1. These lacunæ existed already in the 16th century, when a transcript of the Chronicle was made.
2. For growth of luxury see Murat. ix, pp. 128 ff and 669: Ben. Im. vol. v, p. 150: for slaves see Biagi, p. 333, and Wadding, 1274, p. 423.
3. Ps. Xliv, 3. I have thought it best to give nearly all the Bible quotations from the Douai version, as more exactly representing the Vulgate, which Salimbene of course always quotes. The page references are to the text of Salimbene in Mon. Germ. His. Scriptt., t. xxxii. In some cases, however, I have not been able to secure in time the paged sheets of this standard edition; in such cases I give the year under which Salimbene records the matter, together with the page of the Parma edition. Thus the reference (1250-237) will enable the reader to verify my quotation on p. 237 in the Parma edition, or under the year 1250 in either edition. Whether the whole of the Chronicle was written for Sister Agnes has been questioned by Father Michael, who however gives no very cogent reasons for his doubt. Certainly Salimbene’s freedom of speech supplies no proof that it was not written for a nun: see chap. Iii, note 7.
4. Michael, p. 2.
5. E.g., The early history of the city and diocese of Tournai, in the Corpus Chronicorum Flandriæ, 1841, t. ii, pp. 480 following. Similarly, Abbot Guibert of Nogent tells how he has been pestered to deliver imaginary panegyrics on unknown saints: and his words imply that such requests were frequent and difficult to refuse. (Migne, Pat. Lat., vol. clvi, p. 624). When, in 1282, a general chapter of the Franciscans was held at Strassburg, “the Minister-General . . . . . . . enjoined Philip, 356 Minister of Tuscany, to enquire diligently, if perchance he could find the day and hour on which the stigmata of Jesus Christ were imprinted on St. Francis’ body. So he found a lay-brother, perfect in all virtues, to whom had been vouchsafed many revelations directly from St. Francis, to the effect that on the day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross . . . . the Lord Jesus . . . . imprinted on him those marvellous wounds.” (24 Gen., p. 374.)
6. Occasional Papers. Vol. i, p. 87 (Macmillan, 1897).
7. She speaks of Cantarelli’s as “an Italian version, for which it is difficulty to say one good word” (p. 60): et, where Salimbene has Rex Hyrtacus, and Cantarelli’s Italian has naturally il Rege Irtaco, Miss Macdonell mistranslates this as “King of Ithaca” (p. 259); and by a similar misunderstanding of Italian she converts Salimbene’s swineherds into swine. There are very many other such mistakes, often small in themselves, but going far to explain Miss Macdonell’s under-estimate of Salimbene’s value as a serious historian.
For a conspectus of all that is at present known about Salimbene we must await Prof. Holder-Egger’s introduction: but meanwhile a very good bibliography may be gathered from Prof. Michael’s Salimbene und seine Chronik (Innsbruck, 1889), pp. 1-5 and 87-94. The author, though his theological bias is obvious and natural, subordinates it generally to the interests of historical truth. His book shows a truly German industry and master of detail, though it is interesting to an Englishman to mark the natural limits of a Jesuit professor’s familiarity with the bible text. On page 123 he quotes the similes of the she-bear robbed of her whelps, and the eagle that hasteneth to the prey, as specimens of Salimbene’s picturesque phrases: the context shows that he has no suspicion of their Biblical origin.
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1. Cæs. Heist. dist. X, cap. 99. Bert. Rat. Pred. I, 402.
2. Vinc. Bell. Spec. Doct. x, 12. Northumberland Assize Rolls (Surtees Soc., vol. 88), p. 341. L. Gautier,, La Chevaleri, pp. 342-9; A. Schulz, Höfisches Leben, vol. ii, p. 163; La Tour, chaps. 17-19; Bern. Sen. Pred. II, 103, 115; Pipinus in Murat., ix, 647; Bourbon, p. 241 (where the editor misses much of the point of the story by referring Imperator quondam to Barbarossa, not realizing that this was the stereotyped phrase applied to Frederick II by good churchmen after the sentence of deposition pronounced on him by Innocent IV in 1245); Ben. Im., vol. v, 357 p. 150; Arte, p. 74. The statutes of medieval towns often yield very interesting evidence. Those of Castellarquato, near Piacenza (about 1350 A.D., pub. 1876, p. 179 ff), give a tariff of fines for defamatory language or assaults. The former list varies from 20 pence for calling another Tapeworm! through a rising gradation of Cagasangue! and similar picturesque epithets, to £10 imperial for Forger! or Traitor Pulling the hair or scratching, if without effusion of blood, cost £1; with blood, £2, unless the assault were committed “by way of correction,” in which case it was condoned altogether. Biting was assessed at £2 10s, without blood, and £5 with blood. An assault without arms, if it drew blood from the victim’s body, cost £10; if from his face, £15. With arms and blood, the tariff was £20 per wound inflicted, plus the doctor’s bill. To thrown a stone and miss cost £1; the too successful marksman must, however, pay £10, or, if the missile struck his victim’s face, £20. This elaborate tariff (of which I have given only brief specimens) was, however, inapplicable to “ribalds, prostitutes, or vile and abject persons,” who were to be fined or punished at the judge’s discretion. Other equally interesting tariffs at medieval universities may be found in Rashdall, vol. ii, pp. 415, 614. As the example of Cianghella may suggest, the idea of self-control even in church was foreign to the mass of the people. Bishop Quivil of Exeter complains, in his Synod of 1287, that the services were often scandalously interrupted by two or three parishioners scuffling for the same seat; Chaucer twice alludes to similar quarrels of women for precedence or salutes in church; and I shall have occasion to quote St. Bernardino to the same effect (Wilkins, Concil, vol. ii. p. 129, Cant. Tales, Prol. 450 and B. 309). The scuffle of the two Archbishops for precedence in Westminster Abbey, York finally sitting on Canterbury’s lap, and getting his clothes torn almost off his back, is only one of a dozen similar instances which might be quoted (Gervase of Canterbury, R.S., vol. i, p. 258). The Bishops’ registers are full of solemn “reconciliations” of churches and churchyards polluted by bloodshed in brawls.
3. The 14th-century commentator, Benvenuto da Imola, speaks as if this boyish vandalism were quite common — quite apart from the pleasure which older ruffians found in destroying churches ore palaces in war-time (vol. i, pp. 115, 461).
4. For this, “the earliest of all the poets of Northern Italy known to us,” see Gaspary’s Hist. of Early Italian Literature. Salimbene frequently quotes him, and paid him the compliment of an imitation, as he tells us (464).
5. Bert. Rat. Pred., vol. i, p. 89, and ii, 205.
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1. for Leo see Fleury, an. 1240, xxxiv, and 1267, liii.
2. For Gerard of Modena, see Wadding, 1244, p. 109, and 1251, p. 277. Bartholomew of Vicenza seems, like his fellow townsman John, to have had two sides to his character. Prof. Holder-Egger points out (p. 74, note 1) that he is almost certainly the friar who was chosen in 1231 to arbitrate between Genoa and Alessandria, but who disgraced his office by falsifications and interpolations of documents.
3.
“Et Johannes johannizat
Et saltando choreizat.
Modo salta, modo salta,
Qui celorum petis alta!
Saltat iste, saltat ille,
Resaltant cohortes mille,
Saltat chorus dominarum,
Saltat dux Venetiarum, &c.”
4. For this satire, and Guido Bonatti’s testimony, see Prof. Holder-Egger’s notes, pp. 77, 78.
5. For a more orthodox explanation of the delay in St. Dominic’s canonization, see p. 30 of the works of his successor, Jordan of Saxony (Ed. Berthier, Fribourg, 1891).
6. The story of the philosopher Secundus may be found in Vincent of Beauvais, Spec. Hist. x, 70. Though designed to point a moral in its time, it again is scarcely suitable for modern print.
7. Cf. Archiv., iii, 458, for a decree of the general chapter of Terni forbidding friars to have obscene books in their possession. A similar prohibition of cantilenæ lascivæ may be found in the Franciscan Constitutions of 1290, edited by Prof. Little. (Eng. Hist. Review, July, 1903, p. 493.) Similarly, in his instructions to preachers, Cardinal Jacques de Vitry finds it necessary to record the warning, “scurrilia tamen aut obscene verba vel turpis sermo ex ore predicatoris non procedant” (Vit. Serm. p. xliii, note). To realize how much need there was for this admonition, the reader should refer to A. Méray, “La vie aux Temps des Libres Prêcheurs,” vol. ii, pp. 142 f, 243. It is a book which must often be used with caution for historical purposes: but the quotations on those pages tell their own tale. Gerson complained of the obscene talk of university professors, by which their pupils were corrupted (ii, 763). The manners of ordinary society 359 in this respect are clearly shown by Chaucer: but, in view of attempts often made to avoid the natural inferences from the Canterbury Tales, it may be worth while to add further references here. The licence allowed in society games be inferred from a “Ragman Roll,” printed in Wright and Halliwell’s Reliquiæ Antiquæ, and from the fact that medieval moralists and preachers condemn dancing with practical or literal unanimity, and frequently even attendance at weddings. The book of The Knight of La Tour Landry shows how a particularly careful nobleman talked to his daughters: next to this book, there is perhaps no document so significant of medieval manners in this respect as the sermons which St. Bernardino delivered in the great square of Siena, and to which he expressly asked the mother to bring their daughters. (Prediche, vol. ii, nos. xix-xxii: especially pp. 98, 108, 110, 132, 135, 157, 138, 140, 142, 143, 149, 150, 167-172). Yet that even this license of speech was insignificant compared with that which the manners of the time often permitted, may be gathered plainly from the horror with which he describes the common sins of 14th century society in this respect. (Opera, vol. iii, p. 367b.) We get similar evidence form Sir Thomas More, as I have pointed out in Med. Studies, no. 6; and from one of the early chapters in Raimondo da Vigna’s “Life of St. Catherine of Siena.”
8. Compare this reference to Guido with what Salimbene says of him later on, in the chapter which I have entitled “Settling Down.”
9. Guibert is specially concerned to combat the error of the monks of St. Médard at Soissons, who boasted the possession of one of our Lord’s milk-teeth, fallen out in the course of nature when He was nine years old. Incidentally he refers to those who prided themselves on still stranger relics — umbilicum et praeputium Domini. Even Innocent III treated these relics seriously (De Sacro Altaris Mysterio, Lib. iv, c. 30), discussed the claims o two rival præputia, and summed up (very nearly in the words of Sir John Maundeville), “yet it is better to commit all to God than to define rashly either way.”* The encyclopædic learning of the late Father Denifle, sub-librarian of the Vatican, has unearthed no less than seven churches which claimed this strange relic (Désolation des Eglises), vol. i, p. 167: (cf. J. B. Thiers, Traité des Superstitions, Avignon, 1777, p. 365, from whom it appears 360 that it had a Mass of its own). Guibert, bolder and more logical than the great Pope, decides that, if we are to believe in the resurrection of the body, we cannot suppose the risen Christ to have left a tooth or any other such relic on earth (col. 631). The monks of Soissons, he concludes, can therefore only be absolved from heresy on the charitable supposition that they are liars: nor can he admit that the alleged miracles afford any valid proof of the relic’s authenticity. As a somewhat earlier chronicler puts it “miracles are sometimes wrought by evil spirits, by God’s permission and as a punishment or men’s sins.” (Rodulfi Glabri Monachi Cluniacensis Hist. lib. iv, c. 3.) Guibert’s treatise should be read in its entirety: but the following extracts will give some idea of the attitude of a very distinguished scholar and churchman in St. Bernard’s generation towards popular beliefs (col. 621). “A certain most famous church (he is probably speaking of Laon Cathedral) was sending round wandering collectors of this kind, and had employed a preacher to beg money for its restoration. This man, swelling beyond all measure in his sermon over the relics which he bore, brought forth a casket in my presence. ‘Know ye,’ said he [to the congregation], ‘that this casket contains some of the bread which our Lord pressed with His own teeth: and, if ye are slow to believe, behold this illustrious man’ (or thus he spake of me) ‘of whose great learning ye yourselves are witnesses, and who rise up, if need be, as a witness to the truth of my words.’ I confess that I blushed to hear this: and (but that I feared in the presence of those at whose prompting he spake, lest I should offend them even more than the speaker himself),** I should have exposed the fraud. What shall I say? not even monks — let alone the secular clergy — abstain from such filthy lucre, or shrink from speaking heresies on matters of our faith even in my presence. [And I must be silent] for, as Boethius said ‘I should be rightly condemned as a madman if I were to dispute with madmen.’ ” As Guibert says in another place (624) “There are things written about some saints which are much worse than old wives’ fables, and unfit even for the ears of cowherds.” While the clergy hold their tongues, old women and ignorant hussies sing these legendary saints’ lives, and will attack the rash sceptic not only with abuse but with their distaffs (622). Men are put as saints under the altars who, living, were scarcely fit to come into the sanctuary (615): villages and little towns “daily” invent saints of their own to rival the St. Martins and St. Rémis of the great churches: and Guibert quotes in this context, I Sam., xvii, 29, “Each nation made its own God” (622). 361 He illustrates this manufacture of relics from his own experience (625). “Those who worship they know not what, even though it be in fact a holy relic, are yet never free from great danger. If on the contrary it be no relic at all, then they live in most terrible sacrilege: for what could be more sacrilegious than to worship as divine that which is not divine? . . . . . Hear a tale which may explain my complaints and show the truth of what I have advanced. Odo, bishop of Bayeux, natural son to Robert, count of Normandy, and blood-brother to William the First of England, eagerly sought the body of St. Exuperius his predecessor, who is worshipped with the utmost reverence in the town of Corbeil. He paid, therefore, the sum of one hundred pounds to the sacristan of the church which possessed these relics, that he might take them for himself. But the sacristan cunningly dug up the bones of a peasant named Exuperius, and brought them to the bishop. The bishop, not content with his mere assertion, exacted from him an oath that these bones which he brought were those of Saint Exuperius. ‘I swear,’ replied the man, ‘that these are the bones of Exuperius: as to his sanctity I cannot swear, since many earn the title of saints who are far indeed from holiness.’ Thus the thief assuaged the bishop’s suspicions and set his mind at rest. . . . . . See now what disgrace this bishop’s bargain brought upon religion, when the bones of this profane peasant Exuperius were thrust into God’s holy altar, which perchance will never more be purged of them. I can recall so many like deeds in all parts that I lack time and strength to tell them here; for fraudulent bargains are made, not so much in whole bodies as in limbs, common bones being sold as relics of the saints. . . . .”
Compare this with a parallel passage from Cardinal Jacques de Vitry about 1220 (Hist. Occ., c. 10). After a vivid description of the traffic in false relics and indulgences, the blackmail exacted by preachers for ill-gotten gains, and the drunkenness and debauchery in which much of the money thus extorted from the laity was spent, the Cardinal goes on: “Those who send these aforesaid filthy and blasphemous fellows to preach for the building of their churches, and the bishops who grant them their letters of authorization, shall give account to the strict judge for all their perverse deeds.” While the minds of the faithful were thus poisoned by the habit of revering false relics and false miracles, the belief was commonly exploited to their own sinister purposes by rascals even in the highest ecclesiastical circles. There is a typical instance from the Winchester annals (Annales Monastici, R.S. ii, 100, A.D. 1262). The prior of St. Swithun’s was imprisoned for his sins, and escaping by fraud, said that St. Thomas of Canterbury had set him free by a miracle: in token whereof he hung his chains at the Canterbury shrine “pro 362 ludibrio, ne dicam pro miraculo,” remarks the indignant chronicler of the monastery.
The Papal Letter referred to in the text, may be found in Raynaldus, Ann. Ecc., an. 1238, § 33: cf. Cæs. Heist., dist. ii, c. 24: Thos. Cant. II, xxvi, 7, 8. The latter writes: “I remember what I once heard from a very simple-minded layman at Cambrai. Certain monks had made him a solemn promise which they had not kept: so, not seeing how else he could excuse them, he said, ‘Those men break their promise to me by a daily lie; but I believe that they lie by leave of their Abbot.’ This is still remembered as a proverb in those parts where some monk fails to tell the truth: ‘Let him alone,’ men say, ‘for he lies by his Abbot’s leave.’ ” Thomas blames their habit of excusing such falsehoods by the example of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and other patriarchs. The fraud which he relates with approval may be found in II, xxv, 13.
With regard to the case of St. Francis, see Sabatier, Vie de St. F., pp. 64, 65: Knox-Little, St. Francis, p. 94. The Three Companions say (chap. vi), “restore [to thy father] the money which thou hast; for, since it is perchance ill-gotten, God willeth not that thou pay it to Church uses.” Thomas of Celano, Leg. Antiq. (Ed. Rosedale, p. 14): “He restored the money to his father . . . at the persuasion of the Bishop, a most pious man, for the reason that it was unlawful to expend anything ill-gotten on pious uses (eo quod non liceret de male acquisitis aliquid in sacros usus expendere).” Nowhere do the early authorities, I believe, claim that the horse and cloth sold at Foligno were the saint’s own: they simply say, venditis . . . quæ portaverat (or portabat). For admitted “pious thefts,” see Wadding, 1242, p. 80; 1252, p. 281; 1297, p. 359; and Ana. Fra. Iii, 164, 425, 551.
