Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 04, 1999

Social Economics

The middle ages was a time of material and emotional extremes. Judge them, not by the unscrupulous exploiters called nobles and bishops or the burghers and merchants, or even the guildsmen, but by the condition of the serfs—their life was horrible. Serfdom was slavery. The life of the mass of the people was inconceivably filthy, miserable, and vile. Their only meat was salted, and half the time was rank. Their hovels were bare, dismal, disease-ridden kennels. Their daughters or wives were free to any abbot or lord, and his chief officials. They were tied to the soil, in monotonous small villages, and had to risk their lives at any moment in the lord’s quarrels or the king’s wars.

The serf or villein had no legal rights against his lord, he could not marry or leave his village without permission and any privilege he might enjoy had to be paid for. The peasant owed his lord compulsory labour on demand, irrespective of his own needs, “innumerable dues and payments”, obligation to the lord for services like the mill and the bread oven, and obligation to the lord’s court for justice. Fines made up a substantial part of the lord’s income. Any peasant able to save enough money would buy his freedom from his lord’s demesne, but most had no chance of doing it.

The golden age of peasant prosperity is a romantic myth.

R H Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

Frequent peasant revolts testified to their misery and desperation. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been a time of advance, and prosperity, at least for some, and population increased. The fourteenth century marked a down-turn in feudal society all over Europe. It was an age of collapse and disaster, plague, famine, war, desperation and the abandonment of hope. In France and Flanders, Italy and Bohemia, Spain and Germany, peasants, artisans and burgers boldly engaged knightly armies in open battle—sometimes, as at Courtrai in 1302, winning unlikely victories. These were complex struggles of poor against rich, unprivileged against privileged, fierce, angry and brutal outbursts, yet whose brutality was exceeded by the brutality of their suppression. The established order always triumphed, but the prestige of the armoured man on horseback and the system for which he stood, was dying.

Around 1300, just when the Church was vigorously destroying heresy, the increase in population turned into a decline. Production dropped and the peasants, except a rich minority, became worse off. The lords, who had enjoyed most of the prosperity, did not want to abandon their luxurious and ostentatious way of life—but how to continue to screw the same level of tribute out of a diminishing and impoverished population? The battle over feudal rent, became more intense. In their effort to maintain their position the aristocracies of Europe resorted to new and ever more desperate measures. They took to banditry, to political gangsterism as groups of magnates tried to seize control of the state apparatus and manipulate it to their interests, and, increasingly, to the gamble of war with its attractive promises of loot, of ransoms and of enlarged estates to exploit.

Some individuals did profit from war, but any individual gains were paid for many times over on a national reckoning in economic dislocation, in plundered cities and burning villages, in slaughtered civilians and in the loss of crops and cattle. Whatever the outcome, a conflict like the Hundred Years’ War which began between England and France in 1337 could only be a disaster for the common people of both countries.

Into this declining and demoralised Europe came the further disaster of plague—the Black Death—which struck in 1348 and swept away perhaps twenty-five million people or a third of the population in no more than a couple of years. Even in an age accustomed to epidemic disease such destruction was without parallel. The epidemic swept mercilessly from one end to the other of helpless Europe. Return of the disease on a lesser scale every decade or so prevented any recovery of population and the presence of plague became an accepted fact of life.

The immediate physical effects must have been disturbing enough—villages depopulated, fields unsown, empty houses falling into decay, so many dead that in places the living were not enough to bury them. Yet the Black Death probably initiated little that was new. What it did was to increase and speed up the disintegration that was already taking place. Nor did it lead to any prolonged change of ways. At the end of it, labour was scarce and was better paid, and so those are the periods which the Christian apologist quotes. But, before long, it meant more money for the brigands, the quacks, the impostors and exploiters, the church and the lords. The luxury of the rich continued scarcely abated and the war between England and France, which had been temporarily halted, was soon renewed.

The suffering of those who survived was beyond our comprehension. Joseph McCabe describes the life of a men working from dawn to sunset, then returning to a sty, the floor unpaved, the cesspool and mud-heap at the door, the filthy interior without the cheapest comfort or adornment, the sudden call to arms, the famine drawing on with fiendish slowness, the plague spreading over the countryside. Imagine the women bearing her seven or eight children in it, brutally treated by most husbands, and the same gossipy and superstitious village round her from cradle to grave, the scold’s bridle or the ducking-stool if she dare assert herself, the suspicion of witchcraft if she tries to help others or curses gentle Jesus for it all. That is the glorious spiritual age of the church when saints multiplied like pints of ale.

The lives of the lords were at first as affected as those of ordinary people. Rents fell because there were fewer people and more untenanted holdings. Wages rose because there were fewer landless labourers and employers had to compete with one another in a smaller labour market. And rising prices meant that even with the same nominal income the lords were actually worse off. Observers noted that a tradesman had no choice but to cheat or starve. The problem for the nobility was to secure the same as before from fewer cultivators.

