THERE is probably nothing which draws so sharp a line between medieval and modern Society as the status of the clergy — their immense numbers, their privileges, and the celibacy which made it possible to treat them so entirely as a separate caste. Since even reviewers who ought to have known better have thrown doubt on the trustworthiness of Salimbene’s evidence on this point, I subjoin here a few documents supplementary to the mass of evidence which is to be found in the six hundred closely-printed octavo pages of Dr. Lea’s “Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church.” Many readers may not care to pursue the subject; but those who do can scarcely fail to realize how strictly Salimbene has kept within the facts.
A. Popes. The Chronicle of Meaux was written at the Cistercian Abbey of that name in Yorkshire, by Abbot Thomas of Burton, at the end of the fourteenth century. On p. 89 of vol. iii he speaks of Pope Clement VI, who instituted the fifty-years’ Jubilee,* and against whom the Cistercians as a body had certainly no grudge. The Chronicler goes on: “Now this same Pope Clement VI had been lecherous beyond measure his whole life long. For every night at vespertide he was wont, after the cardinals’ audience, to hold a public audience of all matrons and honourable women who wished to come. At last some men, speaking ill of him on this account, began to stand by the palace doors and secretly to number the women who went in and who came out. And when they had done thus for many days, there was ever one lacking at their egress from the number of those who had entered in. When therefore many scandals and obloquies arose on this account, the confessor of the Lord Pope warned him frequently to desist from such conduct, and to live chastely and more cautiously.** But he ever made the same answer, ‘Thus have we been wont to do when we were young, 427 and what we now do we do by counsel of our physicians.’ But when the Pope was aware that his brethren the Cardinals and the auditors and the rest of the Court murmured and spake ill of him on this account, one day he brought in his bosom a little black book wherein he had the names written of his divers predecessors in the Papal chair who were lecherous and incontinent; and he showed by the facts therein recorded that these had better ruled the Church, and done much more good, than the other continent Popes. Moreover on the same day he raised to the Cardinalate one of his sons, a boy of sixteen, who was afterwards Pope Gregory XI. This Clement VI was succeeded by Innocent VI, who, like his predecessor Clement, promoted his own sons and brethren and nephews to Cardinals and Bishops, so that scarce any were left in the Sacred College who were not of his kin or of the aforesaid Clement’s.” The chronicler’s account is no doubt exaggerated, in parts at least: but the significance of the story lies in the fact that it was believed and recorded for posterity by a man in Abbot Burton’s position. Hardly less significant is the praise occasionally bestowed by chroniclers on popes of exceptional virtue. Peter of Herentals thinks it worth while to note that Gregory XI “died a virgin in mind and body, as some have asserted” (Baluze, Vit. Pap. Aven. i, 483): and similarly Wadding is proud to record of Salimbene’s Nicholas III, “he kept perpetual virginity” (An. 1280, § 93). Indeed, the scandals sometimes forced even the laity to interfere. In 1340, the King of France felt bound to complain publicly to the Pope, who had legitimized “three brothers, born of a detestable union, that is to say of a Bishop in pontifical dignity, degree, or order, and an unmarried woman.” The word in the original being Pontifex, it is possible that the father may have been one of the Pope’s predecessors, several of whom were notoriously unchaste. (Baluze, Vit. Pap. Aven., p. 600).
* The great Jubilee Indulgence was first instituted by Dante’s Boniface VIII in 1300, and was intended to recur only once in a hundred years: Clement VI shortened this period by half, and held the second Jubilee in 1350.
† Cf. Salimbene’s “Si non caste, tamen caute.”
B. Bishops. Here is Cardinal Jacques de Vitry’s account of the state of things about the time of St. Francis’s birth. “the cause of all these evils [monastic decay, etc.] was the indiscipline and insufficiency and ignorance of the prelates; for it was not only while the shepherds were asleep, but with their help, that the enemy sowed tares in the midst of the wheat . . . . In those days scarce any could be found who sorrowed for Christ’s suffering, even though He had an infinite number of ministers; scarce any setting themselves up as a wall for the Lord’s house, or eaten up with zeal for the house of God, or catching the little foxes that destroy the Lord’s vines. For, crucifying again to themselves the Son of God, and making Him a mockery, they not only made His limbs bare of all substance by the greed of their avarice, but also stripped them of virtues by the example of their iniquity. At night among harlots, next morning at the altar; caressing the daughter of Venus by night, and on the morrow handling the Son of the Virgin Mary, they trod under foot the Son of God, and esteemed the blood of the Testament unclean.” (Hist. Occ. cap. v).