* The plea that all these duplicate relics were really fragments of one genuine relic is, I believe, quite modern, beginning with Wadding and other 17th century scholars whose bias was definitely apologetic. In many cases the plea is demonstrably false, for different churches claimed the relic in its entirety. Mr. J. C. Wall (“Shrines of British Saints,” p. 9) writes in a very misleading fashion on this subject.
** The text of this parenthesis seems corrupt in parts, but its general sense is obvious.
10. Dav. Aug., p. 357.
11. This book is now lost.
12. These two sermons on Antichrist have been edited by Schönbach, “Studien zur Geschichte der altdeutschen Predigt,” IV. For information as to the preacher see E. Bernhardt “Bruder Berthold v. Regensburg.” (Erfurt, 1905).
13. The vivid impression made by Berthold’s sermons may be realized, even through legendary exaggerations, from an anecdote quoted from an anonymous chronicler in Pfeiffer’s edition of Sermons (vol. i, p. xxi), and recorded in the Chronicle of the 24 Generals, p. 238. “Once when he was preaching against the vice of lechery, a certain prostitute who heard him was smitten with such pain by the arrow of his word, shot from so 363 valiant and direct a bow, that she gave up the ghost.” Berthold prayed her back to life: “And among other things she revealed how in that same hour wherein she died 60,000 men were called from life in divers parts of the world; of whom three only entered Purgatory. The rest were plunged into hell, all but one Friar Minor, who passed through Purgatory and, suddenly taking with him two souls which had confessed to him, went up with them to Paradise.”
14. The version of this story given by Wadding explains that Berthold had Papal authority to grant several says’ Indulgence to his listeners at every sermon, and that on this occasion he had granted one of ten days.
15. Berthold was exceeding his powers in admitting a new member into the Order; but he hoped that the General would ratify his decision.
16. This address to a single definite reader, who knew Bologna, adds to the probability that our chronicler is here thinking of his niece.
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1. Michael, p. 70: but cf. Carmina Burana (Ed. Schmeller, Breslau, 1883), p. 71. For Primas see Cæs. Heist. dist. ii, c. 15; Boccaccio’s Decameron, G. i, n. 7, and the references given by Prof. Holder-Egger, p. 83, note. For Feast of Fools, Gerson, vol. ii, pp. 555A, 636D, 641C; Od. Rig., pp. 44, 384, 472. Sacchetti, Serm. p. 22. For the transitory nature of these Revivals, see Murat., vol. ix, p. 55, and xxiii, 839.
2. Ecc. i, Vulg. This text was a great favourite with medieval moralists, whose pale ghosts must have rejoiced far more to welcome Carlyle’s disembodied spirit than Wordsworth’s.
3. Obizzo ii: see Dante, Inf. xiii, 110.
4. Bacon, ed. Brewer, R.S., p. 426 — Rashdall, vol. ii, p. 385 — Jac. De Varagine in Murat., vol. ix, p. 45.
5. Miss Macdonell (p. 263) is misled by Cantarelli’s translation into imagining that the friars only promised him an excellent meal this evening, and actually gave him cabbages: thus missing the whole point of the story. This supper in the infirmary before his admission was in fact excellent; only, when once he was admitted, 364 he must needs eat cabbages at his daily meals in the refectory, like the rest of the Brethren.
6. ”Milvus ait pullo, dum portaretur ab illo, cum pi pi faris, non te tenet ungula talis.”
7.
“Homini avari, e pien d’ogni empietate,
Che lor par proprio ire in paradiso
Quando hanno il figlio dal padre diviso!”
(Drama of 14th or 15th century, quoted in D’Ancona, Origini del Teatro, etc., vol. i, p. 189). Bern. Bess., pp. 297, 399. Salimbene, as his own artless revelations often show, would have learnt more easily than most otherwise amiable boys that renunciation of home ties which has always been preached as one of the first duties of a Religious. As the Mirror of Monks puts it (a treatise often printed among St. Bernard’s works), “the religious should be like Melchizedek, without father, without mother, without genealogy.” Again, Brother Giles, paraphrasing Luke xiv, 26 after his own hyperbolical fashion, advised the intending postulant to “go forthwith and slay his parents, his brothers, his sisters, and his cousins” (24 Gen., p. 92: cf. 98). Though we may scarcely need Prof. Holder-Egger’s warning that the man’s account of the boy’s ever-ready biblical quotations are not to be taken too literally, it transpires plainly enough from this and other episodes that Salimbene, if he did not slay his father and mother, at least did not strive officiously to keep them alive.
8. This is the Illuminato of Dante, Par. xii, 130.
9. The actual word here used by Guido, though unfamiliar to polite English ears, is said to be still commonly used in Italy as a term of abuse for monks and friars.
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1. There was, nevertheless, another Br. Ognibene in the Order at the same time as our chronicler. He is mentioned by Eccleston (p. 59) as the Companion of Albert of Pisa in England.
2. This description is strikingly like the fresco of the vocation of S. Ranieri in the Campo Santo of Pisa. Salimbene could not of course have seen that actual painting; but his imagination might well have been struck by the story, which may be read in the Acta Sanctorum, or in the old Italian translation of Benincasa’s Life of S. Ranieri, published at Pisa in 1842.
3653. E.g., the story (recorded in Vincent of Beauvais and the Golden Legend) how St. John the Evangelist turned pebbles into gems and sticks into gold (p. 46): again, stories from St. Gregory’s Dialogues and (nominally at least) from the Vitae Patrum. The Bible misquotation if p. 51, line 43: God in the third person, p. 52, ll. 39, 40. Prof. Holder-Eger assumes that Christ’s speech must have ended somewhere before this, but there is no such indication in the text; and the simplest explanation seems to be that our good friar had become thoroughly muddled with his own arguments.
4. Hist. Occ., p. 349: the s’étaient crus of Sabatier, Vie de St. F., p. cxxiii, is distinctly misleading.
5. Matt. Paris an. 1244 (p. 558), and 1250 (695), 1252 (731). — Mon. Franc., pp. 86, 90, 96, 101, 105, 213 and passim — Browne Fasc. ii, 251. Cf. Grosseteste. Epistolæ, R.S., pp. 434, 440 — AA. SS. Oct. iv, 712 — Bonaventura Quæstio ii, circa Regulam — Vinc. Bell. Spec. Doct., lib. ii, dist. ii, para 2: Spec. Hist. lib. xxx, c. 107 — Quétif-Echard, Scriptt O. p. i, 25, notes A2 and B. — Vit. Frat. Cap. I, § ii, iii, — Thos. Cant., pp. 253 (lib. Ii, c. 37). AA. SS. Ap. III, prologus primus in vitam S. Cath. Senensis, sect. iii and iv.
6. Archiv., vol. iii, p. 453.
7. Bacon, ed. Brewer, R.S., pp. 24, 30, 33, 38, 398 — 404, 426, 475.
8. See an article by the present writer in the Independent Review for June, 1905, reprinted as No. 5 of Medieval Studies. (Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 6d.)
9. Gerson, vol. i, p. 201A, vol. ii, pp. 555F, 649B, 712A. The Church, he says, is as though smitten with an incurable disease, and remedies do but make her worse. Compare the striking anecdote told by Salimbene’s contemporary, Etienne de Bourbon (p. 217). Etienne had been informed by Petrus Hispanicus — apparently not Dante’s pope of that name, but a fellow-friar — how a holy man watching in prayer saw a vision of a fair lady who announced herself to be that Holy Church on whose behalf the devotee uttered so many groans and prayers. “And then she took off the resplendent crown which she wore and bowed her head towards him. And he saw the crown of the head cleft crosswise in four parts, and vermin bubbling forth from her brain, and her wounds reeking with corrupted blood in all four quarters. ‘Behold!’ said she: ‘from what thou canst see of my head thou mayst now understand my corruption and pain in the rest of my limbs.’ A strikingly similar vision of the Franciscan Order smitten with leprosy is recorded in Angelo Clareno’s Seven Tribulations — but, 366 indeed, it would be easy to fill a whole book of this size with similar complaints from orthodox medieval churchmen.
10. We may gather from frequent allusions in inquest and assize rolls that many houses in the towns of the 13th century were built of wattle and clay. The burglar’s line of least resistance was often not a door or a window, but a more or less decayed portion of the house wall.
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1. Independent Review, Feb., 1905. Contemporary Review, Aug., 1905 (reprinted as Medieval Studies, nos. 3 and 4).
2. Newman’s Letters, Ed. Mozley (1891), vol. ii, p. 481: cf. Ana. Fra. Vol. iii, pp. 118, 269, 360 and passim. Wadding, an. 1246, p. 158: 1261, p. 178: 1277, p. 22: Eubel. Prov. passim.
3. For puritanism in architecture see Eccleston, col. Vii; Archiv. vi, pp. 34-36, 70; Ana. Fra. Ii, 123; Wadding, an. 1242, p. 17; Actus S. Francisci ed. Sabatier, p. 203; D. Bernardi Ep. ad Guil. Abbatem, cap. xii. — For music Dav. Aug., p. 28: R. Bacon ed. Brewer, R.S., p. 297; Archiv. vi, p. 70; Wadding, an. 1250, p. 241. — For vandalism Od. Rig., pp. 426, 572: Wadding, an. 1236, p. 429; 1279, 462; 1280, 467; 1291; Actus S. Francisci, cap. Xl. For Calvinistic ideas of hell Bonav. Quæst. Circ. Reg. xix and Soliq., c. iv; Aquinas sup. quæst. XCIV (XCV) art. iii. Gerson, vol. ii, p. 676E. In fact (as Dr. Brown has pointed out in his recent able essay on Pearl) this Calvinistic idea is not the exception, but the almost universal rule among medieval schoolmen. (for Angela, see Wadding, an. 1309, § xi).
St. Bernard’s bitter condemnation of elaborate architecture or ornament for monastic churches, though perhaps the most instructive document of its kind, is too long to quote here; but I subjoin a shorter passage from the De Claustro Animæ, printed among the works of Hugh of St. Victor, but probably written by his contemporary, Hugh Foliot (Migne Pat. Lat., clxxvi, col. 1053). “Let the Brethren’s buildings be not superfluous, but humble; not delightful, but decent. Stone is useful in building, but of what use is carving in the stone?” Such show might indeed be permitted in the Temple under the Old Testament dispensation, and nowadays “let it be permitted (if it be permitted in any case) to those who dwell in towns or villages frequented by layfolk, that such simple minds as are not delighted by the subtleties of Holy Scripture may be held fast by the delight of 367 of painting [or sculpture]: but, for us [monks] who delight in solitude, a horse or ox is better in the field than carved on the wall.” Gerson is not at all sure that the multiplicity of images does not lead the common folk into idolatry: and Chaucer’s contemporary Eustache Deschampe, composed a poem which he entitled “Balade, que on ne doit mettre es eglises nulz ymaiges entaille, fors le crucifix et la vierge, pour doubte d’ydolatrier.” (Works, vol. viii, p. 201). There is one stanza o the poem which (if we had no other evidence) would show the futility of Abbot Gasquet’s contention that even the common people worshipped images without any risk of idolatry:
“Car l’ouvraige est forme plaisant:
La painture dont je me plain,
La beauté de l’or reluisant,
Font croire à maint peuple incertain
Que ce soient Dieu pour certain,
Et servent par pensées foles
Telz ymages qui font caroles (i.e., stand in a ring)
Es moustiers ou trop en mettons;
C’est tres mal fait; a briefs paroles
Telz simulacres n’aourons.”
4. Bern. Bess., pp. 303-309, 405. — St. Bonaventura in the same volume, pp. 234, 249, 262-265. — Dav. Aug., pp. 32 ff, 188, 325 ff, 286 ff. — Bern. Bess., 364, 347. — mirror, chap. 96. — Dav. Aug., pp. 46, 48. I will quote a few of these warnings in full. St. Bonaventura (262): “Avoid in all places all women and beardless youths, except for reasons of necessity or manifest profit.” Again (239): “Flee from women as far as in thee lieth, as from serpents; nor even speak with any except under compulsion of urgent necessity; nor even look in the face of nay woman. . . . . For Augustine saith ‘with women we must speak roughly, briefly and stiffly: nor are they less perilous for being holy women: for, the holier they are, the more they entice us, and under the cloke of smooth speech creeps in the slime of most impious lust. Believe me, who am a bishop: I speak the truth in God, I lie not. I have known cedars of Lebanon and bell-wethers of the flock to fall by this pretext: — men whose ruin I should no more have suspected than that of St. Jerome or St. Ambrose.’ ” St. Bonaventura’s secretary (381), after warning the friar never to kiss even his mother, if he can well avoid it, or “his sister or niece, of however tender age,” adds, “how can it be lawful to touch that which is not lawful to gaze upon!” David of Augsburg (188): “How many have frequented spiritual women under the excuse of spiritual friendship and of obtaining their prayers! See, what purity in their first intention, viz., 368 charity and devotion! Then follow long talks, now of God, now of their own mutual love and faith, and loving looks and little presents exchanged for memorials of friendship. . . . At last follow false goods, but true evils, namely, embraces, kisses, touching of hands and breasts, and the like; all of which are suspicious signs of carnal affection and preludes of foul works. Last of all, as the guilt of what hath gone before, follows immodesty, that is, open works of iniquity.” There, again, is an anecdote of St. Dominic’s successor, Jordan of Saxony, a saint, and a man of sound common sense (Vit. Frat., p. 146): “A certain friar accused a brother friar in Chapter of having touched a woman’s hand. He replied, ‘She was a good woman.’ then answered the president (Jordan of Saxony), ‘Rain is good and earth is good, yet from their mingling mud is formed: so also is it even with the good hand of a man and of a woman; for when they join together evil thoughts and affections sometimes arise.’ ” S. Bernardino of Siena, enumerating the cases in which a friar may lawfully appeal to the higher authorities against the decision of his immediate superiors, specifies “also if he were to be compelled by the superiors of any monastery to hear confessions, and through such confessions should frequently fall into frailty . . . . also if any woman were to solicit him to sin with her by signs of words or presents” (Opp., vol. iii, p. 442). Many friars tried to live up to this ascetic creed: admiring chroniclers record how St. Louis of Toulouse was asked by his mother, after a long absence, “Am I not your mother, who may lawfully kiss you?’ To whom her virginal son replied, ‘I know, my Lady, that you are a mother and a woman, whom it is not expedient for a servant of God to kiss’ ” (24 gen., p. 434.) Also, “Brother Jacopo di Benedetto da Todi, a man of great perfection, was so firmly rooted in purity of mind and body that (as he said) he cared to see the head and face of the fairest woman no more, or perchance even less than an ass’s head” (Ibid, p. 460). Yet we may see clearly, even from Salimbene, how little the majority were inclined to avoid all social intercourse with women, and how easy it might be to fall into spiritual familiarity with a nun. A little later, Alvarez Pelayo, a learned Spanish Franciscan, who became a Papal Penitentiary, complained of the frequency with which familiarity between nuns and their devoti, or spiritual directors, led to sin. “Scarce any nun is without her carnal Mdevotus . . . . and she holds herself neglected who has no such devotee, or rather corrupter. Secular folk and nuns’ relations know this, and murmur and are scandalized and complain to the Superiors, but to small purpose; for the flame of the flesh is a consuming fire.” (De Planctu Ecclesiæ, fol. 243A; lib. ii, art. 73). These words, from a churchman in such high position, lend double significance 369 to Salimbene’s tales of the Abbess of Gatharola, and the poor nun who had Cardinal Ottaviano for her father; and they make us understand the frequent attempts of some of the best Franciscan Generals to cut the male part of the Order altogether apart form the female (cf. Wadding, 1245, p. 140; 1250; p. 233; 1255, p. 537; 1263, p. 218). In this last passage St. Bonaventura asserts most earnestly “the secret evil and hidden danger” of such relations. Moreover, there was the further chance of scandal even where there was no guilt, as St. Bonaventura says again in repudiating the care of the béguinages: “I any of these [béguines] were of evil repute for any crime of fornication or adultery, forthwith men who perchance love us not would publish this abroad to our infamy saying, ‘Lo! These barefooted Sisters bring forth little barefooted children for them! but of whom should they conceive such if not of those who are busy about with them all day long? And wanton clergy or laymen, in their hatred of us, would be more unfriendly to those Sisters, either to corrupt them or to bring them into evil fame, since their disgrace would fall upon us rather than upon others.’ ” (Libell. Apol., Quæst. xvi). These passages out of ten ties as many which might be quoted, may suffice to show the reader how much greater were the perils of monastic life in days when the Religious swarmed everywhere, and public opinion was comparatively lenient, than in our days of few monasteries, efficient police, and strong public opinion.
