings of angelic purity—
Peace to their shades! The pure Culdees
Were Albyn’s earliest priests of God,
Ere yet an island of her seas
By foot of Saxon monk was trod,
Long ere her churchmen by bigotry
Were barred from wedlock’s holy tie.
’Twas then that Aodh, famed afar,
In Iona preached the word with power,
And Reullura, beauty’s star,
Was the partner of his bower—
but in sober truth the Culdees were pure as long as they kept the
tradition of their founder, and it was not until they sank to a level
with their savage compatriots that they transgressed the rule and
became worldly and corrupt.[743] In 1125 the Cardinal-legate, John
of Crema, whose unlucky adventure in London has been already alluded
to, visited Scotland in the execution of his reformatory mission.
There he found on the throne David I., a prince whose life was devoted
to rescuing his subjects from their primæval barbarism. We know few
details of the history of those times, but it is fair to conjecture
that the exhortations of the legate had a share in arousing David to
a realization of the deficiencies and the corruptions of the Scottish
church, and in guiding him to the course which he adopted in its
reformation. After some fruitless efforts to restore the order of
Culdees to its original condition, he resolved on the sweeping measure
of removing all who should prove incorrigible. They were accordingly
turned out bodily from their establishments, such property as could be
traced was restored, and donations on an extended scale were made both
to the old foundations and to the new ones which the royal reformer
established—donations which gained for him, from an ungodly descendant,
the appellation of “Ane soir sanct for the crown.” These foundations
were then filled with regular clergy, brought from France and
England—chiefly canons of the order of St. Augustin—and the unfortunate
Culdees were turned adrift unless they would promise to observe the
strictness of monastic rule. It is probable that in a few places they
did so, for references to Culdees still occur occasionally even in the
next century, but these measures were effective and practically they
and their customs disappeared together.[744]
In a church thus constructed from the regular clergy, the heresy of
marriage could find no foothold, especially as it had been so sternly
punished in the expulsion of the Culdees. Still was the desired purity
not yet attained. In 1181, during the long quarrel between William the
Lion and the papacy on the subject of the archbishopric of St. Andrews,
an interdict was pronounced on all ecclesiastics who should refuse to
recognize the papal candidate John, whereupon the King persecuted those
who obeyed the mandate, and the chronicler, in expatiating upon his
cruelty, is careful to mention that he did not spare their children,
even to babes in their mothers’ arms, who were remorselessly driven
into exile.[745] The state of things indicated by this remained without
improvement. In 1225, Honorius III. ordered the Scottish ecclesiastics
to assemble in council for the correction of the many enormities which
were committed with impunity; and the council held in obedience to the
papal command denounced the shameless licentiousness of the clergy
as a disgrace to the church.[746] Inquests to detect the offenders,
suspension and deprivation to punish them, were ordered with all the
verbal energy of which we have already witnessed so many examples,
and were attended with the same plentiful lack of success. With what
disposition the clergy regarded these efforts for their improvement
we may guess from the reception which they gave to the constitutions
of Cardinal Ottoboni. Reference has already been made to the council
held by that legate in London in 1268. The church of Scotland had been
ordered to join in this council, and had sent two bishops and two
abbots as its representative delegates. These took home with them the
constitutions of Ottoboni, which the clergy of Scotland utterly refused
to obey.[747]
XIX.
SPAIN.
We have already seen (p. 121) that among the Wisigoths of Spain the
rule of celibacy had never been successfully enforced, and that during
the later period of the Gothic dynasty the demoralization of the clergy
was daily increasing. The Saracenic invasion, and the subsequent
struggles of the Christians, who founded petty kingdoms among the wild
mountainous regions of the North and East of the Peninsula, were not
favorable to the growth of regular discipline and settled observances.
The centralized sacerdotalism of Rome, which took so remarkable an
extension in the ninth and tenth centuries, and which penetrated every
portion of the Carlovingian empire, was powerless to intrude into
the strongholds of the Jalikiah, whence the descendants of Pelayo
and his companions gradually extended their frontiers from Oviedo to
Toledo. Communication with the apostolic city was rare. The nominal
subjection of Barcelona and Navarre to the Carlovingians, indeed,
brought the eastern provinces of Spain under the domination of the
Archbishops of Narbonne, and kept them, to a certain extent, under the
influences which were moulding the rest of Europe; but the kingdoms
of Leon and Castile grew up in complete ecclesiastical independence.
Even at the close of the eleventh century a Spanish ecclesiastic
describes his contemporary brethren as rude and illiterate, owning no
obedience to the mother church of Rome, and governed by the discipline
of Toledo.[748] Wild and insubordinate as was a large portion of the
European clergy, the ecclesiastics of Spain were even wilder and
more insubordinate. Another writer of the period, himself a canon of
Compostella, and subsequently Bishop of Mondonego, speaking of his
brother canons previous to the reforms of Diego Gelmirez, denounces
them as reckless and violent men, ready for any crime, prompt in
quarrel, and even occasionally indulging in mutual slaughter.[749] How
little, indeed, there was to distinguish the clerk from the layman is
evident from a regulation promulgated by the council of Compostella
in 1113. It provides that all priests, gentlemen, and peasants shall
devote themselves to wolf-hunting on every Sunday, except Easter and
Pentecost, under a penalty of a fine of five sols for the priest and
gentleman, and one sol, or a sheep, for the peasant—visitation of the
sick being the only excuse exempting the priest from the performance
of this duty. Every church, moreover, was bound to furnish for the
hunt seven iron-tipped reeds.[750] A similar condition of society is
indicated at the other end of Spain, where, in 1027, the Synod of Elna,
in Roussillon, had forbidden, under pain of excommunication, any one to
attack a monk or a clerk who was without arms.[751]
In such lack of social organization it is easy to imagine that the
rule of celibacy received little attention. According to Mariana, the
clergy of the period were, for the most part, publicly married;[752]
and when, in 1056, the council of Compostella specifically forbade to
bishops and monks all intercourse with women, except with mothers,
aunts, and sisters wearing the monastic habit,[753] the inference is
fair that even so elementary a prohibition was an innovation, and that
the secular clergy, below the episcopate, were not regarded as subject
to any restriction.