428A. Secular (i.e., non-monastic) Clergy. I have already referred to the fact that St. Bonaventura condemns them in language almost as strong as Wiclif’s: here again is what is said of them by St. Anthony of Padua, when Salimbene was a boy. He speaks of clergy who “flay the faithful by forced offerings, whereon they fatten their horses, their foals, and the sons of their concubines.” (Opera. ed. de la Haye, p. 334). How little the Friars succeeded in reforming this, may be judged from the words of another celebrated Franciscan, Alvarez Pelayo, a Papal Penitentiary who wrote about a generation after Salimbene (1320). He says: “The Parish Priests . . . . live incontinently (and would that they had never vowed continence)! especially in Spain and South Italy, in which provinces the children of the laity are scarcely more numerous than those of the clergy . . . . They often sin most abominably with women of their parish whose confessions they hear.” He goes on to describe, in language strikingly like Salimbene’s, their irreverent treatment of the consecrated Host and carelessness of proper ceremonies at mass, their keeping of taverns, their greed for offerings and negligence of their duties. (De Planctu Ecclesiæ, lib. ii, artic. xxvii). Gower speaks equally strongly and fully (Mirour de l’Omme 20, 593 ff, and Vox Clamantis, bk. iii, l. 193 ff.) But more eloquent still are the fragmentary statistics of visitations which have survived. Here are the words in which Salimbene’s acquaintance, Eudes Rigaud, Archbishop of Rouen, sums up his first ruridecanal visitation (A.D. 1249. Reg. p. 17): “We caused to be called together and visited, at St. Aubin, the priests of he deanery of Longueville [which contained 42 parishes and 3 chapelries]. We found that Richard, priest of Roumesnil, has long kept a certain woman and had a child by her, yet he has been corrected by the archdeacon and the ill report has ceased. Item, the priest of Appeville is ill-famed for drunkenness. Item, we found that the priest of Martigny, ill-famed for incontinent, is non-resident and absents himself from rural chapters. Item, the priest of Ste-Foy is ill-famed of a woman by whom he has two children, as several witnesses have deposed; and he sells his corn at the end of the year. Item, the priest of St. Germain of a woman by whom he has a child. Item, the priest of Torcy le Petit, of the wife of Gautier de Laistre. Item, the priests of Chapelle and Boisrobert are ill-famed for incontinence. Item, the priest of Mesnilobert is ill-famed of a certain woman. Item, the priest of Appeville, of Reialle’s wife. Item, the priests of Arques and Arceaux are said to be incontinent. Item, the priests of St.-Honoré, of Appeville, of Arques, of Fresnoy and of Autels are ill-famed for drunkenness. We warned and rebuked them, and threatened them that, if they are found again ill-famed of such transgressions, we would punish them heavily.” The rest mainly concerns the unclerical attire of the priests and other smaller faults.
Eleven incontinents and four drunkards out of forty-five parishes is nearly double of the general average of these visitations: though, again, there were in other deaneries a good many worse individual offenders 429 than any on this list. But even more significant is the comparative impunity of the offenders, though for generations church councils had attempted to stamp out the evil by enacting the severest punishments not only on the clergy but on their partners. Any one of these Norman black sheep would at once have been deprived under the modern Anglican régime; and it is significant of the difference between our century and theirs to trace their actual careers. In 1259, Eudes began a second ruridecanal visitation which even his untiring energy failed to complete (p. 329 ff.) Here, after this ten years’ interval, we find the priest of Appeville still “a drunkard and a sot”: Roumesnil is as “ill-famed of witchcraft, and kept his daughter in his house”: and there were two fresh incontinents who had not appeared on the earlier list, one of whom “had sometimes taken harlot into his house.” The Archbishop adds “all these things we corrected and bade them amend: moreover we warned the priests generally, all and singular, to abstain from foul, mocking, and jesting words, especially before layfolk: and that they who had not close cassocks should buy them by mid-Lent.” A later notice in the diary discloses that the priest of Boisrobert is “ill-famed of the wife of a certain clerk named Bigre, and of a certain Englishwoman: we enjoined him to expel altogether the said Bigre and his wife.” (516). The priest of Mesnilobert, too, is heard of again. (139, 192, 655). In 1252 he was found to be helping his uncle, prior of the hospital at Neuchâtel, to consume in riotous living the revenues of that pious foundation. In 1254 he was cited to answer for certain misdeeds which were recorded in another register, now unfortunately lost. The result was that he gave an undertaking in legal form to resign when called upon; whether he amended his ways, or whether this written promise was later enforced against him, there is nothing to show. The rector of Fresnoy (669) was solemnly warned in 1264 for non-residence and neglecte of Church services, and for beating a parishioner’s wife with his fists. The priest of Autels (786 and 402) proved unsatisfactory, and it was ordered in 1252 that he should be pensioned off or exchange his living: in 1261 he, or his successor, resigned. The rector