5. Friars and food, see McCabe, “Twelve Years in a Monastery,” p. 263, and “Life in a Modern Monastery,” chap. Iv: Eccleston R.S., p. 19” Bonav. Quæst. circ. Reg. ix: Bert. Rat. Sermones, p. 30: Archiv. vol. iv, pp. 77, 80. cf. 187: Bern. Bess., chaps. xxi, xxii, xxxii: Hugo de S. Victore de Inst. Novitiorum. (Migne. Pat. Lat., vol. 176), col. 949c: Humb. De Romanis Speculum Religiosorum (Cologne, 1616), p. 136. “Indecenter agitur” (says B. Bess., p. 352) . . . “si quis tussit aut sternutat non aversa facie a mensa; raro enim hoc fit sine qualicunque emmissione reliquiarum oris; si nudam manum in mensa naribus emungendis vel carni nudæ scalpendæ apponit, vel manum ipsum ad vestimenta detergit.” The handkerchief or napkin, though not absolutely unknown even in the 13th century, was seldom or never used for its chief modern purpose. The 14th century “Boke of Curtasye” warns: —
“If thou spitt ouer the borde, or elles opon,
Thou shalle be holden an uncurtase mon . . .
If thy nose thou clense, as may be-falle,
Loke thy honde thou clense, as wythe-alle,
Priuely with skyrt do hit away,
Other ellis thurgh thi tepet that is so gay.”
Manners and Meals. E.E.T.S., p. 301, cf. 25). A quotation from Hugh of St. Victor’s rules for the table behavior of Austin Canons, will enable the reader to see how nearly monks and friars approached each other in this respect. (Migne Pat. Lat. clxxvi, 949). “Let nothing be done with noise or tumult . . . Do not as some do, who on sitting down to table show their intemperance of mind by a certain uneasy agitation and confusion of their limbs. They wag their heads, stretch out their arms, spread out their hands on high, and not without great boorishness (as though they would swallow down the whole meat at one gulp), they strain and stretch with unseemly gestures. They pant, they gasp for anguish: you might fancy that hey were seeking some easier inlet to their clamour maw, as though the straitness of their gullet could not minister in proper abundance to their hungry stomach. . . . Some at their meals, in their anxiety to empty the dishes, wrap in the cloth, or throw upon it, the sops reeking with fat or gravy that have been poured over them; until at last (having meanwhile gutted the inward parts of the dish) they put back the sops as they were. Others, as they drink, plunge their fingers half-way into the cup. Others wipe their greasy hands on the frocks, and turn again to handle the food. Others again fish out their vegetables with bare fingers instead of a spoon; so that they seem to wash their hands and refresh their belly with one and the same broth. Others thrust again into the dish their half-gnawed crusts or sops, and dip into the cups the leavings of their own teeth in the guise of sippets. These things (as I have said above) would be shameful for me to described, but that I have been forestalled by such as do them in deed.”
6. Cf. a Reviewer in the Church Times for Aug. 26th, 1904, who complains that the average Englishman judges monks by “the consciousness of what he himself should (sic.) be and do if he were placed in a cloister,” and who goes on to betray complete ignorance of monastic life as described by monks themselves.
7. Friars in church, see esp. Bern. Bess., pp. 301-341. Bonav., pp. 56, 218 of same vol.: Dav. Aug. pp. 7, 107: Cæs. Heist., vol. i, pp. 202-206, 222, 250 (2), 283, 284, 333: vol. ii, p. 104: vit. Frat., p. 206. Nic. Clar. Serm. iii in Nativ. Domini. (in Mabillon’s St. Bernard, 1719, vol. ii, p. 584). Thos. Cant. Pp. 334, 335, 405. Italie Mystique, p. 171.
8. The law might indeed forbid: but the reader will see later on that the secular clergy were often almost incredibly irreverent in medieval churches.
3719. Talking, laughing, etc., Eccleston R.S., p. 20. Vit. Frat., p. 144. Bonav. l. c. 207. Bern. Bess. 328, 357, 377, 395, 396. Archiv., vol. iii, p. 168. Bern. Bess. 340, 302. This same habit of public criticism during service is noted by Bishop Grandisson among his clergy in Exeter Cathedral. Too often one officiant would trip in his reading; when the rest, who should rather have mourned his fault, would cry aloud in the vulgar tongue, “Cursed be he who spake that last lie” (Reg., p. 586).
10. For sanitary rules in church, etc., see Bern. Bess. 327, 328, 338, 339, 364, 368, 370, 406. Flamenca (ed. p. Meyer), line 3, 131; cf. T. Wright, Domestic Manners, pp. 162, 277, 366.
11. Mantellos curtos usque ad nates. For this, and other wilful singularities, the General rescenzio da Jesi “valiantly exterminated them.” (xxiv Gen., p. 263. Cf. 469, and Ubertino’s description of the Brethren’s dresses in Archiv, iii, 56).
12. Archiv., iii, 65.
13. Cæs. Heist. dist. iv, c. 48: cf. iii 8, iv 6, xii 5. For monastic and general ideas of personal cleanliness in the Middle Ages see Busch, Introd., p. xxiv, and p. 584: Consuetudines S. Aug. Cant. (H. Bradshaw Soc. 1902), p. 195: Winchester Obedientiary Rolls (Hampshire Record Soc.), p. 71: cf. 36, 87: R. Steele, Medieval Lore, p. 51: Vinc. Bell. Spec. Hist. xxviii 128, and xxix 116: Register of Peckham, R.S., vol. i, p. 1: Maitland, Dark Ages, 1890, p. 85. David of Augsburg mentions vermin among the petty trials which no Religious can escape: “oportet nos pati morsiones pulicum et similium bestiolarum” (259); cf. the Dominican Vita Fratrum, p. 39, where Father Conway renders a plain word of the original by the euphemistic phrase “and other discomforts.” Etienne de bourbon is even more plain-spoken about the inconvenience of the elaborately dressed wigs which were in vogue among 13th century ladies, and which had to be built up with such toil and kept so carefully undisturbed. Such fashionable ladies, he says, are “the devil’s martyrs”: just consider “the pain and labour which they suffer in getting and dressing [the hair], washing and combing, dyeing and anointing, suffering vermin and nits and lice therein, etc., etc.,” (pp. 233, 240). Michelet was too hasty in asserting that Europe forgot to bathe for 1,000 years; but it is none the less true that he daily tub draws a hard and fast line between polite society in the 20th century and in the 13th. This is clearly shown by many detailed descriptions of the knight’s morning toilette: e.g. Petit Jean de Saintré pt. i, c. ix: 372 Manners and Meals E.E.T.S., p. 179: Flamenca, l. 224 ff. cf. 1556 ff. See again the words of St. Vincent Ferrar (in a sermon quoted by Thureau-Dangin St. Bernardin de Sienne. Chap. iv, § ii. (Paris, 1897). “what does a man do on awakening in the morning/ He does ten things: opens his eyes, sits up in bed, half dresses, gets out of bed, spits, puts on his drawers, washes his hands, etc., etc.” L. Gautier, in his La Chevalerie, shows clearly enough that the bath was not unknown, but entirely fails to see that this was the warm bath, taken as a luxury or by doctor’s orders. Siméon Luce points out that public bathing establishments of this kind were to be found sometimes even in villages in 13th century France: but his assertions on this and similar points are summed up very inaccurately and apologetically by Abbot Gasquet (Gt. Pestilence, pp. 54-56: cf. Luce, chap. iii).
14. Cf. Ubertino’s contention (Archiv. Iii, p. 176), that “the Rule alloweth no change of garments, for outer or for inner wear . . . yet, since the Brethren need now and then (interdum) to wash their frocks [which the Rule compelled them to wear day and night], St. Francis ordained that some should be kept in common, more or less according to the numbers of the brethren; which common frocks might be used by the sick.” Thomas of Eccleston (R.S. p. 33), mentions how “Brother Elias sent word round that the Brethren should wash their own drawers: so the Brethren of the English Administration washed theirs, according to his bidding; but they of the Scottish Administration waited for further orders.” This probably involved the problem of the lavandaria, or washerwoman, which had long been a serious difficulty in the older orders, and became acute later on among the Friars also, as Ninguard’s 16th century Visitations show.
15. For friar’s morality see Ana. Fra. iii, p. 268. Piers Plowman, B. xx, 345. Ben. Im. Vol. v. p. 85. Busch, p. 45. Gerson, vol. i, p. 194E, ii, 641C. Gower, Vox Clamantis, lib. iii, l. 837; and the parallel passages in his Mirour de l’Omme.
16. Contemporary, Dec., 1905, and April, 1906: cf. reply by Father R. H. Benson in the June number, and my rejoinder in July. I cannot help regretting that Father Benson, from a dislike of controversy which I know to be genuine in his case, has declined to allow me to reprint his essay under the same covers as my two (Medieval Studies, No. 6, “The Truth about the Monasteries”). I had already dealt with Abbot Gasquet’s falsifications of the real evidence in my first Medieval Study, “The Monastic Legend.” the matter was also discussed at some length in the Tablet (Dec. 6, 1905, to the following February): 373 but my antagonist in that paper, Father Gerard, whom I had convicted of gross and palpable mis-statements, altogether declined to let me reprint the whole correspondence. I have since permitted the Protestant Reformation Society to reprint my letters with summaries of Father Gerard’s, in a pamphlet entitled, Catholic Truth and Historical Truth.”
17. Monummeta Franciscana, p. 55. Father Cuthbert’s translation (The Friars, and how they came to England”) destroys the real sense of this passage, by omitting the crucial word ordinis, thus making it appear as if the friars’ difficulties were incurred in reforming other institutions than their own.
18. Cf. Eccleston’s description of the General Aymon of Faversham, who through his early asceticism “became at last so feeble and delicate that he could scarce live without roast meats and warm food” (R.S., p. 22). Similarly Bourbon (p. 422) describes the extent to which St. Bernard, after ruining his own health, was forced to set a dangerous example to his brother monks.
19. Bert. Rat. Serm., p. 11: cf. 8, 9, 13, 14, and passim. — Bonav. Quæst. circ. Reg. xix: cf. the even stronger language of his contemporary, David of Augsburg, as to the scorn and persecution to which strict friars were already subjected by the laxer majority (pp. 110, 285, 331). — Bert. Rat. Serm., pp. 29, 41, 71.
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1. In theory, divorce in the modern sense is not permitted by the Roman Church; but it was generally easy for influential persons to obtain a decree of nullity on different pretexts, or (as apparently in this case) to take the law into their own hands and practically change wives at pleasure. For the absurd and immoral anomalies of the Canon Law on the question of marriage, see the chapter on this subject in Pollock and Maitland’s “History of English Law.”
2. Cf. Brother Thomas Hibernicus, who imitated a certain St. Mark in cutting off his thumb to escape the priesthood (Eubel. Prov., p. 51), and Conrad of Offida, one of the greatest of the early friars. “Brother Andrew asked Brother Conrad of Offida why he never celebrated, since he was priest and was [formerly] wont to celebrate frequently: whereunto he answered, ‘Know, Brother Andrew, that before I was made priest, I was for full seven years continuously in such a mood that in all created things — stocks and stones and whatsoever else they might be — in all, I 374 say, I was wont to behold God wrapped in sweet celestial light, and then I was so comforted that I thought to possess a Paradise everywhere. And at that time it was burdensome to me to serve at mass, for that it distracted me from this consolation, when I must needs serve the priest in his mass. How then could I now celebrate mass, though I received the Lord’s body on Sundays and feast days for the reverence and efficacy o the Sacrament? And meseems that, before I was a priest, St. Francis appeared more often to me than now: and at times he would lean his head on my breast, and would speak to me at greater length than now.’ ” (Ana. Fra., iii, 427).
3. For St. Francis see H. Böhmer, Analekten z. Gesch. des. F. v. Assisi. (Tübingen, 1904), pp. 28, 39. The former reference is translated at length, though not very correctly, by Miss Macdonell, p. 152. The hermitage system went on at least till 1220, six years before the saint’s death: Sabatier, p. 199.
4. Salimbene, pp. 100 foll. Lempp. (p. 116) thinks that his opinions can scarcely be taken as altogether typical on this point; that the Order can scarcely have drifted so far I so short a time. But it had undoubtedly drifted at least as far from the Saint’s purpose in the direction of extravagant buildings and reception of money: and even the love of money is not a more natural instinct than that the learned members of a religious Order should resent such an equality, or even preponderance, of the unlearned, as was the rule under St. Francis.
5. Cf. Dante, Inf., xxiii, 3. After the example of the earlier monastic Orders, friars were commanded always to go about two by two, to avoid scandal: and the same regulation was enforced on the inmates of colleges at medieval universities.
6. Salimbene here exaggerates: Haymo of Faversham (1240-1244) did indeed forbid their promotion to offices, but hey were still admitted to the Order, as Prof. Holder-Egger points out (p. 103, note 6).
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1. For Guido Bonatti see Dante Inf., x, 118, and Prof. Holder-Egger’s note on this page 163.
2. It is noteworthy that St. Bonaventura was here of an opposite opinion to his contemporary Salimbene. He specifies this “frequent re-election of officials as one of he chief causes of the decay of a religious Order,” and gives his reasons at length.” (Quæst. cir. Reg., xix.)
3753. Cf. his Life by Bonaventura, viii, 9, 10. I have already noted (Medieval Studies, no. 3) how little the Order in general seems to have shared Francis’s love of animals. From the time of the General Chapter of Narbonne, at least (1260), it was a strict rule “that no animal be kept, for any Brother or any convent, whether by the Order or by some person in the Order’s name, except cats and certain birds for the removal of unclean things.”
4. Such assertions as that in Mr. F. S. Stevenson’s Grosseteste (p. 148), that the early part of the 13th century was the “golden age of English monasticism” cannot be taken without very considerable qualification. There is a strong tendency among modern writers to ignore the large body of irreproachable evidence as to widespread and serious abuses in all, or nearly all, the Orders long before 1250. Guibert of Nogent, early in the 12th century, describes the monasteries of his time as dumping grounds for young men of good family who could not otherwise be proved for, and who therefore spent their monastic life in Idleness and dissipation of the common revenues. (Migne. Pat. Lat. clvi, col. 850): Jacques de Vitry, early in the 13th, and Roger Bacon towards the end of the same century, bear testimony at least a unflattering. See note 5 to chap. 12, and appendix D, in which I have put a small selection from the vast mass of available evidence.
5. Among the witty and improper pieces of prose and verse contained in the Franciscan MS. Harl. 913, is one on the Abbot of Gloucester’s Feast, in which the Brethren make this complaint. See Reliquiæ Antiquæ, i, 140.
6. For Pietro Peccatore see Dante, Par., xxi, 122, and Toynbee’s Dante Dictionary s.v. Damiano and Pietro degli Onesti. It is very possible that Dante confused the two men; but these words of Salimbene’s seem to show conclusively that the second was the real Pietro Peccatore.
7. Cf. Father Cuthbert’s the Friars, and how they came to England, pp. 105, 106, in which a doubtful sentence of Prof. Brewer’s is exaggerated out of all moderation and reason. Apart from such passages as this of Salimbene’s, and hundreds of other briefer testimonies to the same spirit among the records of the early friars, (E.g. Bonaventura’s Lie of St. Francis, v. 5), Father Cuthbert’s theory is flatly contradicted by two passages of the very chronicle which he has undertaken to edit (pp. 207, 233). His only medieval reference in its support is to Chaucer (Prol. 212, 213), where the poet obviously intends slyly to convey that same accusation against the Friars’ morality which is outspokenly 376 pronounced in Piers Plowman, b. xx. 344. Father Cuthbert’s work, though the Church Times commends it warmly “to al who are vexed with Dissenters,” abounds in such purely imaginary presentations of history; and his translation of Thomas of Eccleston, apart from a few obvious blunders, is disfigured by one or two very unfortunate misrepresentations.
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1. Cf. Purg., xi, 81.
2. For the extent to which Latin hymnology was indebted to popular songs, see Du Méril, pp. 26 ff.
3. Helinand in Vinc. Bell. Spec. Hist., l. xxix, c. 144 — Ben. Im. vol. iii, p. 75.
4. Some instances of the rapid oblivion which overtook even miracle-workers may be found in Wadding 1212, § 42: 1233, p. 369: 1235, p. 401: 1282, p. 114: 1291, p. 281: 1305, § 4. The seven bulls said to have been addressed in 1216 to seven bishops about the Portiuncula Indulgence were all lost by 1281, or at latest by 1330 (Sabatier, p. 415: cf. 24 Gen., p. 372 note). Bartholomew of Pisa, when he wrote his book of the Conformities, was unable to ascertain where Simon of Assisi was buried. Already in 1360 the important book of the Minister-General Crescenzio da Jesi, on the lives of early friars, was half destroyed: “some of it is left, the rest has perished through neglect.” St. Adhémar de Filsin died in 1309: half a century later the Chronicler of the Twenty-four Generals writes “although much had been written of his life and miracles, all have been lost by carelessness” (Ana. Fra., pp. 160, 263, 464: cf. 216 and 372 note). I shall have occasion to return to this subject of medieval negligence of books. (Chap. Xiii, note 6).