They tried to meet it in two ways. One was to try by every possible means to enforce and jack up all sorts of traditional obligations. Quite apart from the customary rents, which it was difficult to change, there was a great variety of fines and imposts for all sorts of occasions. These always made up a substantial part of the income to be derived from every manor. Some ground, no doubt, was recoverable in such ways—but there were limits. If peasants felt themselves treated with exceptional harshness they could and did run away and try to mend their fortunes elsewhere. Such flight was illegal and could be heavily punished, but the laws were hard to enforce in these confused times and flight became increasingly common.

A Sombre Melancholy

Calamities were never far off. Illness was one such calamity and contrasted with health far more than it does today with the scientific cures we now have. Riches also contrasted starkly with the general poverty and squalor. The cold of winter was truly cruel—it seemed evil. Today with centtal heating, warm clothes, soft beds and comforting drinks, we have no idea of what thick furs, crackling fires and snug, dry beds meant to people who had none of it, and only cold cloudy ale to drink if they were lucky.

There was a stark contrast too between town and country. There were no suburbs and industrial estates to soften the boundaries between the two. The town was like a castle divided from the country by high walls and accessible only through gates, so that only a few steps took you from one into the other. Silence was profound, as was darkness. There were no lights except candles, lamps and fires, all flickering and making dark spaces look mysterious and frightening. Such violent contrasts combined with the physical violence of the times led to excessive emotionality by modern standards, and hysteria—as Johan Huizinga—a Christian historian who thought he was Erasmus revivified in his readable book, (The Waning of the Middle Ages, 1924)—put it, an “oscillation between despair and distracted joy”, between piety and cruelty.

One symptom of this perpetual near hysteria was the prevalence of ascetics, ecstatics, visionaries and cracked pots with every imaginable religious delusion. John Gerson warned that the Devil could inspire wonderfully pious feelings, akin to real devotion, that could become addictive. People then profess a love of God to attain this feeling of addiction. One woman mystic told Gerson that her mind had been utterly destroyed and recreated in her mystical passion. “How do you know this?” he asked. She replied that she had experienced it! Though a clergyman, Gerson was too honest to take this unreason as an adequate answer. The Church ultimately did not pretend to be logical. Catherine of Siena thought her heart had become the heart of Christ. It made her a saint. Marguerete Porete thought God had absorbed her heart. She was burnt as a heretical Free Spirit.

People attended executions and burnings as entertainments, for punishments in God’s kingdom were severe and became accepted. Public tortures would be prolongued, despite the victims’ pleas for death, to prolong the crowd’s entertainment. And Christians like to claim that they ended the Roman games. An arsonist at Brussels was himself condemned to burn. Attached to a stake by a chain, he was able to walk around the pole movingly addressing the crowd to all sides as the flames rose. He “so softened their hearts that everyone burst into tears and his death was commended as the finest that was ever seen”. In another instance, the hangman, as was customary, asked the victim to forgive him, whereupon he declaimed his readiness to do so with all his heart, begging the executioner to embrace him. All present “wept hot tears”.

In an illiterate age devoid of stimulation and communications, the eloquence of itinerant preachers created a deep impression in the common people. Preachers of orthodox Catholicism were welcomed, so here was not any sort of rebellious attraction that a heretical speaker might have had. Friar Richard, a Franciscan, was allowed to preach non-stop all day for ten successive days in the cemetary of the Innocents in Paris. People flocked to hear him and wept grievously when he announced the conclusion of his final sermon. The authorities forbade another friar, Antoine Fradin, from preaching because he had a record of criticising bad government. He was guarded night and day in a monastery to ensure he could not defy the ban. Sermons against dissoluteness and luxury inflamed the common people into rioting against symbols and articles of luxury. Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” was only the best known case of an epidemic.

Worshippers fell weeping in devotion before Bernardino of Siena when he ended a sermon by displaying the name of Jesus in a gold sunburst on a blue background. Just the word, “Jesus” depicted as the sun could make people close to hysteria fall down in tears. The church called it idolatry, and Bernardino had to face the curia. Pope Martin V banned the practice. Yet, at the same time the church was introducing the use of the monstrance, at first only during the week of Corpus Christi. Originally in the form of a tower, it became a sunburst, like the idolatrous image of Bernardino.

By the waning of the middle ages, people knew that right was certain and justice could be summary, and had the character of vengeance. This was the outcome of a thousand years of Christianity, the god of which religion had turned the other cheek to his enemies and had told his followers not to judge lest they be judged. A religion that could only produce a justice of vengeance after a millennium of unopposed power cannot be what it claims—truly a religion of love.

