The most frequent and regular experience the laity (all the members of the Church who were not clerics) had of organized Christianity was through their parish. In the earlier Middle Ages the network of local ‘mother’ churches with control over baptism and burial and the right to collect tithes within a particular area had often been sparse, though there might also be small chapels or ‘field churches’ built by lords for their estates, which would lack the rights of the mother churches. Now the local churches underwent a dynamic phase of change in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Many new ones were founded, almost always by lords of estates, to serve new centres of population; very often they were sited next to the lord’s own residence, a hall or castle. They acquired rights of baptism and burial from their origin or soon after: for example, the tiny church at Raunds Furnells in Northamptonshire, originally built in the early tenth century, acquired a graveyard about fifty years later. Gradually the old mother churches lost their monopolies over baptism and burial, and, even though they might still be distinctive by having richer endowments or bigger buildings, there were, by the start of the twelfth century, no real differences between them and the newer churches in most areas: by then a fairly dense network of parish churches covered much of western Europe.
The creation of new parishes also affected towns, which were split
Up into multiple parishes. New parishes might exist to serve suburbs growing up round abbeys on the fringes of towns; in England and in Scandinavia the creation of urban parishes might be more extensive—London, for example, had well over 100 parishes by the twelfth century, some of them containing only a couple of streets. The new churches, rural and urban, were often tiny when first constructed, simple two-celled structures with only a nave and a chancel, but most were progressively enlarged, and by the thirteenth century the richer ones had side aisles, allowing space for the saying of private masses or even to run a small school.
Local churches were usually founded by the lords of the manors on which they were situated, though manorial tenants made their own contribution through donations or building work. However, the lord of the manor, by providing the land on which the church stood and the house and land needed to support the priest, enjoyed the rights of patronage over the church: that is, the right to choose the priest. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as a result of the Gregorian reform, which discouraged ownership of churches by the laity, lay patrons were encouraged to bestow their rights of patronage on monastic houses: over a quarter of parish churches passed into monastic ownership. The impact of this development on the recruitment of parish clergy was mixed. There was a tendency for lay patrons to present their relatives to benefices; equally, any patron, lay or ecclesiastical, might feel like maintaining the status quo by allowing a relative of the previous incumbent to succeed. Bishops and kings, not content with the patronage they enjoyed on their own estates, often applied pressure on other patrons to provide well-endowed livings for their own proteges; so too did thirteenth-century popes. As a result, the range of clergy serving parish churches was quite varied, although they were normally men of some social standing, with local connections. The belief that parish incumbents generally came from peasant families is misplaced: benefices were usually too valuable to be given to low-born clerics, and the latter usually found subordinate positions as chaplains. The educational standards of beneficed clergy varied from those with only very limited knowledge of Latin, who might have difficulties coping with the simple oral examinations set them by thirteenth-century bishops such as Eudes Rigaud, to those with a university education. A twelfth-century example of an episcopal protege as an active parish priest is Gilbert of
Sempringham (d. 1189), who gave up a promising administrative career in the household of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln to concentrate on his duties as parson of Sempringham (Lincs.), and who eventually founded a monastery for young women in his parish, which grew into a small monastic order.
Relations between the parishioners and their parson were not entirely harmonious: the duty on the former to pay tithe, an ecclesiastical tax of one-tenth of all produce, led to numerous disputes. Nonetheless the role of the parish church as a focal point in the life of the local community was accepted. Babies of the parish would be brought for baptism to the font to mark their entry into the community, and the deceased of the parish would normally be buried in the churchyard. Groups of parishioners, often split up according to age and sex, would band together in confraternities to provide money for repairs to the church, or to pray, like the group of twelve matrons venerating the apostles in a Rhineland parish described by Caesarius of Heisterbach in his Dialogue of Miracles of the early thirteenth century. Parishioners were expected to attend mass once a week, though they took communion much more rarely, usually only at Easter. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) fixed the minimum requirement for communion as once a year. Before this they would confess to the priest.
Although the parish church provided the main framework of religious experience for the laity, it was not the only source of spiritual advice and consolation. The instruction provided by parish clergy, often limited, was sometimes supplemented by preaching and counsel from members of monastic communities, such as the monks of Worcester Cathedral in the eleventh century, or from hermits. Wandering preachers, a common phenomenon in France in the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries—for example, Robert of Arbrissel (d. 1116), active in Anjou—might introduce the faithful to a much wider range of ideas, not necessarily orthodox: bishops kept a wary eye on wandering preachers, and tried to ensure that they operated only under licence. In the thirteenth century this role was taken up by Dominican and Franciscan friars, who were carefully trained in both doctrine and preaching skills, and who carried with them handbooks of suitable sermons for different social groups (known as sermons ad status) and collections of stories with which to illustrate their preaching.