of Torcy le Petit (146) was in 1252 kicked in his own churchyard by the Lord Jean de Peletot, Kt., who was forced to put himself at the Archbishop’s mercy for a fine. But the strangest career from among these misdemeanants of 1248 was that of the priest of Martigny, near Dieppe. On Aug. 5th, 1257, “Gerard, priest of Martigny, appeared before us and confessed that he had kept for three years one of his parishioners named Matilda, and had frequently (pluries) known another girl: and we assigned him a day, viz., Aug. 16th, to proceed legally upon his confessions legally made in our presence: but at length he gave a formal undertaking that, if it should befall him to relapse, his living might be taken as resigned.” By canon law, of course, his living ought long ago to have been vacated. This formal undertaking signed before witnesses, is duly filed in the Appendix of the Register. On December 25th, 1261, the same Gerard was summoned to answer 430 for having wounded a vassal of the Lord Thomas of Beaumont with a sword; he pleaded self-defence, and an enquiry was instituted, we are not told with what result. On the 20th July, 1265, “he was cited by his archdeacon on a fresh accusation of incontinency but denied it on oath; and we fixed the 16th August to hear the result of such inquisition as the Archdeacon should make in the mean time.” This inquisition was unfavourable: for on August 17th he was cited to appear on January 8th next for compurgation by the oaths of six other priests (at his own choice within certain obvious limitations) who would swear with him that they believed him innocent. This was the usual lenient procedure for clerical offenders; and the great Oxford Chancellor Gascoigne describes in very strong language the iniquities to which it gave rise at the University. (Mun. Acad., R.S., p. 536). Apparently Gerard found the requisite number of obliging colleagues; for there is no more of him, nor any record of a vacancy at Martigny, in the Register, which lasts to the end of 1269. (See pp. 17, 283, 417, 523, 525, 658).
It is not at all uncommon to find such a paragraph as “we warned the priest of St. Peter’s to abstain from tavern-haunting, immoderate wine-bibbing, gadding about and unhonest consorting with women: for he was exceedingly ill-famed of such offences.” Here, again, is another case in detail, illustrating the leniency with which offenders were treated. On November 9th, 1261, “we fixed December 15th for [John] priest of Civières, who is of manifold evil report for divers vices, to purge himself with the oaths of eight other priests from the accusations of incontinence, adultery, manifold assaults, and tavern-haunting.” On December 16th John appeared without his compurgators: he was allowed a respite until the Wednesday before Christmas: on which day he failed to appear at all. Meanwhile the Archbishop instituted an inquisition into his case: from which it appeared that he was also under ill report of buffoonery, and that the witnesses who deposed to his offences were “good and grave men”: he was therefore citied again and appeared on April 1st, 1262. Here a day was again fixed for his purgation (April 17th): meanwhile, if he had any real proof of innocence to bring, he might bring it next day (April 2nd): however, “neither he appeared, nor any on his behalf.” He evidently failed to find compurgators, for on June 7th he was forced to sign a deed admitting that “he lay under grievous ill report . . . . . of incontinence with my own parishioners and with other women, of tavern-haunting, of assault; and seeing that my father the Archbishop might deal hardly with me on that account, if he were so minded,” he therefore swears in due legal form to resign his benefice when called upon by the Archbishop. Two years later, September 21st, 1264, he is again “under manifold ill report of incontinence” and is given the 17th October on which to appear with six compurgators. He did not appear: but on November 5th “he appeared with seven priests, in readiness to purge himself of many vices whereof he was accused, and whereof he lay also under manifold 431 ill-report. But we, fearing his fury and that of the priests that were with him,* and recalling that undertaking which he had formerly given us concerning the aforesaid matters, thought best to remit him this purgation, assigning to him the Tuesday before Christmas to fulfil what is contained in the said letter, as he promised under his own oath.” On the 3rd May, 1265, he was at last brought to bay and compelled to beg for mercy: upon which the Archbishop made him swear that he would consider his living as vacant on July 29th and allow another to be put in his place. On the 8th of August it is at last recorded that he has actually resigned in due form. (pp. 415, 417, 423, 434, 497, 502, 516, 524, 666).
There are many other cases worse in certain respects than either of these — priests who had formed incestuous connexions, or with married women, or with two or three different women, or who regularly haunted the neighbouring convents. There are many others also showing almost as strongly as those I have quoted the difficulty of enforcing the law, even when the prelate happened to be one of the most energetic in Christendom, and the diocese one of the most civilized. In many cases Eudes simply bound down the priests to heavy fines in case of relapse; in others (and these among the worse), he compelled them to exchange into other provinces, where no doubt they had an easier time.