No one doubted, at these times, that anyone accused was a criminal and deserved severe punishment. People condemned to death would be condemned to hell too in the Christian superstition everyone had to believe at that time unless they were willing to risk their lives—confession was refused to those who were condemned. The Council of Vienne (1311) decreed these people should have the sacrament of penance, but no effort was made to implement it. In 1397, the French king ordered that those who were condemned should be offered confession, and a stone cross was erected at a place where friars could get the attention of those about to die to offer them it. In practice nothing changed because the bishop of Paris had to restate the 1311 decree in 1500! Society had no doubts about anyone’s actual responsibility for some misdeed, or that the magistrates might have been wrong, and so had no thoughts about any need for reform, confirming that gentle Jesus had made no impact on his church and its believers after a thousand years.

The only hope of anyone accused was mercy. Revenge or mercy were two more medieval contrasts. An offer of mercy did not imply innocence—quite the opposite. god’s mercy had to be purely gratuitous, not given with any purpose such as preventing injustice, though, by chance, it came more often to those accused who had powerful families with connexions. Even so, the poor did sometimes benefit from the desire of princes to exert their power by issuing letters of remission.

Life could be all blood and roses. In 1418 AD, the brotherhood of S Andrew was being formed in Paris, priests and laymen wearing garlands of roses to scent the air of the church of S Eustache with the odour of sanctity, while outside the Armagnac enemies of John the Fearless were being butchered. Arras celebrated the annulment of the sentence of witchcraft passed on it (1461) with extravagant displays, no one apparently thinking much about the innocent tortured victims. Huizinga writes that people…

…oscillate between the fear of hell and the most naïve joy, between cruelty and tenderness, between harsh asceticism and insane attachments to the delights of this world, between hatred and goodness, always running to extremes.

The psychological effect was no less dramatic than the physical. The insanity caused by the demands of bad governments, the greed of nobles and bishops, violence, wars, banditry, want, pestilence, injustice and misery, was aggravated by concern over “the coming end of the world, and by the fear of hell, of sorcerers and of devils”. Life was hateful and unjust to most, and “a sombre melacholy weighs on people”.

The literature of the age was also pessimistic. Contemporary documents give an impression of intense sadness. No one seems optimistic. It was the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment that brought forward optimism for the future and the idea of progress. Priests and monks offered false consolation and hope, but the poets and the chroniclers of the times had no such delusion. They were most often laymen employed by princes and so relatively comfortably off. But they could see no consolation and find no hope in the state of the world they looked out upon from their ivory towers. They saw universal decay and misery. They bewailed the absence of justice and the perpetual warfare and banditry. The poet, Eustache Deschamps, wrote:

Time of Grief and temptation, age of tears, of envy, of torment, time of languor and damnation, age of decline night to the end, time full of horror that falsifies everything, lying age, full of pride and envy, time without honour and lacking fair judgement, age of sadness which cuts off life.

Coming up to 1500, Jean Meschinot, wrote similarly:

O miserable and too sad life! … We have war, death, famine. Cold, heat, day, night erode our strength. Flease, scabies-mites, and so many other vermine combat us. Simply have mercy, Lord, on our wicked bodies whose life is very short.

Even the portraits of the time show people with sad expressions—and these were the wealthy! Deschamps asks:

Why are the times so dark that men do not know each other, but governments move from bad to worse, as it seems? Times past were much better. What reigns? Sadness and apathy. Neither justice nor right exist. I don’t know what to do.

Modern Christians look on in disgust at Moslems or Hindus hysterically mobbing the coffin of some dead holy man or hero. But their sophisticated disdain is nothing to do with Christianity. Christians have been worse in their hysteria over the remains of dead saints. For example, S Elizabeth of hungary was lying in state in 1231. The worshippers, keen for a relic, cut off strips of the linen shroud covering her, and cut off her hair, nails and even her nipples. A strict system of conventional rules to keep passions from exploding and hysteria in check did not always work:

1. God had ordained how things should be, and so they could not be changed.
2. Loving the world imperilled the soul. The world was a vale of woe, indeed, a place of sin, simply God’s test of people’s suitability for heaven. Injustice on earth would be righted in heaven. Pie in the sky!
3. The closest to heaven possible on earth was when people devoted their entire life to God—not by doing good deeds, but by withdrawing from the wickedness of it, forsaking it, renouncing it, and contemplating God in one’s every spare mopment.

Why were so few people interested in changing the world in the middle ages? It was because of Christianity—because of these beliefs. The thought of changing the world for the better could hardly arise in such a milieu. Life was terrible but it was God-given, and, the clergy taught, was spoiled only by human sin. The imminent Last Judgement offered all the reforming needed. Any changes of practice and law made were justified as reversions to a golden age. It was meant to be regressive, not progressive. The ideal was that of a perfect heroic age for the lords, or the perfectly idyllic country life of contented shepherds for the unwashed. The aim was to restore the ideal, and to do this in the sinful world seen by Christian clergy, the justification was that earlier times had been virtuous or innocent ones. So the aristocratic lifestyle of stength, vanity, pride, pomp, and lust was justified in a sinful world as the pursuit of virtue and honour, and sometimes as a pursuit of childlike innocence.