5. See the confessions of W. de Notyngham in Mon. Franc. R.S., p. 71, and compare those of Adam Marsh, on p. 336.
6. Wadding, 1256, pp. 2 ff.
7. Dante. Par. xii, 134.
8. Miss Macdonell (pp. 246 foll.) brings out well the unselfish humility of John’s last thirty years, though here again she twice misreads Salimbene, and misapplies to John some words of Ubertino which were really written of St. Francis.
3779. These testimonials of John of Parma are quoted in full by Affò, Vita di Gioanni di Parma (Parma, 1777), pp. 181, 182. Miss Macdonell puts the date of his beatification wrongly in 1770.
10. “Ugolino the shearer,” whom Miss Macdonell quotes to prove Salimbene’s want of snobbishness, even towards humble friends, would in fact be a man of wealth and position in the city. The “tonsores“ (not shearers, but shearmen) were clothdressers, possessing a quarter of their own in 13th century Oxford, Norwich, and elsewhere; and a master-shearman, such as the context implies Ugolino to have been, would be a wealthy man.
11. Not the Azzo VIII of Inf. xviii, 56 and Purg. v, 77; but his great-grandfather, Azzo VII, who died in 1264.
12. The great heroine of the Church party, and probably the Matelda of Purg. xxviii, 40 foll.
13. Ecc. x, 19 (Vulg.) Those who groan over the power of “the almighty dollar” in the modern world, may be consoled to learn that this text was repeated in the Middle Ages with wearisome iteration by writers of all classes, and certainly with at least as much just as at present.
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1. These and half-a-dozen similar sentences in Salimbene form an admirable commentary on Par. xvii, 58.
2. With regard to Salimbene’s remark about the five talents Prof. Holder-Hegger falls into a curious error. Not recognizing the allusion to the Parable of the Talents, he notes, “I have never read the incident in the lives of St. Francis; nor do I see how it can be bold [told] of a man who would not touch money.” Salimbene, with the usual Franciscan ingenuity in finding types of St. Francis throughout Holy Scripture, has no doubt that St. Matthew’s words “to one he gave five talents” prefigured the one Saint to whom Christ had given his five wounds. For it must be borne in mind that this miracle of the Stigmata, not uncommon since, was still unique when Salimbene wrote.
3. Cæs. Heist. dist. vi, c. 30.
4. The Parmese had torn down all the exiles’ houses and built their city walls with the materials (Murat. ix, p. 773D).
3785. This is the Bernardo Rossi whom Salimbene compares with Charlemagne: a flattering description which Miss Macdonell, blindly following Cantarelli’s translation, transfers to the Emperor Frederick.
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1. Cf. Ben. Im., iii, 320 (commentary on Purg., xi, 134 ff). Prof. Holder-Egger throws doubt on this story: very unnecessarily, as I cannot help thinking. The fact that Enzio was at one time treated well in prison affords only a very slight presumption in favour of his continued good treatment, especially in the Middle Ages.
2. For the horrors of prison life even under ordinary circumstances see Gross, Office of Coroner (Selden Soc.), pp. 79 ff. Six prisoners died in Northampton Gaol, within little more than a year (1322-3), of “hunger and thirst and cold.”
3. Chron. Parm. in Murat., ix, pp. 810, 823, 825.
4. One of the most crying sins of Bologna is branded by Benvenuto da Imola, vol. i, pp. 522 ff. (commentary on Inf. xv, 106 ff.)
5. Ben. i, 128: cf. 222 — though in iii, 397 he seems to say that all provinces of Italy were alike desolate.
6. III, 181, on Purg, vi, 76 foll. [Does he mean Ibid here? Check text for note]
7. Sermon iv, p. 93.
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1. Miss Macdonell, again misled by the Italian translation, represents the courtiers as standing on each other’s shoulders!
2. Lyons was then nominally in the Empire.
3. This latter tree is described also, in much the same language, in the Chronicle of the Twenty-four Generals, p. 354.
4. This unflattering account of Papal Legates is borne out by the distinguished John of Salisbury, who writes: ‘Not even do the Papal Legates keep their hands altogether free from bribes; for sometimes they rage with such fury in their provinces as though 379 Satan had come out form before the Lord’s face to scourge His church . . . . I do not say this of all legates, however. (Migne. Pat. Lat. cxcix, col. 580).
5. This remark about the Benedictines is all the more significant because the journal of his contemporary, Odo Rigaldi, shows that even these stricter French monasteries were already in such a state of decay as would not be tolerated in modern England.
6. For these parodies see Du Méril, pp. 204 note, 222 note.
7. i.e., in modern French “J’ai bu: à vous!” — “I have drunk, now it’s your turn!”
8. For Eudes Rigaud, one of the most remarkable prelates of the Middle Ages, see the chapter below on “The Princes of the Church.”
9. See Archiv., vol. vi, p. 129.
10. It was not only in churches that the scantiness of medieval furniture frequently necessitate sitting on the ground, e.g., Joinville, vi, § 37 “li roys . . . mist la main à terre, et dist: ‘Seez-vous ci, bien près de moy, pour ce que on ne nous oie.’ ” Cf. ibid iv, § 27; Eccleston R.S., p. 60; Rashdall i, pp. 438, 561. This explains, though it can scarcely justify, the frequency of scuffles for seats during the service.
11. Cf. Chaucer, Prologue i, 179. The ascription of these words to “Holy Scripture” will surprise none of those who know what quasi-Biblical authority was usurped in the Middle Ages by some most unbiblical books: this quotation is in fact from Gratian’s Decretum.
12. See below: “Princes of the Church.”
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1. One of the spurious writings called forth by the popularity of Joachim’s prophecies.
2. The same “rigour of justice” was also inflicted on friars whose only crime was that of interpreting the Rule too literally. Perhaps the worst case was that of Bro. Pontius Potugati, who had refuse to give up for the burning certain writing which he possessed of the Spiritual Jean de Pierre d’Olive. “Nam vinculis 380 Derreis compeditum et catena ferres, infra carcerum fetidum artum et cæcum ligatum includunt, et affligentes trunco cathenam in tantum eum coarctant et stringunt ut non alibi, nisi ubi seere ferro ravatus cogebatur, posset secedere vel modicum ad requistia nature. Super nudam humum urina pedum suorum et stercore stratam, fetentem et lutosam, infixus sordido limo jacebat. . . . . Infirmatus tandem jacebat vel potius reclinatus sedebat sub pondere ferri in fetoribus stercoris et urine animo letus et caritatia igne succensus, infinitas Deo gratias refferens spiritum Deo reddidit. . . Custos . . . duobus fratribus laycis robustis corpore mandat, in fossis orti foveam aliquam facere et in ea corpus hora secreta projectum humo operire. Accedut fratres hii injuncta perficere, et dum laborant corpus semiseputltum in vermibus et stercore a cathena et ferreis vinculis solvere, a lumbia deorsum iveniunt [per] multitudinem vermium ex magna parte corrusum. Inteuentes vero vultum ipsius obstupuerunt, eo quod queam claritas refulgebat in facie ejus, que videbatur naturam hominis excedere, et esse potius angelica quam humana.” — Angelo Clareno in Archiv. ii, p. 300. Other similar cases may be found described in Dr. Lea’s Inquisition, vol. iii, pp. 1-89.
3. Joachim was generally understood to have fixed the year 1260 for the beginning of the New Era: and indeed Salimbene himself says as much on p. 466. It is significant of the widespread unrest and expectation of change that, in the great dispute between the Mendicants and the University of Paris, both parties were agreed as to the mysterious significance of the year 1260. (Rashdall i, 383, note 1.)
4. further allusions to the love of the Dominicans for great convents, and to the relations between them and the Franciscans, may be found on pp. 88 ff of the Mon. Germ., and 337 of the Parma edition (an. 1285).
5. For further information about Gerard and his book, see Rashdall I, 345 ff.
6. This was of course a pis-aller; Frederick, the original Antichrist, being now dead.
7. This systematic destruction of older MSS. For the sake of fresh writings was especially common in Italy, e.g. the library of Bobbio, not far from Parma, contained a very large proportion of palimpsests. There is a strong tendency among modern writers to exaggerate the responsibility of the Reformation for the destruction of books as well as for that of ancient buildings. Visitations and similar documents supply us with abundant evidence 381 of books lost or decayed through the fault og clerical custodians; it id by no means rare to hear of books completely lost to posterity, as that attributed to Lazarus, of which Salimbene tells us a few pages lower down, and those of which I have already spoken in note 4 to chap. ix. The number of books written in monasteries has also been grossly exaggerated. Eudes Rigaud’s register shows us that the Norman monks in Salimbene’s day seldom did any writing at all. It may be doubted whether, if there had been no Reformation, we should possess many more medieval books and buildings than we do at present. It is characteristic of the amount of detailed research which still needs to be done, that so good a scholar as Prof. Medley can write (Social England, illustrated edition vol. ii, p. 762) “large numbers of copyists were at work in every monastery and nunnery throughout the land.” This is simply to accept uncritically the exaggerated ideas set afloat by S. R. Maitland in his Dark Ages — ideas which sprang out of a natural reaction from the still more uncritical acceptance, a generation earlier, of Robertson’s mis-statements as to the booklessness of the Middle Ages. For the small amount of writing done in the monasteries of Normandy, even in the 13th century, and the frequent neglect of their books, see the Register of Abp. Eudes Rigaud, pp. 76, 145, 339, 361, 407 (2), 496, 555, 556, 572, 577, 578 (2), 585, 593, 596, 597, 601, 609, 612, 619, 622 (2), 628, 630, 632, 633, 639. Even great monasteries like Eu and Tréport had nobody on the premises who could re-write the dilapidated service-books. Compare the evidence of Nicke’s Norwich Visitations (Camden Soc., 1888, pp. 178, 295), and of Gascoigne (pp. 73, 112) who tells us plainly that the 15th century monks were rather destroyers than producers of books. — At the Augustinian Priory of Taunton, in 1339, five of the twenty-three Brethren were unable even to sign their names to a document, and therefore commissioned Brother John Coker to sign for them. (Reg. Rad. De Salopia. Somerset Record Soc., p. 351). Cf. Gerson, de Laude Script., Consid. x, and especially xii.
8. The seer thus raised up in Parma is no doubt Dante’s Asdente, of whom Salimbene will speak at length later on.
9. See his treatise in Baluze-Mansi, Misc. ii, p. 595 ff: especially 600, 604, 609, 610: cf. Bourbon, p. 25.
10. It is possible that the pueri of this passage were simply the city loafers, “undesirables,” and lower classes generally. The 382 Chronicon Parmense describes a similar scene of mob-rule in 1294 (Murat. ix, 827a), where pueri is evidently used in this sense.
11. Here, for instance, are the words of S. Giovanni Capistrano in the life of his contemporary S. Bernardino: “All Italy then (about 1420) lay wholly sunken in vices and crime. . . . There was no devotion to be found amongst Religious and Clerics, no faith among their flocks, no mercy, modesty, or morality (disciplina morum).” Savonarola, of course, spoke equally strongly.
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1. The steps by which the Magdalene became one of the greatest saints of the Middle Ages are interesting to trace. Many of the romantic tales which had grown up round her and her family may be found in the Golden Legend: but the high-water mark is reached by the pseudo-Cavalca, whose legend of the saint has recently been translated by Miss Hawtrey (Lane, 1904).
2. For the aureola see Ducange (who quotes Josephus Angles in 4 Sent., dist. xlix, art. 6), and Bonav. Compend. Theol. Verit., lib. vii, cap. 29. This is a work of doubtful authorship: it is also ascribed to Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The virgins’ crown will be white, the martyrs’ red, and the doctors’ green: each will proceed from a certain redundancy of spiritual joy shining forth in outward shape: cf. Dante, Par. v, 131-137; xi, 18; xvii, 121-123; xviii, 55-63, etc., etc.
3. For John of Parma’s extreme reverence see Angelo Clareno in Archiv. Ii, 267.
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1. Miss Macdonell (p. 278) adduces it is a special proof of Salimbene’s curiosity that he should have turned aside to see this landslip: but he nowhere speaks of having actually it, and only implies that he learnt what he tells us on his natural road from Lyons to Genoa. This fall of Mont Grenier, more terrible even than the Goldau catastrophe, is mentioned by Matthew Paris (an. 1248), who attributes it to the divine wrath at the greed and lust and brigandage of the inhabitants of that valley. On the other hand, Etienne de Bourbon (p. 182) explains that God’s object was to punish an unscrupulous clerical politician named Jacques Bonivard, who had wrongfully seized a priory near 383 Chambéry, and had no sooner taken possession than the landslip overwhelmed him.
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1. Nicolaus Anglicus or Brito, Bishop of Assisi in 1247. He is described as a man of great learning and high moral character.
2. For the flagellants see Murat. ix, 704; Affòl, vol. iii, p. 259. Fleury, an. 1259, § 62. Gerson, vol. i, pp. 636-643.
3. Boccaccio, Decameron, G. v, n. 8.
4. Ricobaldo an. 1275, in Murat. ix: Chron. Parm. an. 1275.
5. Vit. Ex., pp. 20, 21.
6. I have already pointed out in the Independent review of Feb., 1905 (Medieval Studies, no. 3), how little the contention of the Marquis de Rambures in his L’Eglise et le Pitié envers les Animaux is borne out by actual medieval facts.
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1. Rucibakdu Ferrarensis Additamentum (Murat. ix, 190C). — Murat. ix, p. 792.
2. Dante, Vita Nuova. Cap. iii. — Murat. ix, p. 801.
3. I point out lower down (chap. xxiii) how mistaken is the common idea that this sort of vandalism originated with the Reformation: and I have dealt more fully with the same subject in Medieval Studies, nos. 3 and 4.
4. The decree of the Synod of Milan is in Murat. ix, p. 570.
5. Cæs. Heist. dist. viii, c. 52.
6. Purg. xxiv, 24. — Salimbene smacks his lips on another page (572) over the recollection of this choice vintage, àpropos of which he quotes “the verses of a certain buffoon, who wrote:
‘O precious juice of the vine, what gift hath life like thine?
If two sorts come to the feast, then fill me a cup of the best!
Small is the profit to me if I suck down less than three;
Sweet is the fourth full bowl, and deep is the calm of my soul;
But the fifth cup sets me adaze, and my memory all in a maze;
With the sixth I desire no more, but sprawl full length on the floor.’ ”
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1. R. Bacon, ed. Brewer. R.S., p. 402.
2. The transactions of Church Synods in the Middle Ages are full of notices of such tithe quarrels. One of the most interesting of these is recorded in the diocese of Exeter at this same time. It was naturally the pettiest tithes which often caused the deepest irritation, and especially that on milk. The parson preferred to receive this in the more convenient form of cheese: but recalcitrant parishioners, as Bishop Quivil complained, hit upon an exquisite artifice to rid themselves of the vexatious tribute. They “maliciously brought their tithe of milk to church in the raw state; and then, more iniquitous still, if they found no man there to receive it, they poured it out before the altar to the dishonour of God and of the Church.” (Wilkins, Concilia. ii, 160.)
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1. Miss Macdonell, by some strange misunderstanding, seems to attribute this gift of mimicry to Salimbene himself (p. 383).
2. “De ludo schacchorum et alearum optime noverat.” Salimbene had no business to know this, for by Canon Law not only were all men forbidden to play at games of hazard, but it was sinful even to abet or watch the players, especially for an ecclesiastic; and this prohibition had been recently renewed by the great Lateran Council of 1215. Even chess enjoyed a very bad reputation: and St. Peter Damian speaks of it as a positively criminal game for a bishop. St. Bernardino triumphs in the success of a mission-preacher who “burned . . . . . many chessboards, and converted more souls than I could tell” (Prediche i, p. 73). This was no doubt because the game was usually played for money and led to much quarrelling: a murder at chess is among the stock incidents of medieval romance, and Salimbene himself gives us an instance later on (chap. xx). See B. Petri Damiani, lib. i, ep. x (Ed. Paris, 1743, t. iii, p. 227). Cf. Rashdall, vol. ii, p. 671, and T. Wright, Homes of Other Days, pp. 214 ff; Domestic Manners, pp. 198 ff. An admirable essay on Dante and the games of his time, in which much use is made of Salimbene’s evidence, ahs been contributed by Mr. E. Armstrong to the Modern Language Review (April and June, 1906).
3. The Latin word aculeus used here by Salimbene marks his sarcasm more plainly. The aculeus or equuleus was a bar of wood 385 with a sharp upper edge, which the victim was forced to bestride as on horseback, with weights hung to his ankles. The Chronicon Parmense speaks of these mock-trials as frequent during the long period of Ghiberto da Gente’s rule at Parma. (Murat. ix, 776).
4. Cf. Inf. xxix, 20, where the shade of Geri del Bello scorns his cousin Dante for not having continued the family vendetta.