I am publishing similar visitation records for England in Medieval Studies, No. 8, “Priests and People,” which will probably be ready in August, 1907. In these English records, the clergy and their flocks are presented side by side: and the former supply, in proportion to their numbers, from five to ten times as many incontinents as the laity. I say from five to ten times, because it depends whether we accept Thorold Rogers’s calculation that the clergy formed fifty per cent. of the total population, or Abbot Gasquet’s more probable contention that they formed only one hundred per cent. It is worth while to consider for one moment what this means in modern figures. There would be, under medieval conditions, about 350,000 priests in the United Kingdom at the present day; and, if we may take as a standard Bishop Morton’s Norfolk Visitations of 1499 (Bodleian MS., Tanner, 100, f. 56), there would be about 2,500 notorious black sheep among them! The Ripon and Beverley Chapter Acts show a state of things even worse.
[There is some problem with these percents of priests. Coulton states in a note in Appendix A, “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.”
[Dr. Coulton refers to the populations of priests estimated by Thorold Rogers and Abbot Gasquet in another of his works, Ten Medieval Studies, Cambridge, 1930; p. 161. He adds a footnote that gives the source as The Great Pestilence (A. D. 1348-9), by Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet, p. 166 and p. 205. On these pages, there is a note by Gasquet that states that there was on priest to every 25 people, after the plague, according to Thorold-Rogers. He states on another page, that some people think that there was one priest for every fifty people. — Elf.Ed.]
* Timentes ne ipse cum eisdem presbyteris deliraret, a phrase which is sufficiently explained by Gascoigne (l. c.) ‘no townsman of Oxford dare object . . . for, if he were to object against these false purgations, then the accused and his compurgators would secretly maim or slay him.’ It is possible that Eudes remembered how nearly one of his predecessors in the see of Rouen was stoned to death for his zeal in enforcing the laws against concubinary priests. — Pommeraye, p. 98.
D. Religious (i.e. monastic clergy). I have already pointed out in Medieval Studies, Nos. 1 and 6, how strong and unimpeachable is the evidence of monastic decay from A.D. 1200 onwards; and the list of authorities might be much extended. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry speaks 432 of the monks before the Franciscan movement as “keeping an outward show of piety but denying its inward virtue. . . disobedient, murmurers, backbiters, bearing Christ’s cross unwillingly, unclean and incontinent, walking after the flesh and not after the spirit.” Turning to the nuns, he asserts that a girl’s virtue was safe among none but those of the Cistercian Rule (Hist. Occ., caps 4 and 5). Fifty years afterwards St. Bonaventura writes, “Seeing that . . . the late Legate in Germany pronounced a general sentence of suspension from office and from benefice against clergy soliciting nuns of any order whatsoever, and of excommunication against those who seduced them; and whereas Pope Gregory IX confirmed this, and granted to few confessors the power of absolving such offenders, it is to be feared that many are bound by these sentences, who think not in their hearts that they need the grace of absolution or dispensation; yet they minister in this state, and keep their cures of souls, and receive church benefices while under this anathema.” Gower, who had no personal enmity against the monks, speaks even more strongly a century later. In some monasteries, he says, chastity is dead, and lechery has taken her place: very many (plures) monks go to hell for women, and nuns are sometimes seduced by the very visitors whose office it is to guard them (Vox Clamantis iv, 327 ff, 461, 495: much of this is repeated in his Mirour de l’Omme). His contemporary St. Catherine of Siena asserts that unnatural vices reigned among religious and parish clergy as much as among other classes: the stench of these sins tortured her so that she longed for death as a relief. There was little discipline in the monasteries, because the superiors were often as bad as the rank and file: monks and nuns sin together “and oft-times (spesse volte) they go so far that both abandon Holy Religion, whereby he is become a ruffian, and she a public harlot” (Dialogo, ch. 125: c. 162). Scarcely a generation later, the great Gerson made the same accusation of unnatural vices, and wrote, “I actually doubt whether boys and girls do not sometimes learn worse morals . . . at the schools and among monks and nuns (in religionum et scholarum contuberniis) than they would in brothels.” (Ed. Paris, 1606, ii, 628).