Symbolism was an obsession of the time. The twelve months were accepted as standing for the twelve apostles, the four seasons were the evangelists, and the whole year was Christ, a memory of the worship of Yehouah as Iao, the ancient near eastern god of the year (see the pages on Gnostics). Seven was a particularly magical symbol in Christianity. Virtues, supplications of the paternoster, gifts of the holy spirit, beatitudes, moments of the passion, sacraments, deadly sins, unholy creatures, diseases, and others no doubt, all came in sevens.

The fifteenth century, profoundly pessimistic after a millennium of Christianity, a prey to continual depression, a time when books were still expensive and people illiterate, when society was violent and people had little to amuse them, had only festivals when people could enjoy themselves in culinery, literary and musical arts, leavened with dancing and colourful costumes.

Colours too had a symbolic meaning. Blue and green were the colours of love, blue being faithful love, and green passionate love. By coincidence, these are the colours of the garb of the Cathar Perfects, although they were such dark shades that Catholics claimed they dressed in black, like modern clergymen.

Chivalry

While Catholic Christianity was meant to be the ethical system of the middle ages, in practice, for the upper classes, it was chivalry. Not only the church but the whole of society was arranged into “orders”, on the belief that the whole of society expressed God’s divine will—His creation and His everlasting order.

After the honours of war, the court—the princely household—was the proof of chivalric dignity and order. The best dukes had the best ordered and grandest households. Everyone had their ranks in it, as they had throughout society. Cooks and carvers were important servants of the household, but they were outranked by bread-masters and cup-bearers because bread and wine had a holy purpose in the legend of the eucharist. The importance of precedence and its offspring, etiquette, is religious. It reflects the importance of precedence in early Christian society, and among the Essenes before that, although the Essene criterion of precedence—that of humility—soon evaporated to leave a mere patina of it as justification for a class system.

All the orders were divinely instituted, and according to the Catholic view, a wicked person could not contaminate a divinely appointed position and function in society just by occupying and fulfilling it. The heretical view was that God could not entertain any wicked person in a divinely appointed position, and the wicked occupier indeed tainted and invalidated any earthly office because the God of this world was the Devil. Heretics would not allow the Catholic escape clause that demanded respect for anyone, however wicked, because they sat in some divinely appointed seat, and their acts, such as administering the sacraments could not be sacred if they were administered by a corrupt priest. For heretics, the whole point of an office—and they recognized far fewer of them than the Catholics—was the requirement that they were filled by people who were spotlessly pure—the Cathar Parfaits. So, what was the stance of Foulques de Toulouse when he was criticised for giving alms to a poor Cathar woman? He cleverly replied:

I do not give alms to the heretic, but to the poor woman.

John of Varennes, a learned divine and preacher, gave up his benefices to become a simple holy man at his birthplace of Lié. He declared fornication to be the cause of all sin, but, like the heretics, decried that the sacredness of an holy office could be preserved when the holder of it was a sinner, particularly a fornicator. A wicked priest, for him, invalidated the sacraments he administered. He was locked up for his opinions. His views seem to have been those of a Cathar Perfect, and his view of marriage also seemed influenced by Catharism. Marriage conferred 23 different sins, he taught.

Now, it happens that the chivalric ideal matched the heretical view. Knights had to be honourable and pure. In a Catholic dominated world, few princes could be pure, but admittedly, some tried to be. It was not something that a corrupt bishop or prior need bother about. Moreover, the chivalric ideal was equality. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” the couplet atributed to John Ball was really a chivalric rhyme, oft quoted by chivalric spirits before John Ball made it famous. Like the lifestyle recommended by Christ in the gospels, though, it was excused by most of the nobility as a theoretical ideal, just as most modern Christian dismiss the Sermon on the Mount as theoretical and impractical for modern people!

The equality of man and the notion of virtue held by the nobility both came through to the middle ages from primitive Christianity—from Essenism—preserved by the heretics, the Essenic or apostolic form of Christianity that lived among the lower classes unchallenged by Catholic Christianity so long as masses were occasionally taken, and particularly while tithes were paid! As men were equal in so far as all of them aspired to be angels, and could be, even though men were not created equal. Men could consciously make up for their deficiencies by piety. Innate faults, however serious they might be, did not stop anyone—by hard work, good deeds and living righteously—from entering God’s kingdom. But what of the ranks of the Essenes? They were ranks such as the angels had, based on noble qualities, chief of which, according to the Christian god, were poverty and humility. The troubadours had sung to widespread appreciation:

From where do we get a lofty character? From a gentle heart wrapped in noble mores… No one can be humble unless it comes from the heart.