For moments of great need—illness or famine—potent mediators between God and mankind were required, and in these extremities people prayed to saints for help. This was not a new development: saints had been a focal point for prayer from early in the history of Christianity. Nonetheless the cult of saints, even the most ancient ones such as the Virgin Mary, was not an unchanging phenomenon. At the end of the tenth century, for example, saints’ cults acquired a new significance at the heart of the Peace of God movement, an attempt by bishops in parts of France to quell private warfare. The assemblies where the faithful swore to abstain from violence were dominated by reliquaries (boxes, usually shaped like small houses, containing saints’ relics), brought by monasteries of the region in a display of solidarity with the movement. Oaths made while touching reliquaries had great force. We can see how the ceremony was conducted from the famous scene in the Bayeux Tapestry in which Duke William of Normandy forced Earl Harold to swear obedience. The use of reliquaries in the Peace of God movement relied on the long-popular view of saints as harsh taskmasters, but a shift in this perception is visible in the twelfth century as the more human and even fallible qualities of saints come to be stressed in saints’ lives. Walter Daniel’s Life of the Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx (1147-67), for example, mentions how Aelred had prayed in homely English rather than in Latin or French on his deathbed. This trend did not completely dispel the image of saints as severe: in the early twelfth century, against historical evidence, Saint Cuthbert (d. 687) was reinterpreted as a harsh opponent of women by the monks of Durham, who wanted to exclude women from most of Durham Cathedral. However, the new stress on the humanity of saints proved popular, especially if it was combined with a reputation for performing healing miracles. With these incentives the guardians of shrines, usually monks, nuns, or cathedral canons, could attract a larger, more socially diverse range of pilgrims and benefactors. Miracle stories were recorded and then disseminated in sermons or vernacular verse. Pilgrims would flock to shrines in search of cures, and the shrines benefited from their donations.
Although many pilgrimages were undertaken in search of healing, these journeys were principally intended to be penitential: they were serious events, sometimes involving long distances. Rome, Jerusalem, and Compostela (the shrine of Saint James in north-west Spain) all attracted pilgrims from afar. Wealthy pilgrims might use the journeys as opportunities to show off or to carry out political negotiations (for example, Cnut, king of Denmark and England, who in 1027 visited Rome, dispensed alms lavishly to display his wealth, and negotiated with the king of Burgundy about the tolls paid by English merchants crossing the Alps), but even for them the journeys presented dangers. The more vulnerable poor looked on pilgrimage as a journey from which there was no certainty of a return. Rodulf Glaber in the mideleventh century recounts how some gladly accepted this in the hope that they might, by dying at their destination, achieve salvation.
Penance did not have to be performed by the penitent in person: it could be delegated to others, preferably those better equipped for it through a greater reputation for holiness: monks and nuns. As a result, links between members of religious communities and the better-off laity, who could afford to pay for prayer, were close. Patronage of monastic houses by laymen and laywomen began to expand over a wider social range. At the start of the eleventh century only royal or aristocratic families could afford to be patrons of monastic houses, but in the twelfth century the growing numbers of small monastic houses made it possible for knightly families to be patrons, too, while in the thirteenth century the mendicant orders attracted benefactions from almost all social classes. Gifts of money or land to monasteries provided anniversary prayers or masses for benefactors after their deaths, and favoured benefactors might be buried in the monastery church. Some major churches became family mausolea: Speyer Cathedral for the Salian emperors in the eleventh century, Fontevraud Abbey for the Angevins (Plantagenets) at the end of the twelfth century. By these means the benefactors hoped not only to secure salvation but also to have their memory preserved.
Prayer was the key. It was a vital part of penance; it helped to articulate all sorts of ceremonies; and it was resorted to by those suffering from illness or threatened by disaster. Prayer was expected from all, but believers felt that the most efficacious prayers were said by the holiest people. The people regarded as most holy were the contemplatives who had withdrawn from worldly affairs (though retaining enough contact with the world to be in touch with their benefactors). The role of contemplatives within the Church was a very ancient one: monks, nuns, and hermits were long-established features of the religious scene by the start of our period. Although they were technically a side shoot rather than part of the main hierarchical framework of the Church, the respect that they could obtain for their asceticism and discipline gave them moral authority, and they often acted as opinion-formers. Moreover, monks could become priests (by the tenth century in the West they normally did), and some of them became bishops. Many popes in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries were monks.
World History