In 1414, almost at the same time as Gerson wrote these words, the University of Oxford addressed to Henry V a series of articles for the reform of the Church, probably in view of the Council of Constance. Although several of these articles are strongly anti-Lollard, yet those in which the University touches different failings of the clergy could scarcely have been more strongly expressed by Wiclif himself. The “Religious” exempt from episcopal jurisdiction were very numerous: probably nearer a half than a third of the whole number in England: and the University complains: “Whereas exempt Religious, at the Devil’s persuasion, are frequently defiled with fleshly vices, and are not punished by their own superiors, but their sins remain unpunished, therefore it seems expedient to appoint that the ordinaries may have full power to punish and reform all Religious, and especially for the crime of fornication committed outside their cloister.” (Wilkins, iii, 433 363). The next generation brings us to another distinguished name, Tritheim, an abbot of that Congregation of Bursfeld which owed its reform to Thomas à Kempis’s Congregation of Windesheim: and this leads me to point out an extraordinarily ineffectual criticism by a writer in the Contemporary Review for September, 1906, who professes considerable familiarity with medieval history. He is offended at my speaking of the plain evidence for monastic decay, and writes: “on the whole the standard was much higher than one might expect. It is noticeable that Thomas à Kempis barely hints at the possibility of moral laxity.” This criticism betrays a very strange ignorance of monastic history. Thomas à Kempis belonged to a particularly small and select Congregation at the period of its earliest and purest activity, and was not at all likely to write of gross sins. Yet, on the other hand, a scarcely less distinguished contemporary, himself a member of the same Congregation, has left enough and to spare of that evidence which it did not come within the province of Thomas à Kempis to give — I allude to the Liber de Reformatione of Johann Busch, which my reviewer would have done well to read side by side with à Kempis. Johann Busch, a Provost in his own Order, spent himself in the effort to reform other monasteries and bring them under the strict Bursfeld rule: he records the most startling details, and tells how his life was more than once in danger from those whose immoralities he attempted to check. Tritheim, who wrote some thirty years after Busch, and who was an Abbot of this same reformed Congregation of Bursfeld, shows how short-lived that reform had been. For seventy years, he says, scarcely one Abbot of his own house of Spanheim had died in harness: nearly all had given up the apparently hopeless task of bringing their monks to order. Again and again Tritheim enumerates the great monastic reforms of the past — including this of Bursfeld which owed so much to the friends of Thomas à Kempis — but only to lay stress on their evanescence. Addressing his fellow-Abbots at the Chapter General of 1493 he asks “where are those terrible oaths of all the Abbots of our province, whereby they swore to Cardinal Cusanus before the altar of St. Stephen at Würzburg that they would observe the Rule? . . . . . Behold Fathers, ye have 127 abbeys under the authority of your Chapter, whereof . . . . . scarce 70 have remained under the Reform. . . . See the manner of life both of abbots and monks, whose smoke goes up round about, which, though it be known, I blush to tell, and ye (most reverend Fathers) shudder to hear! For the three vows of Religion [poverty, obedience and chastity], which by reason of their excellence are called ‘the substantial vows,’ these men care no more than if they had never promised to keep them . . . . . The whole day is spent in filthy talk . . . they despise the vow of poverty, and know not that of chastity.” Again, nobody (he says) builds new churches or endows monasteries nowadays; “for the laity say ‘Lo! sinful priests and monks have gotten to themselves riches: lo! they despise the worship of God and waste their substance with harlots.’ ” (Preface to 434 Homilies — De Statu et Ruina, c. xi — Oratio III: cf. De Viris Illust. lib. i: Declamaton ad Abbates, c. ii, iii, and v).
In the case of the cloistered clergy, as in that of the parish priests, these unfavourable judgments of distinguished and orthodox churchman are borne out by official records. The Liber de Reformatione of Johann Busch is, in itself, sufficient to explain the depth of that moral impulse which undoubtedly underlay those wild passions and frequent injustices of the Reformation. Abbot Gasquet’s Henry VIII and the English Monasteries, with all its show of full documentary evidence on less important points, ignores most unaccountably the mass of obvious and unimpeachable evidence against the monasteries during the four centuries preceding the Reformation. When we take this ignorance in conjunction with his constant profession of familiarity with the subject, his flat refusal either to give chapter and verse for some of his most important statements or to discuss them publicly, and the fact that his strongest support has for some time come from anonymous articles and anonymous books, it is difficult not to conclude that the defenders of the monastic legend are at last driven to the last ditch in which the defenders of the Loretto legend are now fighting abroad — that of more or less wilful ignorance and of misrepresentations hurled from the dark corners of periodical literature. Any reader who cares to realize the shifts which Abbot Gasquet’s supporters have by this time been reduced, even in their own journals, may refer to the Tablet for Dec. 9, 1906, and following numbers, and Demain for May 3, 1907, ff.