Gregory the Great, early in the Dark Ages, had reminded the Catholic Church that all men were equal before God, but the men who followed did not see it as signifying any earthly equality. It was precisely that men were equal before God, after death, at the Judgement, and even the thought of Judgement did not impress them, any more than it impresses modern evangelicals forcing their bizarre views on to others while getting rich out of their gullible audience.

To Christians in the middle ages, equality meant specifically that everyone ended up as putrefying corpses, conquered by the worm, whereas it meant to the Essenes that they should aspire to heaven, even on earth. To believers in the middle ages, the notion of the equality of men just reminded them of the death that was only too near, for most people. To remind even a prince that all men were equal simply reminded him that he differed not a whit from a penniless beggar when he died. Like today, he often decided to make the most of his good fortune while he lived, after all, Catholic prelates assured him that God had ordained it.

The Catholic emphasis in the middle ages was on death—not so much on the spiritual consequences foreseen but on the physical manifestation of death, on the corpse corrupting and being eaten with worms. It showed how disgusting and sinful the world was. Everything of beauty in it was an illusion which soon disappeared to reveal the unsavoury reality. The Christian belief ought to be that the world is essentially good, having been created by God, who expressly declared that it was good. The wickedness in it was caused by mankind’s sins, it was no property of the world itself. Yet the heretical belief was precisely that the world was wicked because it was created by the demiurge—the deluded son of the true God—the god of the Jews and Christians. The true God of all, who was purely good, had sent his good son to save humanity from his wicked son. Catholic clergy held to the wickedness of the world because it provided an excuse for how awful the world actually was, and it was meant to drive the despairing people into church to receive the magic salvific rites of the mass and the sacraments—at a price. By emphasising material and visible corruption, the even greater horrors of hell kept the masses faithful.

Chivalry recognized the importance of knowledge, and set the doctor at the equivalent rank as the knight, the one being the sage and the other the hero, learning being ranked with courage.

The archangel Michael was seen as the first chivalrous knight, albeit a heavenly one, from whom knighthood on earth and chivalry began. According to Jean Molinet, the angels around God’s throne were the model for the chivalrous court of Lord and knights. The system was thought to have been carried forward into the middle ages by the Romans from a distant antiquity, the Roman soldier being a “miles”, and the wealthy noble class of horsemen being the “equites”, considered as knights. Romulus was supposed to have founded the earthly system of knighthood, having founded the order of equites as cavalrymen.

The Templars, Knights of S John, the Teutonic Knights, and the Spanish orders were the earliest chivalric monks, if the Essenes themselves are not counted, for chivalry, monachism and the Essenes could be linked by the umbilical cord of a forgotten primitive Christianity.

Medieval chivalry, in its first bloom, was bound to blend with monachism.

Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages

The chivalric knight errant was poor and without ties like the first Templars. Like the Essenes, knighthood was a sacred brotherhood requiring an initiation involving shaving and a ritual bath. The shaving went with the Nazarite vow, which was followed then by allowing the hair to grow so long as the vow was kept. If the vow was broken the hair was again shaved, and the vow had to be taken afresh. Medieval knights were fond of making all sorts of curious vows, but the aim was the same as the Nazarite vow, to provide a symbol and reminder of it.

The bath was natural to the Essenes, a baptizing religion. Essenes had to bathe often, but the need to bathe continually several times a day was abrogated when the circumstances of a holy war precluded it. Christians used this as a pretext for abolishing regular bathing, and, eventually, even the initial bath became a ritual splashing with holy water, until baptist sects were revived after the Reformation. The knights who took this initiation, as opposed to the honorary knighthood conferred by a prince, had evidently carried forward the original Essene tradition, and were known as the knights of the bath. Henry IV recognized them formally and George I made it into an official order of knights in Britain.

By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, orders of chivalric knights based on high moral ideals were multiplying rapidly, all great nobles wanting to start an order of their own. The Order of the Passion specified a vow of moral perfection, the same aim the Essenes had, and the same aim that the Cathar leaders had, even being called Perfects. It seems earlier orders had not needed such a vow, it being assumed as a sine qua non of chivalry. The feasts of the court of Edward III are described in The Vow of the Heron where the Eart of Salisbury vowed not to open one of his eyes “until I shall be in France where there are good people, and until I shall have lighted the fire…”

The word “order” came to be synonymous with “religion”. The order of the Golden Fleece was called the religion of the Golden Fleece. A particular knight was said to have been of the religion of Avys. Michault, in rhyme, said the Golden Fleece was to praise God and to offer “glory and high renown to the good”. Jason is an alternative form of the Greek name Jesus. He was a Greek saviour who brought the Golden Fleece, a symbol of the rising sun, from the far east—Colchis, at the eastern end of the Black Sea. Jason, like Jesus, is a mythical sun figure, symbolised by the fleece, Just as Jesus is symbolically the Lamb of God. The church was not happy with this imagery, and raised objections that Jason was an unworthy hero having used deceit to get the fleece. But the Bishop of Chalons, who was chancellor of the order, identified the Golden Fleece with the fleece of Gideon in the Jewish scriptures who caught the dew of heaven on it. Thus the Greek hero became an Israelite judge. In such ways are Pagan mythologies Christianized! Members of the order were re-named with moral names in a baptism ceremony involving a sprinkling with wine, most likely the original ritual of the Last Supper before Paul Christianized it.