5. Prof. Holder-Egger points out (p. 624, note 3) that Guidolino was elected in place of a murdered abbot, Landolfo.
6. Purg. vii, 127-129. How thoroughly Italian Dante’s feeling was on this point, is shown by Benvenuto da Imola’s comments on Inferno xxix, 122 (vol. ii, p. 409). “To understand this matter, thou must know that the French have been from ancient times the vainest of all nations, as may often be read in Julius Celsus (sic), and may be seen to-day in deed: for we see them daily invent new habits and new shapes of garments. Whence there is not a limb of the Frenchman which hath not its own fashion: for they wear chains on their necks, bracelets on their arms, points at their hose; and garments so short as to show their nakedness and the dishonourable parts of their body which should rightly be hid: while the honourable part, the head, which should be shown free, is covered by a hood over their face; and so may it be said of many of their vanities. Wherefore I marvel much, not without indignation of mind, when I see Italians, and especially our nobles, seeking to follow in these men’s footsteps and learning the French tongue, and asserting that no tongue is fairer than the French: which I cannot see: for the French is a bastard of the Latin tongue, as plain experience showeth. For since they cannot rightly pronounce cavaliero they corrupt the word and say chevalier: and in like manner they cannot say signor but sir, and so with the rest. Whereof we have a testimony herein, that even now when they would fain say ‘speak in the vulgar tongue,’ they say ‘speak Romance,’ and their vulgar tongue is called the Romance. Wherefore it is not meet that Italians should willingly submit their own nobility to less noble talk.”
7.
Dum Trutannus in m pateram tenet, el sedet ad pir,
Regem Cappadocum credit habere cocum.
i.e. “While Trutannus sits at the fire with a wine-pot in his hand, he dreams he has the king of the Cappadocians for his cook.” The reference is evidently to Horace, Ep. i, 6, 39. Trutannus is the typical drunken vagabond of medieval satire, the Roi des Truands of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame.
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1. For a long description of this Nicholas see Murat. ix, p. 248.
2. In 1270 a fleet of Sicilian and Genoese crusaders was wrecked off Trapani: Charles of Anjou appropriated everything of value that could be recovered from the wrecks, “alleging an injurious of law of King William and a longstanding but infamous custom.” Muratori Annali d’Italia, an. 1270, and Scriptt, vi, 551a. The poisoning is, of course, referred to by Dante, Purg. xx, 69: cf. the authorities quoted for and against in Toynbee’s Dante Dictionary, p. 531.
3. It is impossible to translate Salimbene’s description fully, either here or lower down: but I subjoin a few references to enable the students to realize how characteristic such scenes are of the Middle Ages. The De Antiquis Legibus Liber (Camden Soc., p. 75) describes the obscene mutilations practised on Simon de Montfort’s corpse for the gloating vengeance of a noble lady his enemy: cf. Ben. Im. i, 416, iii, 111, and A. Schylz. Höfisches Leben. i, p. 453. Such mutilations are spoken of as perfectly natural in Murat. Scriptt. ix, p. 130.
4. Vit. Ex., p. 64.
5. La Tour, p. 2, and passim: Salimbene, pp. 27, 67, 427, 429. In the first of these passages, Salimbene is speaking of Nicholas, bishop of Reggio, who “loved the friars minor so well, that he would fain have given them the cathedral church to occupy: and the canons who then held it consented thereto, and for love of the Brethren they would have gone to occupy chapels in diverse parts of the city: but the friars in their humility would not suffer this; nay, they utterly refused it. This bishop received an accusation against his steward, that this man was wont to withdraw from the friars the dole of bread which the bishop had commanded: wherefore he called him to his presence and rebuked him sore (Ecclus. iv). Moreover, knowing, as Solomon saith, that ‘a servant cannot be taught with words, for he understandeth what thou sayest and scorneth to answer,’ he laid him in strictest keeping within a dark dungeon, and fed him with the bread of tribulation and the water of anguish: after which he drave him forth form his service: God’s benison be upon him! for he knew that the race of servants cannot be corrected but by torments,’ as a certain tyrant said to them that nourished St. Hippolytus [in the Golden Legend]. As Patecchio saith ‘blessed be the Marquis of Montferrat, who was gentle to all man but to 387 serving-men.’ [Scutiferis: literally squires]. Wretched fellows! for when they are exalted and honoured in the courts of great folk, they become miserly, to show themselves good husbands and guardians of their lords’ goods: robbing from the poor and the righteous that which they waste afterwards on their harlots; and meanwhile in some parts the wives and daughters of their lords become lemans of servants and stewards and bailiffs, for they can have nothing whatsoever of the goods of the house but by the hands of such menials. Most avaricious are such lords, who love their worldly goods better than their own honour, or the bodies of their wives and daughters! Mine own eyes have seen and proved all these things.” Marriage itself, though in theory a sacrament of the church, was generally a more or less definitely commercial bargain; and nobody needed to visit Gretna Green in an age when the mere promise by word of mouth exchanged between two children in the presence of witnesses constituted a perfectly binding marriage without any ecclesiastical formalities, though the priest’s blessing was useful to guard from contingent difficulties. Here is a scene from Siméon Luce’s Du Guesclin, p. 139 ff. “Cette frénésie de luxe, où se laisse emporter la noblesse, n’a d’égale que la corruption des mœurs. Froissart, cet historien, on pourrait presque dire ce changre de la chevalerie, a raconté longuement un brillant fait d’armes de Galehaut de Ribemont contre les Anglais . . . Ce que le chroniqueur de Valenciennes se garde bien de dire, et pourtant il était trop rapproché du théâtre des événements pour l’ignorere, c’est que ce même Galehaut avait commis l’année précédente l’attentat le plus audacieux dont les annales judiciaires de cette epogque, si riche pourtant en scandales, aient gardé le souvenir. En 1356, Marie de Mortagne, fille unique de Guillaume de Moetagne, sire d’Oudenarde, est restée orpheline à l’âge de huit ou neuf ans, avec six mille livres de revenu annuel: c’est alors la plus riche héritière de Flandre et de Hainaut. Aussi, obtenir la main de cette fillette est le rêve que caressent tous les gentils-hommes de cette région. En attendant qu’elle soit en âge de se marier, Marie vit au château de Tupigny sous la garde de la dame de Tupigny, d’Eustache et de Galehaut de Ribemonit, ses cousins germains, impatients de voir mûrir cet épi blond dont ils se promettent bien les grains les plus dorvs. Malheureusement pour eux, un chevalier de leurs amis, Jean de Fay, a déjà jeté, luis aussi, un regard de convoitises sure cette riche proie. Pendant qu’Eustache et Galehaut sont allés servir le roi Jean dans cette néfaste expédition qui se termine par la défaite de Poitiers, Jean profite de leur absence pour enlever à l’église pendant la messe, avec l’aide d’une de ses sœurs nommée Clémence, la richissime héritière. Il l’emmène en son château du Fay, trouve un prêtre pour bénir leur mariage, et le tour est joué. Quelle n’est pas la 388 déconvenue des deux Ribemont lorsqu’à leur retour en Picardie, ils s’apercoivent qu’on les a prévenus [Un ???] avide oiseluer a mis la main sur la petite colombe, alors que les premières plumes lui poussaient à peine. Galehaut, surtout, moins riche que son frère en sa qualité de cadet, est inconsolable, et il guette dès lors l’occasion de reprendre celle qu’il considère comme son bien. Jean de Fay et Marie de Mortagne sont mariés depuis plus de deux ans; ils habitent le château du Fay, en Vermandois. Un matin qu’ils reposent tranquillement ensemble, Galehatu, quo s’est introduit par surprise dans le château, envahit avec l’aide de Baudas de Hennin, sire de Cuvilliers, chevalier, de Colard de la Cauchie, de Bernequin de Bailleul et de Bridoulet d’Atiches, écuyers, la chambre nuptiale, arrache Marie de Mortagne, toute nue et tremblante de frayeur, des bras de son mari, puis la conduit dans son manoire de Sorel, situé à quatre lieues du Fay où il la tient enfermée dans une tour pendant plusieurs semaines. Enfin, comme la jeune emme, révoltée sans doute de passer ainsi de main en main comme une marchandise qu’on s’arrache, refuse de fair les volontés de ce nouveau ravisseur, Galehaut, qui vaut que son équipée lui rapporte au moins quelque chose, prend le parti de transporter sa cousine germaine [an ? au] château de Dossemer, dans le souverain bailliage de Lille, où il la end en mariage à un chevalier de Gand, nommé Pierre Pascharis, “au prix de doux mille quatre cents florins d’or, plus deux draps d’écarlate.” Voilà le vilain revers de cette chevalerie, affolée de luxe, de tournois, de parade, dont Froissart n’a voulu voir que les prouesses et les élégances.
In war, the lot of women was of course infinitely les enviable. To quote Luce again (p. 67) “Il n’est pas de crime que l’on ne puisse se faire pardonner quand on sert fidèlement le roi à la guerre. Un chevalier, nommé Guillaume d’Agneaux, a commis en basse Normandie quatre viols bien aévéres, un sur la personne d’une jeune fille, trois sur la personne de femmes mariées, mais il sert le roi sur mer sous les ordres de Jean de Vienne, amiral de France; et le sage, le pieux Charles V acorde purement et simplement à ce monstre le pardon de ses atrocités.” Even this is out-done by the case of Sir John Arundel towards the end of the century. This ruffian and his crew first carried off nuns wholesale from a convent near Southampton and then threw them overboard to lighten the ship during a storm. (Walsingham, R.S., vol. i, p. 420, quoted in “Social England,” vol. ii).
6. Sacchetti, Nov. 153. — Giordano da Rivalto Prediche, p. 250 (Bologna, 1867). — Ben. Im. i, p. 579. — Archiv. iii, 107. — Bonaventura Quæst. xxvi, circa Regulam. In the Middle Ages all taking of interest, directly or indirectly, was held a mortal sin, and Pope Clement V expressly declared in the Council of 389 Vienne (1311) that it was heresy to deny the wickedness of usury: the offender was to be excommunicated and deprived of Christian burial unless he repented, confessed, and made all restitution in his power. This law however was as freely broken as most others: we constantly find monasteries in debt to money-lenders: even the best of English bishops were compelled to borrow at usury the enormous sums which had to be paid to the Papal court for their appointment: and Matthew Paris (an. 1250, 1253), complains bitterly of the protection afforded by the Popes to these bloodsuckers, adding, “In England at this time there were scarce any who were not taken in their toils.” Usury was perhaps most regularly practised in the South of France (see Toynbee, Dante Dict., art. Caorsini): but the Lombard merchants were also very frequently bankers: and indeed as trade began to grow in Europe it was found impossible to carry it on without the forbidden usury. In spite of these hard facts, usury remained a mortal sin until long after the Reformation, in theory at least: nor am I aware that the solemn decision off Pope Clement V has ever been reversed.
7. Libellus Apologeticus Quæst. xvi, in which the saint deals with the question ‘why do you not give more encouragement to the Third Order?’
8. Prof. Holder-Egger seems hypercritical in pointing out that, as Salimbene’s other data prove Bartolino to have stayed at Noceto only from Oct. 27th to Dec. 7th at most, thus “many days and nights” cannot be true (p. 604, note 1). Six weeks — or even the half of six weeks — would indeed be an uncomfortably long time to spend under these nightly excursions and alarms.
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1. Michelet. Hist. de France, liv. xi, c.1. M. Reinach (Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, Dec. 1904) has shown that Michelet was too hasty in taking literally the probably exaggerated testimony of contemporary witnesses; but the arguments by which he attempts altogether to explode that testimony show a strange estimate of what is reasonably to be expected from a 15th century law report.
2. The convents were too often dumping-grounds for natural children of great men: even in the 17th century, Wadding boasts that a Poor Clare of the 13th century was “the legitimate daughter of the king” (1259, p. 117: and he vaunts shortly afterwards two “legitimate daughters of marquises.”)
3903. Vitæ Patrum ii, c. 61: cf. Golden Legend (Temple Classics), vol. vii, p. 79.
4. Ana. Fra., vol. iii, p. 196. “A certain raven was offered to St. Francis during his lifetime, and the bird became so domesticated among the Brethren by the merits of the holy father, and so learned, that he seemed endowed with human reason. For he would go into Choir with the Brethren at all their Hours; and while the Brethren washed their hands before meat, the raven also washed his beak, and, coming into the refectory, took his food with the Brethren, and after a while, by the mere grace of God, the bird began to speak intelligibly. So St. Francis, seeing this with amazement and joy, once in the refectory bade him go to the infirmary to care for the sick and minister to their necessities. Wondrous to relate! Immediately the raven, like a reasonable creature, obeyed the servant of God implicitly. He would go through the city of Assisi at the man of God’s bidding, with a servant following him, and entering rich men’s houses he would beg alms after his own fashion for the sick. So men naturally marvelled, and gave alms to the servant, who brought them to the sick Brethren. One day when the bishop was celebrating and collecting alms, the raven begged of him according to his wont. The bishop would give nothing at the moment, but promised to give some other time; wherefore the raven, as if in indignation, took the bishop’s mitre and carried it to a butcher; and then taking meat for two sick Brethren, left him the mitre as a pledge. The bishop wondered to hear this, and paid the price to recover his mitre. Another day a knight was walking unshod through the streets in summer-time, and refused the raven’s prayer for alms; whereupon the bird ran after him and pecked him with his beak on the shin, and the knight forthwith struck him again with his staff. So another day the raven found the aforesaid knight riding between Assisi and the Portuincula with a fair helmet or cap upon his head; and, remembering how the knight had once struck him, he snatched the cap from his head, and left it hanging high on a tree. So the knight dismounted and climbed to the top of the tree for his cap. But the raven forthwith swooped upon the horse, and smiting him sore with his beak, urged him to a gallop, and so was revenged of the knight. When St. Francis died, the raven fell grievously sick, and would eat nothing. But when the Brethren told him to go to the saint’s tomb, he obeyed forthwith, and would not leave it, or eat, or drink, but died there of grief.”
5. The phrase was doubtless commonly current in the Middle Ages: Gower alludes to it in speaking of the number of evil clergy in his day (Vox Clamantis, bk. iii, 1. 1327.
391“Tales nec caste curant neque vivere caute,
De quibus exempla sunt modo saepe mala.”
Cf. Fuller, church History, bk. vi, sect. iii, c. x, § 7, “The Charta Magna, as I may call it, of monastical practice, ‘si non caste, tamen caute.”
6. Miss Macdonnell (p. 287) has misread this passage, evidently not fully realizing the sacredness of the Franciscan habit. Her account of the two Germands and of Rinaldo of Arezzo, on the same page is equally inaccurate.
7. This too favourable description, which Salimbene no doubt heard as a tradition in the Order, is in direct variance with the accounts of eye witnesses, themselves of the Church party. (Murat. Scriptt. tom. viii, 299 and 694). Only five men were murdered, but “the violent plunder of the houses was more than can be described or imagined.”
8. There were the friars who clung to the original Franciscanism of the Fioretti and the Mirror of Perfection, and who resisted the relaxations introduced by brother Elias. It is from Salimbene alone that we learn the character of the Legate who compelled the German province to conform to these relaxations.
9. This is the church by which Dante’s tomb now stands.
10. i.e. a canon of the cathedral. For the steps by which this title came to be applied exclusively to members of the sacred college, see Ducange, s.v.
11. Prof. Holder-Egger points out (p. 400, note 3) that the chronicler Thomas of Pavia records the finding of this body in 1231, and tells how the great Bonaventura was glad to get a single tooth. Parma is too near Ravenna for Salimbene to have successfully imposed on his brother-friars with a totally different body; we must therefore infer that the relic had cheapened very much between 1231 and 1270, when the archbishop died. This however is a common medieval phenomenon: we may see from inventories that relics were constantly disappearing from churches: the charm of novelty seems rapidly to have evaporated, and they were either stolen or allowed to disappear by mere neglect: for popular worship was apt to tire as quickly and as unaccountably as it had sprung up.
12. Much curious information about contemporary ladies’ costume may be found in Bourbon, esp. pp. 228, 231, 233, which cats interesting 392 sidelights also on contemporary manners. Bourbon is specially indignant at their cosmetics and false hair; “they paint themselves like idols”: “they are like images of Janus, old in front and young behind.
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1. Probably Gerard, Archbishop-elect of Albano, who died in 1211.
2. Liutgardis quoted in Hurter’s Innocent III., l. xxi. — Cæs. heist. dist. ii,., cap. 30. — Jac. de Marchia in Baluze-Mansi Misc., vol. ii., p. 599.
3. Wadding III, 325: Thos. Cant. II, x, 21, — Eccleston R.S. pl 66: his words are “quam Papa quicunque.” Here, as in other places. Father Cuthbert’s translation is not true to the too plain-spoken original. Compare Pipinus’s account of another papal deathbed (Murat. ix, 750). “Pope Clement V possessed in his lifetime a flood of riches; yet on his deathbed he was stripped even of his clothes by the servants, so that only one wretched cloak could be found to cover his corpse withal, as was reported afterwards by the Religious who were then present. Moreover, it is said that on the night whereon he died he was so deserted by all, that his body was partly burnt by the fire of some tapers which fell upon him.”