As time passed and the Renaissance approached, chivalry lost its religious pretensions and became a set of social customs and traditions.

The Church

As there was no explanation of the moral catastrophe in the later middle ages, it added to a widespread collapse of confidence in the human and divine ordering of events and in the church as its acknowledged interpreter—all the more since the clergy had shown themselves in no heroic light. Too many Christian historians are like Huizinga who ignores the historical facts in preference to Christian myths, pleading, “the church had inculcated gentleness and clemency”. This is the same church that had instituted the crusades, the Albigensian massacres and the various inquisitions, and was just fomenting the witch hunts at this very time. It must be that these are the Christian ideas of what gentleness and clemency are. It has continued to demand retribution for sin as it always did, and sin to any Christian is what their enemies do!

The Church of the God of love had no interest in the plight of the poor, though a few individual Christians did.

The Church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She cloaks her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked.

S Bernard

At the height of feudalism, wealth was owned as land, and the nobility were the ones who owned it. The bishops and barons might envy each other, and fight wars over land, but they showed their wealth by holding courts of astounding elegance and luxury at this castle or that palace, and travelling in grand procession from one to the other. The sin was pride, necessitating envy and extortion. By the end of the middle ages, feudalism was already yielding to the bourgeoisie. Enough money was in circulation to make it worth hoarding, and these hoarders were the first capitalists. The sins were envy and greed for money and possesions. Throughout, the poor envied and hated those with the wealth and the desire to show it off—the princes and bishops, and eventually rich burghers, who were kicking sand in the faces of weaklings.

The Church was a landowner on an immense scale and the upper clergy were as rich and luxurious as their lay counterparts. Much of the wealth of the Church was in its land ownership, and owning land meant owning men. As the biggest landowner and owner of peasants in Europe, the Church had no doctrine on this that it wanted to emphasize.

Doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church.

R H Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

Abbots and bishops were amongst the richest of the princes, and amongst the most avid. A fracas between two poor men led to some slight bloodshed in the church of the Innocents in Paris—the cemetary of which was the place where Parisian nobles wanted to be buried—requiring it to be reconsecrated. The bishop refused unless the two poor men paid him a sum of money they could only have in their dreams. Contemporaries described this bishop as an “ostentatious, grasping man, of a more worldly disposition than his station required”. Mass could not be served for three weeks while the dispute was being settled.

Only five years later, the next bishop refused all funerals for four months unless the church paid up the fee he demanded. Here was another high clergyman who contemporaries described as “a man who showed very little pity to people if he did not receive money”. Not only that, but he was a man who would rather go to law than to pay a bill. “Nothing could be gotten out of him without going to law”, and “it was the truth that he had more than fifty law suits before Parlement”. Modern TV evangelists will know exactly what motivated men like this—greed and a profound contempt for the flock.

Royal funerals in Paris more than once were disturbed by the greedy wranglings of monks. In 1422, the guild of salt-weighers, whose honour it was to carry the dead king, Charles VI in this case, to the abbey of Saint-Denys, fought the monks of the abbey when the latter tried to make off with the rich cloth of gold over the bier. At the funeral of the next Charles, Charles VII, the guildsmen refused to move the body more than half way along its journey unless the monks were plainly told they had no right to the pall, which was the guildmen’s honour, or the guild should be compensated if it were to go to the abbey. The Grand Master of the Horse agreed to pay the guildsmen out of his own pocket, thereby entering his own right to the relic, but the monks ended the day squabbling with the Grand Master over ownership of the pall.

Since some of the clergy were among the few who were literate, they came to fill many government offices. As it still does, the clergy mainly protected the Church’s interests not Christian doctrines. Serfdom suited the Church. The poor were rewarded in heaven—Lazarus went before Dives—serfs could look forward, as always, to pie in the sky! But the poor were not disposed to wait so long for it. And post mortem punishment of the rich carried less weight when the peasants saw the abbey as another exploiting landowner and the parish priest as a collector of tithes—all joining in the scramble to impoverish him. They were far more ready to listen to unbeneficed and persecuted preachers like John Ball who spoke to them of their own experience.

The fourteenth century was the great age of popular revolt, and it was in the late 1370s that these came to a head. The revolts in Europe may not be strictly comparable with that in England, since they were urban rather than rural. An important difference between most of Europe and England is that in England towns were much less developed and a great deal of industry was situated in the countryside, so that in the villages peasants and artisans lived side by side, were often of the same family and formed common interests. The artisans were likely to have been disproportionately influenced by heresy, because many of the heretics were themselves artisans. In the English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, artisans played a considerable part and supplied several of the leaders. In Europe such unity was harder to achieve. The towns exploited and tended to despise the villagers.

It was in these great industrial cities that the European revolts were centred. Thus in Florence the guildsmen, the “ciompi” as they were called, seized power in 1378 and were not finally reduced till 1382. In Flanders the citizens of Ghent made their third major revolt of the century, culminating in the total defeat of the Count of Flanders at Bruges. They maintained control under the leader Philip van Artevelde till they were destroyed by a French army in the terrible battle of Roosebeke in 1382. This victorious army then turned back to Paris, where it crushed a revolt which had been simmering since 1380.

Similar revolts, mostly over taxation and civic rights, took place in Rouen and other French cities. Textile workers, particularly in Flanders and Italy, repeatedly revolted in the fourteenth century. How far these events influenced those in England it is hard to say, but contacts between this country and Flanders and northern France were quite close. At least the simultaneous coming together of all these tensions and discontents over such a wide area can hardly be entirely accidental.

It was not the Church, but these revolutionary peasants who pointed out that Christ had declared all men free. The German peasants wrote in the programme of 1525:

For men to hold us as their own property… is pitiable enough, considering that Christ had delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the great, without exception, by the shedding of his precious blood. Accordingly, it is consistent with scripture that we should be free.

But artisans and peasants, for all their revolts, then had no power to change the system. It was the French revolution, in the eighteenth century, that ended serfdom in France. The German revolutions of the nineteenth century ended it in Germany, and the downtrodden serfs of Russia were not freed until the Bolshevik revolution of the twentieth century[†]Russian Serfs. Lucien Brancaccio writes that Alexander II’s Emancipation Act of 1861 nominally set he Russian serfs free. The problem was that a serf freed without land was a dead serf, yet the landowners claimed it would cost them too much to give them all a viable plot. Discontent with the new law was immediate, and some serfs did not receive any land for 20 years. Alexander was eventually killed by a revolutionist’s bomb. I should have said “effectively freed” perhaps. Thanks to Lucien for the correction..

Over Europe, “parliaments” of wage earners were convened, the forerunners of trades unions. Textile workers in Paris, as early as 1270, were given a minimum wage, but the textile trade was often considered special, and other workers and peasants more often had a maximum wage set. At the end of the thirteenth century, Paris had 128 trades guilds of 5000 masters and 7000 journeymen. Other cities were similar. Even Wycliff wrote in opposition to the trades guilds for refusing to buy their raw materials over a certain price, even when the goods were worth it, or more. He meant “men of subtle craft like free masons and others”. Wycliff believed in fraternity, not in narrow guilds, but of all of “Christendom by God’s covenant”. The guildsmen might have agreed but meanwhile wanted something more reliable.

Yet, the Church was opposed to personal enterprise. The sin was not being rich, but seeking to improve yourself. Henry of Langenstein, a fourteenth century schoolman, explained:

He who has enough to satisfy his wants and nevertheless ceaselessly labours to acquire riches, either to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live on without labour, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance—all such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality or pride.

The idea of the Church was that God fixed the social order. People could not improve themselves. Yet the Church itself was, according to Tawney, “an immense vested interest”. The Papacy made huge exceptions to its bans on usury for the international banking houses, even enforcing the payment of debts with the threat of excommunication. Italy was full of banking houses.

The excuse was that the ban on usury was to protect the poor from exploitation by rich usurers, but whatever truth there might have been in this, it was all part of a system geared to keep people in their place. Councils of 1175, 1274 and 1312 placed increasing restrictions on money-lending until the usurer became an outlaw. Exodus, Leviticus and Luke 6:35—a mistranslation—were the scriptural authority for it. Usury finished up declared a heresy. A pamphleteer wrote that it was proverbial that “usury was the brat of heresy”. The Inquisition was authorized to proceed against money-lenders, and, if a guilty money-lender was dead, then, as usual, restitution was had from his heirs. Meanwhile, Bossuet taunted Calvin and Bucer for defending extortion, meaning usury.

The Decadence of Christianity

As early as the ninth century, people were protesting against the rigidity and want of spirituality of the sacerdotal Christian Church. Harold Bayley, A New Light on the Renaissance, says the clergy were men of “fierce passions and low instincts”. They were justly regarded as fanatical obscurantists devoted not to the advancement of morality and learning, but to the perpetuation of a benighted ignorance and an almost inconceivable bigotry.

From the middle of the thirteenth century, a continuous wail arises against the iniquity of the Church, and its burden may be summed up in one word—“avarice”. At Rome, everything is for sale.