4. A well-known medieval romance of two knights who had sworn blood-brotherhood.
5. This was a common scriptural quotation against nepotism: cf. Grosseteste’s letters. R. S. p. 437.
6. See the satire quoted by Benvenuto da Imola (ii, 408) upon the sons of the clergy masquerading as their nephews. — ‘Sæpe sacerdotes filios dixere neopotes.”
7. Prof. Holder-Egger quotes similar unflattering descriptions of Honorius from other writers, including the verdict of Brunetto Latini, “fu avarissimo come cane.” (618, note 4).
8. The author of the Golden Legend speaks almost equally strongly of the Cardinalates as an upstart dignity. Murat. Scriptt. ix, p. 22.
9. Cf. Golden Legend (Temple Classics) vol. v, p. 201. St. Jerome “blamed the jollity and lavish life” of some of the clergy, who 393 revenged themselves by falsely accusing him of unchastity: whereupon he retired from Rome to Constantinople.
10. Salimbene, as Prof. Holder-Egger points out, is here parodying the records of the early Popes which he found in the Liber Pontificalis of Ravenna. The Professor appears to think that nearly all this speech is Salimbene’s own invention: but the main contents are in perfect harmony not only with what we know of Hugh from other sources (e.g. Joinville § 657, Angelo Clareno in Archiv. II, 282, and Ana. Fra. III, 405), but also with Grosseteste’s speech at Lyons (Browne, Fascic. II, 250).
11. Matt. Paris, an. 1251, and Petrarch in Lea’s Celibacy, p. 342. In 1311 Bp. Guillaume Durand presented a petition to the Pope in full ecumenical council, one clause of which ran “moreover [we pray] that public brothers be not held hard by the Churches of the Roman Court and hard by the palace of the Lord Pope, nor near the houses of prelates elsewhere [in Avignon]. And we pray that the Lord Pope’s Marshal and other similar officers may receive nothing from the prostitutes and pimps of the same brothels.” (Baluze. Vit. Pap. Aven. Col. 810). Benvenuto comments on Inf. xix, 106 (II, 59) “Wherefore the modern poet Petrarch will have it that this great Babylon in Avignon, the new Babylon in France, which may truly be called Babylon the Great, not for the circuit of its walls but for its greed of souls (non amitu murorum sed ambitu animarum). She is in truth the mother of fornication, lechery, and drunkenness, full of all abomination and uncleanness, and she sitteth indeed between the devouring waters of the Rhone, the durance and the Sorga; and the woman’s adornment fits well with the prelates themselves, who are wrapped in purple, gold, silver, and precious stones; and that band of prelates is indeed drunken with the blood of the holy martyrs of Jesus Christ. With regard to Rome, Benvenuto (vol. i, p. 95) also repeats Boccaccio’s story about the Jew who was converted by the extreme wickedness of that city, arguing within himself that only a true religion could have escaped suffocation in such a hot-bed of vice. He speaks almost equally strongly below, p. 118, and ii, 186. For Constance see Lea, p. 390.
12. Such, at least, is the apparent drift of Dr. Barry’s plea on pp. 630, 652, of the Cambridge Modern History, vol. I. For Gregory X, and Henry of Liège see Fleury, an. 1273, 1274. — For other bishops worthy to be placed by Henry’s side see Fleury, an. 1245, 1248, 1251, 1257, and Innocent III, Epp. Xiv, 125, xvi, 158: and for their general unpopularity see Ana. Fra. iii, 648.
39413. For Geoffroi de Péronne see also Peter of Blois, Ep. 102, Cæs. Heist. ii, 28, Etienne de Bourbon, pp. 249, 421. — The scholar’s vision, Ana. Fra. iii, 297. — — Gregory’s complaint, Fleury, an. 1274: for the other names: ibid. 1260, 1280, 1285, 1294. — Jo. Sarisb. Ep. 166. (Migne. Pat. Lat. cxcix, 156.) — Cæs. Heist. II, 27, 28: cf. 39, 40. In connection with these and the abundant similar quotations which might be made from medieval documents, it may interest some readers to see a passage form the Roman Catholic Monitor (March 22nd, 1901). “In reference to the recent appointment of Dr. Ingram it [the Church Times] declares that ’he takes up a burden that is almost frightful,’ and again, ‘the burden is terrible. The strongest may bow and break beneath It. We believe the Church Times says that which is strictly true. The burden imposed on Dr. Ingram is very grievous. The language of the Church Times confirms the truth that the new line of Bishops have not the grace of Orders to support them. Language of this kind could not be used of true Catholic Bishops. They have a load, but they have grace to bear it. The task is proportioned to the strength. They may die under it but they fall unconquered and glorious. The words above quoted are neither Primitive nor Catholic.” An equally astounding historical mis-statement about the seal of confession was made publicly for similar polemical purposes by Cardinal Gibbons: see Lea, Confession, I, 414.
14. For Obizzo see Chron. Parm. an. 1295: for Reggio, Affarosi I, pp. 227, 252.
15. Clement V protested in a bull against this introduction of hounds and hawks into the sanctuary: and Gerson, a century later, complained of the same practice, adding that such animals showed no more respect for the sacred places than mere protestant beasts. Yet, at the very time when Gerson was complaining, the Ménagier de Paris was advising good folk to bring their hawks to church, that they might thus grow used to crowds of men and lose their native shyness: and the Editor points out in a footnote how certain canonries carried with them the express right of bringing hawks into church. This evidence is specially significant, since the Ménagier is singled out by M. Léon Gautier, in his apology for the Middle Ages, as one of the four books that give the purest idea of medieval manners — the other three being Villehardouin, Joinville, and the Knight of La Tour-Landry. The Chronicon Parmense tells an amusing story of a dog which for twenty years always followed funerals into the church. — Decret. Clement, lib. iii, tit. Xiv, c.: Gerson ii, 630D. Ménagier ii, p. 296. Léon Gautier, La Chevalerie (Paris, 1891), p. 448. Murat. ix, 779.
39516. Vit. Exemp., p. 2.
17. For Odo Rigaldi see his Register (Ed. Bonnin, Rouen, 1852): p. Feret, La Faculté de Théologie de Paris au M. A. (Paris, 1894, etc.); Hist. Litt. De la France, vol. xxi, pp. 616 f, and a few fresh and valuable details in Ana. Fra. vol. iii, (see index).
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1. The Yorkshire chantry Surveys published by the Surtees Society (vols. 91 and 92) frequently plead the number of “houseling people,” — i.e., those over 14, who were bound to attend the yearly Easter communion — in different parishes, as a reason for not suppressing particular chantries. Though the parishes for which these figures are given are therefore naturally larger than the average, yet the 107 specified for the county of York yield an average of only 821 houseling people — or from 1,300 to 1,500 souls — per parish. In the city of York itself, the seventeen parishes specified had only an average of from 400 to 450 souls. Merston, with only 320 houseling folk, is spoken of as a “wide and great” parish. The only instances, I believe, in which the parish priests had to deal with more than 1,000 houseling people apiece were at Kyldewike and Halifax (pp. 407, 421). Thorold Rogers calculated that England had one priest to every fifty souls in the later Middle Ages: Abbot Gasquet is probably nearer the truth in putting the proportion at one to 100. (Great Pestilence, pp. 166, 205). Sir Thomas More felt very strongly that the Church would have done better with a far smaller and more select body of ministers (English works, pp. 224, 227). The proportion of ministers of every denomination to the present population of England seems to be about one in 900. Sacchetti (Nov. 28) shows us how small was the average Italian parish, for he distinctly implies that, as a rule, the parson knew all his flock by sight. Cæsarius speaks of a Lombard Bishop who knew all the folk in his diocese: this is probably a picturesque exaggeration (ii. 29). I owe the Norwich calculation, with other valuable information about town life, to the rev. W. Hudson, F.S.A., editor of the Medieval volume of the Records of the city of Norwich. A quotation from Hoeniger in Gasquet’s Great Pestilence (p. 66) goes some way in support of Cæsarius’s assertion as to the size of some German parishes: but it must be remembered that these would be endowed to maintain more than one priest.
2. His most important writings from this point of view are the two treatises in which he defends the Friars against charges of encroachment 396 On the duties of the parish clergy (Libellus Apologeticus and Quare Fratres Minores Praedicent).
3. Bourbon, p. 259, quotes a Cardinal Legate as asserting that the devil gained more souls thus than in any other way — whole parishes swept to hell by communicating with an excommunicate! Similarly, the Bishop of Angers asserted at the council of Vienne that it was common to find a parish with three or four hundred excommunicate, “and I have known one with as many as 700.” (Lib. Guil. Major. p. 477: cf. Fleury, an. 1311. § 51).
4. He was a man of some note in the Order: see chap. x. above: but he must be distinguished from the Bro. Umile of the Fioretti.
5. I give here only supplementary evidence to that contained in Dr. Lea’s Confession. The allusion in my text is to Cæsarius, dist. iii., cap. 47. Chapter s40-47 of this book are sufficient by themselves to show that Salimbene’s descriptions are not exaggerated. Cæsarius there tells us of the priest who, at the Easter confession, would cast his stole over six or eight penitents in a batch, and make them repeat a general confession after him: so that his successor found his flock willing to own vicariously to all the sins of the Decalogue, but utterly recalcitrant to personal and first-hand confession. Another would say off-hand, “do the same penance as my predecessor gave you,” or “the same penance I gave you last year.” Some are willing to absolve a heavy tale of sins for the gift of a hen and a pint of wine; another is accustomed to use the confessional for blackmailing purposes: such are ready “to kill souls for a handful of barley,” as Ezekiel says. The 47th chapter, referred to in my text, should be carefully studied by those who believe that such manuals as St. Alfonso Liguori’s are without danger in practice, and unclean only the unclean Protestant mind. Cæsarius tells us also of the female penitent who tempts her confessor; and again a converse illustration which might sere as a worthy pendant to the tale which St. Bonaventura told to Salimbene. Nor does he thus exhaust his stock of instances: “I might show thee by very many examples how great evils are brewed in confession by wicked priests who fear not God, but I must spare the Order, spare the sex, spare Religion.” Later on, however, he so far forgets his resolve as to record an incident if possible still more damning, though the point which interest him is less the opportunity of seduction in the confessional than the abuse of the consecrated Host as a love-philtre. (Dist. ix., cap. 6). Bourbon relates (p. 257) a story of a lady soliciting a Bishop to sin in the confessional, and bringing counter-accusations against him when he resisted her: such anecdotes are by no means infrequent in collections of moral tales. But far more damning are the frequent warnings of sober counsellors 397 to ladies that they should avoid the company of the clergy as much as possible. St. Catherine of Siena, writing to her niece in her convent of Montepulciano, says: “go to confession, and tell your need, and when you have received your penance, flee! Take care, too, that [your confessors] be not of those with whom you have been on friendly terms: and marvel not that I speak thus, for thou mayest oft-times have heard me say (and this is truth) that conversation under the perverse title of ‘spiritual fathers’ and ‘spiritual daughters’ (Col perverse vocabolo de’ divoti e delle divote), spoils souls and the customs and observances of religious Orders.” (Lettere. Ed. Tommaseo vol. I, p. 100). The reader will perhaps here remember what I have already quoted from Alvarez Pelayo about these divoti and divote,* and will be prepared to find the same idea repeated in St. Bernardino’s very explicit warning to widows (Prediche, vol. II, p. 185) “O widow, if thou be not wise, thou wilt take harm: beware with whom thou hast to converse. Wilt thou do well? then have no conversation with good or with bad: oh! thou wouldst have good friars, oh! thou wouldst have holy priests: I tell thee no! with nobody. Believe me, thou wilt do better to stay at home. — What? may I not associate (usare) with good and holy men, that they may teach me? — Yes, but with a wall between you — Oh, but my devotion which I have taken upon myself? — I tell thee no! let it be. . . . . Take care to remove peril for thine own part, and thou wilt keep thyself from ill fame, and other men from scandals and sins. . . . Go not too often to places where thou may’st easily take harm. Stay not too long in church: take away every occasion [of evil]; give all good example of thyself and they life.** . . . Why, if it is seen that one woman talks with a friar, seven others will murmur against her. And even though their converse be only in church, and the friar be there by the side, not speaking to her, they still murmur; nay, if one glance alone can be caught, there is no need of more!” And the saint goes on to relate a story which matches those of Salimbene on this subject. Again, in the very popular rhymed precepts for girls reprinted by Montaiglon (Recueil de Poésies. Franç. des XV[e] and XVI[e] SS, vol. II, p. 22), the moralist writes:
Fille, hormis confession
Seulette ne parlez à prebstre
Laissez-les en leur eglise estre,
Sans ce qu ’ilz hantent vos maisons.
A similar warning by the mission-preacher Geiler von Kaisersberg is quoted by A. Méray (Libres Prêcheurs, vol. II, p. 149: cf. vol. I, 142, 144). Moreover, when the confessor was honest, he was too often a mere bungler: and the blessed Raimondo da Vigna records of his heroine St. Catherine “if this holy virgin had had no other afflictions . . . Than those brought upon her by her most indiscreet [spiritual] preceptors, she might yet have been called a martyr for all that she suffered.” (AA. SS. Ap. vol. iii, p. 882: cf. ibid. lib. i, c. v, § 84).
* Chapter VI, note 5.
** The church was a common trysting-place for lovers: cf. the Prologue to Boccaccio’s Decameron and Sacchetti, Serm. VII, “men were wont to go to church for prayer: but now they go to drive bargains in all sorts of sins, and specially in lechery, with all evils that tongue can tell.” Almost stronger are the words of St. Bernardino (Opera. Vol. I, p. 208).
6. Bourbon, p. 268: Munim. Acad. R.S. p. 305: cf. Rashdall, ii, 689, note 3.
7. A hoop, a branch of a tree, or a wisp of straw were ordinary tavern-signs. The first seems to have been the most usual on the continent in the 13th century: David of Augsburg speaks of it as the ordinary inn-sign (p. 218); and Prof. Holder-Egger seems to be mistaken in tracing a connexion between the circle and the clerk’s circular tonsure. After all, the hoop is still a common enough English sign: it probably was at first simply a barrel-hoop.
8. The earliest form of this Devil’s Letter seems to be in Odo of Cheriton’s sermons: see Prof. Holder-Egger’s note. The fullest account of these documents may be found in Wattenbach’s article “über erfundene Briefe u.s.w.” in Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Acad. 1892, p. 91 ff. A reviewer who ought to have known better having questioned the pertinence of Salimbene’s evidence here, I may refer doubting readers to the criticisms of three distinguished bishops, and of Humbert de Romans, general of the Dominicans, before the two great reforming councils of Lyons and Vienne. (Raynaldus an. 1273, § 6 ff: Labbe-Mansi. Concilia, xxiv, 109ff: the latter is summarized in Fleury, an. 1311, § 51). It is noteworthy that the documents of 1311 show if anything a worse state of things than those of 1274.
9. Compare his versions of the Colyton and Culmstock reports with the originals in Stapeldon’s Register, pp. 111, 130. I have exposed his manipulation of the other evidence in the Contemporary Review for Oct. 1906 and the Churchman for Apl. 1907 (reprinted as Medieval Studies, nos. 7 and 8). Guibert of Nogent, speaking of a gathering of important churchmen in the presence of Pope Paschal II, (d. 1118) mentions casually that “some [of the priest] scarce knew the rudiments [of Latin]” (Migne. Pat. Lat. 156, col. 913). St. Bernardino (Prediche. II, 127) tells a tale of four priests, who had a heated dispute as to the correct Latin for the four words of consecration in the Mass — “This is my Body.” One only could repeat the words correctly: another 399 was wont to say Hoc est corpusso meusso, and the last confessed “I don’t bother myself about it: I just say an Ave Maria over the wafer,” — thus, as the Saint remarks, living from day to day in mortal sin, and teaching his whole parish to commit idolatry by worshipping an unconsecrated wafer. The Bishop of Mende, in his memoir for the Council of Vienne “se plaint que même entre les hommes lettrés, il’ s’en trouve très peu qui soient bien instruits de ce qui regarde les articles de foi et le salut des âmes, conférer avec eux (Fleury, an. 1311, § 52). His colleague, the scarcely less distinguished Bishop of Angers, asserted on the same occasion “the law of God, the articles of faith, and other things pertaining to the religion of the Christian faith and to the salvation of souls, are almost utterly unknown to the faithful.” (Lib. Guil. Major. p. 477). The other authorities referred to in the text are R. Bacon, Ed. Brewer, R.S., p. 413. — Aquinas Contra Impug. Religion, cap. iv, § 10. — Bonaventura Libell. Apologet. Q. I. — Cæs. Heist. vii, 4 and 5. — dialogo di Santa Caterina, cap. 129. — Sacchetti serm. 27, cf. Nov. 35. — Labbe Concil. Xxii, col. 1159, and xxiii, col. 458. — Reg. of. S. Osmund R.S., i, p. 304. — Od. Rig., pp. 159, 174, 217, 332, 395, 787. — Busch., p. 441.
10. Bp. Haymo on Thorpe’s Registrum Roffense, p. 413. — Bert. Rad. Pred. I. 393. — Gascoigne, pp. 118, 123. — Bern. Sen. I, 495, cf. 112. — Joinville §§ 297, 742: c. St. Louis’s life by his Queen’s Confessor in AA. SS. Aug. v, c. iii, § 38. — La Tour, pp. 40-42. — Müller, Anfaänge, p. 147. — For the visitations see Od. Rig., Reg. Grand, the Southwell visitations (Camden Soc.) — Bp. Of Mende in Labe-Mansi, vol. xi, p. 536. — Decret. Clem. lib. III, tit. xiv, 1. — Ben. Im. I, 271. — Bourbon, p. 185.
11. This proverb is quoted by the Wife of Bath: Cant. Tales, D. 389.
12. Bert. Rad. Pred. I, p. 493. — Bern. Pred. II, 109. — Gerson, vol. II, pp. 630 and 641. — Chaucer, Cant. Tales Prol. 376, 449. — Grosseteste (R.S. p. 162) enjoined throughout his diocese “let not rectors and parish priests permit their parishioners to strive for precedence in their procession with banners at the yearly visitation of the Cathedral church; for thence not only fights but death are wont to come about.” Fifty years later, Bp. Giffard of Worcester proclaimed “in consequence of the recent disturbance and drawing of blood in the Cathedral Church of Worcester, that all incumbents of churches and chapels shall give out for four Sundays before the feast of Pentecost, that no one shall join in the Pentecostal processions with a sword or other kinds of arms” (Reg. Giffard, p. 422). In 1364, Bp. 400 Langham of Ely repeated Grosseteste’s complaint of occasional deaths on these occasions (Wilkins III, 61): and a milder complaint of the same nature form a fifteenth century Bp. of Chichester is quoted by Cutts (Paris Priests and their People, p. 122).
13. See Denifle’s La Désolation des Eglises passim. Sacchetti writes (serm. VII, on Matt. xxi, 13). “Per queste parole si puo comprendere come li viventi uomeni e donne son divoti al tempo d’oggi nelli templi di Dio. Io per me mi vergognero quasi di scriverio, che cosa è a dire, che ogni brottura e ogni crimine a pecatto in quelli li mondani sono discorsi a usare. In molti tempi dell’ anno vanno li gioveni e le giovene donne vane ali monasterii a fare le delicate merende con balli e canti e con stormenti, ladove ciascuno da simile cose si doveria guardare, e l’onesta si rimane dall’ uno de’ lati. Cominciasi per li difetti de’ Cristiani una guerra. Conducesi gente a piede e a cavallo: non si possono negli alberghi delle terre questi tali acconciare. E dato loro, che si chiama alloggiamento nelle chiese di Dio; e qui con tutti li vizi che dire si possoni, dimorano giocando, dove contiuo si biastemma Dio e’ Santi, adoperando la lussuria in tutti e modi dissoluti, insino la sodomia a piè degli altari: e però si puote bene dire apertamente oggi: Vos fecistis illam speluncam latronum.” Similar testimony is borne by Frati, p. 82, and Bern. Sen. I, 208.
14. For corn and brewing in churches see Reg. Stapeldon, p. 337, and Statuta Communitatis Parmæ, p. 320. It was Salimbene’s friend, Gerard of Modena, who obtained the removal of this corn from the cathedral. Markets were held at the same time in the Cathedral of Ravenna, and barrels stored there (Labbe-Mansi. Xi, 1583). The synod of Durham in 1220 complains of the dirty state of churches and their use as warehouses (Wilkins I, 580): one of the most frequent subjects dealt with by church synods in all counties was that of markets, games, and dances in churches and churchyards. For the dilapidation of the churches see Reg. Grand, pp. 570 ff and 604 ff; Reg. Stapeldon passim; Visitations of St. Paul’s Churches (Camden Soc., N.S.), Reg. St. Osmund (R.S.), p. 275 ff. For the separation of the sexes, Bern. Sen. Vita Cap. xlix, and Savonarola Serm. xxvi. For churches and lightning, Bourbon, p. 269, cf. Wadding, 1236, 420.
The best way of explaining medieval conditions to the general reader is to quote at some length a single visitation out of many which might be adduced: it is one of those recorded in the York Fabric Rolls (Surtees Soc. pp. 242 ff), and shows a state of things fairly common even in the most stately cathedrals. 401 The date is 1409. “The chantry-priests do not celebrate masses as they are bound by the terms of their chantries: very many (quam plures) masses are left unsung by the defect of the clergy. The dignitaries do not come to the choir at double feasts and feasts of nine lessons, as they should. The deacons and incense-bearers do not come into the choir as they ought: and at the time when they are in the choir they chatter and do not behave themselves as they ought. The choirboys are not taught as they should be in singing, nor do they walk sedately and decently, as they should, in the processions. Both dignitaries, vicars, and other ministers wander about excessively and habitually (nimis et communiter) in the Cathedral, even while divine service is being celebrated in the choir. The books in the choir, viz., two called ‘standards,’ and the processional books, by reason of their age, their discordance, and their excessive fewness, are too defective, causing divers and numerous defects and discordances among those who sing in the choir. Part of the Bible, and the books of sermons form which the Legend is read in choir, are worn-out and defective in those parts where the lessons are read. Within the vestry, the proper sedate silence is not observed as it should be by the Cathedral minister; but noisy disorders commonly take place there while service is being said in the choir, and especially while the minister on duty for the week is preparing for the celebration of High Mass; which disorders frequently impede and disturb the devotion of the celebrant. The prebendaries pay irregularly the salaries for the vicars’ common hall. . . . Very many (plura vestments and ornaments and jewels belong to divers chantries are in an exceedingly defective state, and perhaps some have been made away with, by the default of the custodian and of due inquisition in this matter . . . .” After other complaints of pecuniary mismanagement and defective service-books, the report goes on: “Within the Cathedral and its gates, and especially during the greatest and most solemn festivals of the year, public markets (mercimonia are held, not without public, notorious and enormous degradation to the House of God, contrary to the teaching of the Gospel. The vicars wander too much in the Cathedral, with their robes on, at time of Divine Service. Divers vicars are too much given to chattering and talking together in the choir during service.”
15. Bern. Sen. i, 490. For communion see Aquinas Summa Pars iii, Q. lxxx, art. x. (Migne vol. iv, col. 806). Pope Anacletus (he says) had prescribed daily communion; then, as faith gradually failed, Pope Fabianus thrice a year at least: ‘at last, since the charity of many began to grow cold by reason of the abundance of iniquity, Innocent III enjoined . . . That the faithful should communicate at least once a year, at Easter.” He goes on to speak of weekly 402 communion as a counsel of perfection. For exceptional devotees who kept this see Ana. Fra., 106, 392, 427, Bourbon p. 149, and compare Salimbene’s Guglielmo de Sanvitale “a most conscientious youth, who would be confessed at least once a week” (62). For clergy who grudged to let their parishioners communicate, see Cæs. Heist. dist. ix, c. 25, 26, 46: in the last case the priest “waxed wroth, and answered with indignation ‘ye women always wish to communicate at your own will.’ ” The great Bishop of Mende, in his memoir for the Council of Vienne in 1311, suggested that the Church should return to the ancient custom of three communions a year: but among the sixteen articles of complaint drawn up by the Devon rebels of 1549 was one requiring that the laity should go back to the system of yearly communions, the Reformers having increased the frequency of celebration, (Raynaldus. an. 1311, § 54 note: Gairdner, English Ch. in the 16th Century, p. 268.
16. For baptism, Sacchetti, Serm. xiv.: cf. Gascoigne, p. 197. For extreme unction, Bert. Rat. Pred. i., 304, ii., 89, and Wilkins Concilia i, 583, 595, 600, 616, 670, 690: ii, 135, 295. These cover the years from 1220 to 1308, and cast an interesting sidelight on religious education also. The reasons why parishioners feared extreme unction are given most fully in Bp. Quivil’s Constitutions (ii. 135): “they foolishly imagine that if perchance they recover after the reception of extreme unction, it is altogether forbidden them to eat flesh, go barefoot, or know their own lawful spouses again.” For confirmation, see Wilkins Concilia ii., 53: Fleury, an. 1287: Corpus Chronicorum Flandriæ ed. De Smet, vol. ii, p. 507: Quellen und Forschungen hrsg. vom. K. Pr. Historischen Institut in Rom. (Loescher), vol. v, p. 180. For the irreverence bred of tithe-quarrels, see Wilkins ii, p. 160, and passim. — Ben. Im. iii, 442 (on Purg. xvi, 102): Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 20, 593 ff. E. g. Gardner in Hibbert Journal. Apl. 1906, p. 571.
17. Bourbon pp. 299, 307, 308. Bert. Rat. Pred. ii, 531: cf. Gerson, vol. i, p. 204, 268, 349; vol. ii, pp. 552, 761, 762, and De Laud. Script., Consid. xi., xii.: Busch., p. 731. Gerson expressly specifies this want of religious education as a main cause of the notorious decay of the Church in his days (early 15th century). For the question of bible reading, cf. Trevelyan’s Wycliffe pp. 130, 361, and the Church Quarterly Review for Oct., 1900, and Jan., 1901, where Abbot Gasquet’s mis-statements on this subject are exposed. The Church Quarterly points out (p. 285) how, after Mr. F. D. Matthew had exposed in the English Historical Review a definite and fundamental mis-statement of fact by the Abbot the latter yet reprinted this part of his essay without 403 correction, although he attempted to meet other criticisms of Mr. Matthew’s. I have further shown that even Sir Thomas More, from whose apologetic writings the Abbot had quoted to show that the church went on the principle of “the open Bible,” very definitely repudiates that principle. Not only does More admit that no orthodox writer had made any translation which any printer would dare to publish in the face of ecclesiastical censure, but he further asserts his own conviction that the most orthodox translations ought to be lent by the Bishop only with great precautions “to such as he perceiveth honest,” and that even to such well-meaning students the Bishop might well forbid the reading of St. John’s Gospel or the epistle to the Romans, as liable of misinterpretation. (Contemporary Review, Oct., 1906, reprinted in Medieval Studies, No. 7).
18. One of the best instances of this is to be found in the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, written (as he assures us) with the help of four clerics, of whom two were priests. His distortions of Bible narrative are almost incredible: the story of Ruth, for instance, contains scarcely more than the heroine’s name in common with the scripture narrative. (p. 3: of chap. xci.)
19. Baluze-Mansi, Misc. ii., 600, 610. Bourbon, p. 286. Bern. Sen. vol. i, p. 431.
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1. Cont. Cels[>????] vii. 44 (Ed. Spencer. p. 362). A part of this is quoted in Dr. Littledale’s “Plain Reasons,” and is prudently ignored by the Roman Catholic Father Ryder in his reply. There are in Father Ryder’s book several similar instances of convenient blindness to facts which it could be difficult either to deny or to explain away.
2. But see Lea, Inquisition, iii, 91, for the extent to which bishops still exercised the right.
3. Fleury, an. 1264 § 26.
4. Further references to Alberto and to Punzilovo may be found in Lea’s History of the Inquisition. Compare Guib. Nov., p. 614: but the whole of this treatise should be studied. For the gain accruing to the clergy from these new saints see ibid.: also Sacchetti’s Letter to Giacomo di Conte (Serm. p. 214 ff.), quoted below in my text. The Church councils of Rouen (1445) and Angers (1448) make the same complaint: the former even forbids 404 giving names to different images (our Lady of Redemption, our Lady of Pity, of Consolation, of Grace, etc.) as an invention probably due to the desire of squeezing more money from men’s pockets. Abbot Gasquet, in his Eve of the Reformation, speaks of the alleged connection between saint-worship and clerical greed with a bland ridicule which carries weight only with readers accustomed to modern enlightenment and modern ideals of clerical honesty. If he had taken the trouble to look into the actual evidence, he would have found himself compelled, in common prudence, to leave the question alone.
5. For this canonization see Father Denifle’s short article in Archiv. iv, 349: also Baluze. Vit. Pap. Aven. i, 413.
6. For the Santo Volto, or miraculous portrait of Christ, see the demon’s scoff in Inf. xxi, 448. Benvenuto (ii, 106) tells the legend that Nicodemus painted it, with other marvellous details; but he adds: “Believe thou as much of this as thou wilt, for it is not one of the Articles of Faith.”
7. The Magdalene’s abstinence from food was (as we are assured) rivalled by St. Catherine of Siena alone, who became in consequence so emaciated “ut in obitu repertum sit, umbilicum ejus renibus adhaerere.” So at least reports one of her confessors, Fra Tommaso Cafarini (AA. SS. Ap. vol. Iii, p. 877 note).
8. Even Innocent III, as I have pointed out above, was obliged to acknowledge the same embarrassment in dealing with these duplicate relics: “it is better to commit all to God than to define rashly either way,” (see note 9 to chap. III).
9. Joinville § 46 “[St. Louis] told me how William Bishop o Paris [1228-1248] had spoken to him of a great Doctor of Divinity who had come to him saying that he would fain speak with him. Then said the Bishop: ‘Doctor, tll us your will.’ And when he would fain have spoken to the bishop, he fell to weeping most bitterly. So the Bishop said to him ‘Doctor, say on, be not disconsolate: for no man can sin so sore as that God can no more pardon him.’ ‘And I say unto you, my Lord,’ said the Doctor, ‘that I cannot keep back my tears, for I hold myself an infidel, since I cannot bring my heart to believe in the Sacrament of the Altar, as Holy Church teaches it: and I know well that this is one of the Devil’s temptations.’ ” The Bishop, with admirable sense, comforted him by pointing out how such trials only gave him the opportunity of showing his essential faith. Cf. Gerson, Tractatus de Fœda Tentatione in the 4th vol. of his works: Busch. Lib. Ref., cap. ii., (p. 395).
40510. For St. Louis see the remarkable anecdote in Ana. Fra., vol. i, p. 413 ff. “One day a certain God-fearing knight, very familiar and intimate with St. Louis, said to him: ‘My lord, I will depart from your court, for I can bear it no longer.’ ‘Why so?’ asked the King. ‘By reason,’ said the knight, ‘of that which I hear and see.’ For he heard pestilent folk reviling the King, who (they said) bore himself rather like a monk than a king. So St. Louis said, ‘have patience; I will by no means suffer thee to leave me: as often as thou wilt let us go apart from these worldly folk, and comfort each other by talking of God and heavenly things. Care not for the words of fools: I will tell thee that which befalls me sometimes as I sit in my bed-chamber. I hear some crying ‘Brother Louis!” [as to a friar,] and cursing me, not thinking to be heard of me. Then I think within myself that I might cause them to be slain; but I see that this befalls me for my great good, if I bear it patiently for God’s sake: and in truth I say unto thee, that I am not displeased at this injury which they do to me.’ ”
[link to belloc st. louis ]
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1. Dante. Convivio, Trat. iv, c. 28. Giles in Ana. Fra. iii, 112, 296. For Umiliana, Wadding an. 1246, p. 157, cf. Bern. Bess. p. 321, Cæs. Heist. ii, 19. St. Louis’ Life, by Q. Margaret’s Confessor (in AA. 88.), cap. v, § 56. Dav. Aug. De. Ex. Et. Int. Hominis Compositione Lib III, c. 66.
2. St. Edmund Rich in Golden Legend (Temple Classics), vol. vi, p. 234. St. Dominic in Lives of the Brethren, tr. J. p. Conway (Newcastle, 1896), p. 290. For these devilish suggestions see Dav. Aug. p. 360, Bonaventura Sermo vi. De Decem Præceptis, and Bourbon, p. 199. Many similar pseudo-divine appearances, counselling suicide or homicide or other deadly sins as special degrees of religious perfection, may be found in Wadding, an. 1253, pp. 317 foll; 1261, 141, 1293, 317 (cf. 1291, 253, and the quotation from Alvarez Pelayo, 1318, § 43). St. Bernard Sermo vi, de x. Præceptia: Vitry Ex. p. 34: 24 Gen. pp. 308 foll. (cf. 315): Renan’s “Christine de Stommeln,” in Nouvelles Etudes,, p. 353 ff. Cæs. Heist. iii. 127: Thos. Cant. Lib. ii. C. i. § 14. An instance given by Wadding (1322, 45) specifies the fœdos tactus which are probably referred to here by Salimbene, and certainly by David of Augsburg. For the devils like flies see Wadding loc. cit.
3. An exactly similar occurrence in Spain is told in Analecta Franciscana, iii. 309: c. Vitry, Exempla p. 34. Sir Thomas More tells 406 a similar story of a woman who hoped to attain canonization by suicide (English Works, p. 1188); and another of a carver who wanted his wife to crucify him on Good Friday (p. 1193).
4. (p. 256) There is in the original no trace of the almost treacherous change of tone of which she complains.
5. Cæsarius alone gives many instances of this immoral teaching about confession (ii. 23; iii. 2, 3, 6, 18: x. 35), and many more may be found in the note to Bourbon, p. 448: cf. Athenæum, No. 4025, p. 834.
6. Eccleston (R.S., p. 72) gives an equally uncomplimentary account of the origin of these Friars of the Sack. For the Third Order see Bonav. Libell. Apol. xvi.
7. For Segarello and Dolcino see Lea’s Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 103 ff.
8. Even St. Bonaventura seems to attach real importance to this jesuitical distinction: see his Epistle of 1257 . . . . “pecunis, nostri Ordinis paupertati super omnia inimica, avide petitur, incaute recipitur et incautius contrectatur.” Ubertino da Casale, a few years later, describes how the Friars who collected large sums of money salved their consciences by keeping a servant to touch it, though they kept the key of the bag to themselves (Archiv. III, 67).
9. >‘Lana caprina:’ see Horace Epist. I, xviii, 15. The fifth wheel of a waggon, ‘quinta rota plaustri,’ is a favourite phrase of Salimbene’s for an insignificant trifle: it is used also by Matthew Paris.
10. ‘Gaudent novitate moderni,’ a tag of a verse which is quoted in another thirteenth century chronicle, as Prof. Holder-Egger points out, and (in a slightly different form) by Bp. Guillaume le Maire of Angers.
11. This, of course, is the “Boy Bishop,” an institution closely connected with the Feast of Fools. Abbot Gasquet describes it with characteristic inaccuracy on pp. 165 ff. of his Paris Life in Medieval England, suppressing in his quotation from the Sarum Statutes Bishop Mortival’s complaint of the “manifold disorders” which formerly had caused “some damage both to persons and to the Cathedral,” (see Roc. Church of our Fathers, ed. Frere, vol. iv, p. 255, note). The Boy Bishop was in fact long tolerated even by the pious prelates who (like Grosseteste) looked upon the Feast of Fools as downright devilish: but 407 already in 1260 the provincial Council of Cognac forbade it; and it was formally abolished by a decree of the ecumenical council of Bâle in 1431. It lingered long, however, and was only killed at last by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
12. Prof. Holder-Egger refers this to the sanctuary of St. Michael on Monte Gargano: but, as Salimbene lays evident stress on the distances covered by these pilgrims, it is possible that he may refer to the French sanctuary.
13. See Father Denifle’s essay in Archiv. IV, 330 ff. A certain Radulfus, about 1290, got it into his head that whenever the word nemo (no man) occurred in Latin writing, it was no mere negation, but refereed to a person of that name, whom he proved to be identical with the Son in the Holy Trinity. His own reading (as my well be believed) was small: but he paid monks and clerks to make a collection of such passages, mainly from the Bible, from which he composed a “Sermon upon Nemo” which he dedicated to Cardinal Benedict Caietan, afterwards Boniface VIII. The sermon still exists in different versions, and an adversary assures us that Radulfus founded a sect of Neminians, among whom he names peter of Limoges. This adversary, Stephanus de S. Georgio, “must have been as great a fool as Radulfus to think of refuting him,” as Denifle truly remarks. Here is the beginning of Radulfus’s sermon: — “Beloved, God at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, who preached darkly and with uncertain voice that the Only Begotten Son of God would come to redeem those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death; but in these last days He speaketh openly by His Holy Scripture, preaching, setting forth, and testifying the most blessed Noman as His own compeer, born before all ages, (as it is written in the 138th Psalm [v. 16], ‘days shall be formed, and Noman in them:’ that is, He was before the Prophet David himself), yet hitherto unknown to mankind by reason of their sins. But our Lord and Saviour Himself, whose nature it ever is to spare and show pity, and Who never leaves His own unheard, hath taken pity on the people redeemed by His precious blood; and, having removed the old darkness altogether from our eyes, hath vouchsafed to discover to us the precious treasure of this most glorious Noman; that whereas, to our great loss, he hath hitherto been hidden, we may be able henceforth to behold him with the eye of faith. The blessed Noman, therefore, is found in Holy Scripture to be co-eval with God the Father, and in essence must like unto the Son, as not created nor proceeding, but born: wherein this is plainly said by the Psalmist, ‘Days shall be formed, and Noman in them.’ 408 Afterwards his authority grew deservedly so great that, as though scorning earthly things, he soared with marvellous flight to the highest heaven, as it is written ‘Noman hath ascended into heaven.’ ” And so on, through, “Noman hath seen God,” “Noman knoweth the Father,” “Noman knoweth the Son,” “Noman can do these signs which thou dost,” and a long catalogue of similar quotations. Stephanus, in his treatise addressed to the same Cardinal Caietan, takes these quotations one by one, and explains each painfully away: after which he proceeds to confute Radulfus by a string of counter-quotations from the Decretals: e.g. “Noman sunk in sin, “to Noman did God give easy occasion to sin,” “to Noman doth the Church shut her breast when he would fain return:” and he clenches the matter with the triumphant argument that God, who would have all men saved, would therefore have Noman damned everlastingly: after which he concludes by calling on the secular and religious authorities present at the Provincial Council of Paris to burn these Neminians and their writings. One might be tempted to take it all for an elaborate hoax but for the abundant medieval evidence of the same sort, and for the fact that Stephen’s memoir is solemnly filed among the Vatican archives.
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1. Part of his chapter appeared in a rather fuller form in the Hibbert Journal of Jan., 1907. It was attacked in April by the Franciscan Fathers Cuthbert and Stanislaus, with great vehemence but little pretence of documentary proof. A little of this will appear in my rejoinder (July): but consideration for the Editor’s space obliged me to postpone the full exposure of their ignorance on elementary points of Franciscan history to a separate reissue of the article (Medieval Studies, No. 9).
2. Father Cuthbert’s attempt to contrast the “gloomy, laughter-lacking spirit” of the “sectary” with the holy joy of the Friars is not only inconsistent with the tenour of Franciscan disciplinary writings, but is contradicted by so well-known an authority as Brother Leo, who assures us that St. Francis himself “did specially abhor laughter” (Mirror § 96). The strict Franciscan was as a rule cheerful only in comparison with the lachrymose piety of the other Religious of the Middle Ages: many of his tenets were such as are emphasized now only by gloomy fanatics. I have pointed this out at length in Medieval Studies, Nos. iii and iv.
4093. ”Usqe ad umbilicum ante et usque ad renes retro, buscum tunicæ sacco operientes.” This, and the habit of wearing the second frock over the first, gave the early Friars’ figures that extraordinarily unwieldy shape which we see in Giotto’s pictures. See Ubertino in Archiv. iii, 173 ff., which is full of curious details about the Friars’ dress.
4. Miss Macdonell, not recognizing the references to the Rule, has again been misled by the Italian translation and missed the point of this passage.
5. For the quibbles about money, etc., see for instance Archiv. iii, p. 150, and Bonaventura Lib. Apol. Q. 6, 13, 18. For monks’ pocket-money, Kitchin’s Obedientiary Rolls (Hampshire Record Soc.), pp. 94, 95: Jessopp’s Norwich Visitations (Camden Soc. p. 77, and passim.): for the vain attempts to check this abuse see the various General Chapter Acts of the Benedictines given by Wilkins and Reynerus.
5. Eccleston’s words are (R.S. p. 18) “Et sic aedificabant fratres capellam ita pauperrimam, ut unus carpentariu sin una die faceret, et erigeret una die xiv coplas tignorum” — “and so the Brethren built a chapel so miserably poor that a single carpenter made in one day, and set up in one day, 14 pairs’ of rafters” (see Ducange s. v. Cupla). I am informed by an intelligent carpenter that this would point to a building some 20 or 30 feet long by 10 or 12 broad: the rafters would in this case be from 7 to 9 feet long each, and it would be a man’s work to cut them one day out of the rough spars, and set them up in another day. Indeed, it would scarcely be possible for a single man to set up unaided any larger rafters than these. We have here a miserably small chapel indeed, but far from Prof. Brewer’s “their chapel was erected by a single carpenter in one day,” or Father Cuthbert’s “one carpenter built it in one day.”
6. See Mr. Hudson’s excellent little History of the Parish of St. Peter Permountergate” (Norwich 1889).
7. Bernard of Besse in Ana. Fra. iii, p. 674. For friaries inside towns see Archiv. ii, 258, and iii, 84, 116: Bonav. Libell. Apol. Q., vi., xix.
8. The friar’s money-box is very conspicuous in the 23rd cut of Holbein’s Dance of Death. (Lyon, 1538). For Ubertino’s complaints see Archiv. iii, 70, 104: for Laandshut, see Eubel. Oberdeutsche Minoritenprovinz (Würzburg, 1886), p. 239; cf. Archiv. iii, 105. For the unpopularity which this begging bred see Archiv. iii, 105, and St. Bonaventura’s two Circular Letters.
4109. Monte Casale in i. c. 26: its abandonment is recorded in Eubel. Provinciale, § 143. Bozon. Ed. Toulmin Smith (Soc. Des Anciens Textes Français, 1889), p. 35. Cf. Bonav. Quæst. circ. Reg. xxvi, and Archiv. iii, 107, 165.
10. For evictions of clergy, cf. Bonav. Lib. Apol. Q. xi.: for friar unpopularity with parish priest, ib. Quæst. X.
11. Ubertino in Archiv. iii, 67.
12. Jordan in Vit. Frat. p. 138. Eccleston, R.S., p. 59: Bern. Bess. p. 371, 384.
13. Life in a Modern Monastery, pp. 53 foll. This book, and the equally interesting Twelve Years in a Monastery, describe state of things extraordinarily similar in most respect to what may be gathered from medieval documents. The similarity is all the more striking because the author had evidently not studied the inner history of his Order in the past.
14. Here, for instance, is an extact from the diary of one of the strictest prelates of the Middle Ages, Archbishop Eudes Rigaud of Rouen (p. 42). He is visiting a Chapter at Pontoise. “Richard de Triguel is accused of sin with a certain prostitute; yet there was no great scandal: we warned him to desist. Again Master Robert is accused with the gardener’s daughter, and has but lately had a child by her, but the scandal is not great: we warned him to desist. Moreover, he behaves improperly in going barefooted outside his door to a certain workshop where women of ill fame are often congregated: we warned him to desist from such behaviour.” (p. 42.) This hushing-up spirit is constantly traceable in medieval visitation records; cf. Gower Mirour de l’Omme. l. 20, 137, and Mr. A. F. Leach’s preface to the Southwell visitations. (Camden Soc., pp. lxv, lxxxv, lxxxix). Ubertino da Casale and Angelo Clareno accuse their fellow-friars of great duplicity in hiding the misdeeds of the Order (Archiv. ii, 300, 301, 353: cf. Piers Plowman’s Creed Ed. Skeat. l. 625 ff).
15. Quæst. circ. Reg. Q. 21.
16. Bonav. Quæst. circ. Reg. xix.: cf. his first circular letter “modis omnibus volo quo restringatis receptionem multitudinis”: Bacon, ed. Brewer, R.S., p. 426. Martene de Antiquis Ritibus, lib. v., c. v., and passim. Ubertino in Archiv. iv, 77, 80, 187.
17. See Bonaventura’s first Circular Letter, and his words in Archiv. iii, 517, with Ehrle’s comment, ib. p. 591.
41118. Bonav. Quæst. xix. circa Regulam. “Already the early brethren are becoming a laughing-stock, instead of being taken as examples.” Dav. Aug. p. 110, “now of spiritual delights and the taste of inward sweetness, which surpass beyond compare all delights of this world as honey surpasses dung, — of this there is now scarce any mention or effectual desire or zeal, even among those who seem to themselves to have climbed high in Religion: nay rather, it 9sic0 is despised, derided, and held as a folly and abomination in these days; and men of this kind suffer persecution from other Religious and are thought possessed of demons, and are called heretics.” Cf. ibid. 285, 331. The locus classicus or the persecution of the Spirituals is of course Angelo Clareno’s Seven Tribulations, published almost entirely in Archiv., vols i-iv: but, a century later, we find St. Catherine of Siena speaking if possible still more strongly: the Order to which she specially refers is probably the Dominican. “they [the evil Religious] fall like famished wolves on the lambs who would fain keep their Rule, scoffing at them and mocking them. And these wretches with their persecution, their misdoings, and their scoffs, which they inflict on good Religious and keepers of the Rule, think to cover their own defects: but they discover them far more.” (Dialogo. Cap. 124). In the same chapter and again more emphatically in c. 162, she speaks of the multitude of evil Religious compared with the really good. The contemporary Gower bears the same testimony in his Mirour de l’Omme and Vox Clamantis.
19. Berthold of Ratisbon constantly harps on the soul-slaying abuses of Indulgences (Pred. i. 132, 148, 154, 208, 394: ii. 12, 219). For the later Friars see Wycliffe’s works passim, and Bishop Gardiner as quoted in Abbot Gasquet’s Eve of the Reformation, p. 438. It is strange, however, that Abbot Gasquet can have made such a statement as that on which Bishop Hedley relies in his article in the Nineteenth Century (Jan., 1901, p. 170), considering the appalling revelations of the Oxford Chancellor Gascoigne as to Indulgence abuses in 1450 (Lib. Ver., pp. 118, 119, 123, and passim). Men go about, says Gascoigne, selling indulgences “sometimes for twopence, sometimes for a good drink of wine or beer, sometimes for the stake of a game of ball, sometimes for a prostitute’s hire, sometimes for fleshly love,” with the result that “sinners say nowadays ‘I care not what and how many sins I commit before God, for I can get with the greatest ease and expedition a plenary remission of all guilt and penalty by absolution and the indulgence granted me by the Pope, which I have bought for four pence, or six pence, or a game of ball.” Bishop Hedley’s whole article is vitiated by similar historical mis-statements, none the less serious because 412 they are evidently made in pure ignorance. He knows nothing of Berthold’s words, though they are quoted in so orthodox a Romanist history as that of Prof. Michael (Gesch. d. d. Volkes im xiii, Jhtd. Vol. ii, p. 166).
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1. P. Plowman, B. xxi, 241 ff.
2. Benvenuto’s commentary on Dante’s mention of the great miniature-painter Oderisi shows clearly enough how far the thirteenth century artist was from commanding such social consideration as their most successful brethren command in our own day (III, 310: on Purg. XI). “Note there that some men wonder ignorantly here, and say ‘wherefore hath Dante here named humble and obscure craftsmen’ (homines ignoti nominis et bassae artis), when he might more worthily have named most excellent men who thirsted sore for glory and wrought fair and noble works. But certainly the poet did thus with great art and with excellent justice; for thus he gives us tacitly to understand that the great craving for glory seizes on all men with so little distinction, that even lowly craftsmen (parvi artifices) are anxious to gain it, even as we see that painters put their names on their works, as Valerius writeth of a famous painting.” The tone of this comment is all the more remarkable because of the allusions to Grotto and Cimabue in the context. It is very doubtful whether the great artists of the past received more consideration in official quarters than now-a-days: certainly it would be difficult to find a modern author of Benvenuto’s calibre writing of great artists as he does.
3. “He was a person of scant religion, and never could get himself to believe in the immortality of the soul; wherefore with words suited to his own flinty brain he most obstinately rejected all good doctrine. He had all his hope in the gifts of fortune; and for money he would have undertaken to do any ill deed” (Vasari. Life of Pietro Perugino ad. fin.).
4. About 1230A.D. a friar of Gloucester was very severely punished by the Visitor for having painted a pulpit; and Eccleston was convinced that many others bitterly expiated in purgatory their share in building those beautiful churches which we admire. Wadding quotes an early visionary who went further: according to him, an otherwise excellent friar was sent to hell for this sole cause (Eccleston R.S. col. v: cf. Actus s. Francisci cap. lxx, Wadding an. 1242 § 17.)
4135. Those who (like Dr. Gasquet) argue so confidently from art to morals, should consider the following fact quoted by Mr. A. F. Leach from the Visitations of the Wells Cathedral clergy. “In 1511 . . . a Vicar Choral convicted of several adulteries was ordered [as a punishment] ‘to pain one king before the choir door which is not yet painted; and, if he escaped prosecution in the king’s court, to paint another king not yet painted.’ this priest having been ordered ‘candle penance’ for a similar offence, it is commuted to ‘painting the image of St. Michael and its canopy.’ ” (Visitations of Southwell. Introd. P. 87). Browning’s Lippo Lippi exactly typifies one phase of medieval life.
For the custom of devoting the fines of unchaste priest to cathedral fabrics see p. 42 of C. A. Swainson’s, “A Cathedral of the old Foundation” (i.e., Chichester, A.D. 1287): two Norwich visitations of 1498 and 1499 (Reg. Morton in Lambeth Library, ff 77a, 77b, and M. S. Tanner, 100 in Bodleian, ff 56a, 65a.): also the constitutions of Chichester in Wilkins, i, 692: and Ripon Chapter Acts (Surtees Soc.) pp. 292, 294. Similarly in the diocese of Wells, the Archdeacon of Bath, for incontinence and other offences (including the unpardonable guilt of contumacy), was not deprived, but fined 100 marks for the fabric fund (Reg. R. de Salopia, Somerset Record Soc.., p. 429, A.D. 1340). Gascoigne (pp. 121, 123) speaks very strongly of the scandalous extortions for the York Cathedral fabric, and the immoralities by which the indulgences sometimes raised contributions.