R H Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

The Catholic priest would absolve every crime at a suitable price. Poisoning, incest, perjury, murder—every conceivable crime—had its price, and the price list was carefully laid out. A son could buy an absolution for the murder of his father! The Church was a commercial salvation factory. The motto it spread was “Outside of the Church no one is saved”.

Referring to ornaments in the churches, mainly the larger churches of the bishops, for many ordinary parish churches looked more Lutheran than Catholic in their lack of grandeur, S Bernard spoke of:

[We monks] who have reputed as filth all that shines bright or sounds sweet to the ear, what fruit do we expect from these things? The admiration of fools or the offerings of the simple?

The authorities confessing these things were devout Catholics who could have had no intention of painting a darker picture than existed. For this reason, the Church is in no position to deny it. The constant wail was that of reforming priests and friars who complained incessantly against the corruption, but were unable to get anything done about it.

Berthold of Ratisbon (1220-1272) often commented on the number of “parson’s children” found everywhere, when the clergy had been nominally celibate for two hundred years. He complained that bribery and corruption were as rampant in the Church courts as in the lay ones. Many parishes were abandoned, and many of the priests who remained in post were ignorant and illiterate. Parishioners were so fed up with the greed of the bishops that when they were tithed milk, they took it into the church and poured it on the floor before the altar. Berthold complained that many Christians rose in the morning without making the sign of the cross, and reached the age of twenty before they could recite the Lord’s Prayer. Thomas of Celano, contemporary biographer of S Francis of Assisi, complained that the overwhelming majority of thirteenth century Italians “had nothing but the mere name of Christian to boast themselves with”.

The laity had never known why they believed, and seldom even what they were supposed to believe.

G G Coulton, Ten Medieval Studies

Long before Luther, and while the system of indulgences was still new, Berthold preached against them:

Fie, penny preacher, murderer of mankind!… Thou promiseth so much pardon for a single penny or halfpenny, as thou pratest to them. So, they will never repent, but go to hell and are lost forever… Thou hast murdered true penitence amongst us!

Berthold was as incensed against pilgrimages. The pilgrim’s extravagance often reduces his wife and child to poverty, though he himself “gorges himself so that he comes back far fatter than he went, and has long tales of all he saw that he dins into men’s ears during service and sermon time”.

Roger Bacon (1214-1294) looked upon his age as utterly degenerate. His wish or prayer was for a good pope or emperor to change it all, or for Christ to return to judge it. He names the clergy as the fountain of evil:

Everywhere we shall find boundless corruption—and first of all in the Head… Let us consider the Religious Orders—I exclude none from what I say. See how far they are fallen, one and all from their right state. And the new orders [of Friars] are already horribly decayed from their first dignity. The whole clergy is intent on pride, lechery and avarice.

Monastic Corruption

The priests and bishops were corrupt, but the corruption spread to the monastics in a remarkably short time. The devout monks of the early years of the new Catholic orders took their cues from the heretics they were set up to combat—they were puritanical! The friars began as Catholic Puritans, and the Puritans were the Cathars. Puritans always took most seriously the wickedness of the material world.

The monks who lived by the discipline of the original monastic rules were subject to a severe discipline indeed—“the discipline of the quarter deck” as G G Coulton called it. Laughter, play, dancing and public festivities were improper and forbidden to them, as they were to anyone who wanted to save their souls. The fact that heretics and later witches did not mind enjoying themselves offended people brought up so strictly.

Yet, S Bonaventura complained, only a generation after S Francis had died, that the friars who tried to keep S Francis’s Rule strictly were a laughing stock to the majority of self-satisfied Franciscans. Thomas of Eccleston wrote:

Self-indulgence will grow in the Order as insensibly as hairs grow on a man’s beard.

S Thomas Aquinas had concluded that not even the pope could order a friar to break his solemn vow. As if to prove him wrong, Pope John XXII, in 1317, made it a heresy for a friar to disobey his superior by wearing the short robes S Francis had commanded or refusing to beg for grain and wine to fill the barns and wine cellars S Francis had forbidden to those vowed to poverty.

The outcome was that Catholic Christians were burnt as heretics. Four were burnt, in 1318, for denying that the pope could break their vow of poverty intended by S Francis to make his Rule comply with Christ’s gospel. Sixty more were forced to submit over a period of six months, possibly as a result of torture. Between 1318 and 1330, 113 Franciscans of both sexes were burnt in France, Italy, England and the borders of Germany. In 1330, 25 men and 8 women of the Spiritual Franciscans were burnt “in England, in a certain forest”.

Thomas of Eccleston and the Franciscan, Salimbene, in their contrasting ways, show that the Franciscan Rule was defunct within a generation of its founder’s death. The fault in the Rule was that hermits cannot be apostles, but friars were meant to be both. Some managed to become sincere hermits, and some sincere apostles, but most found a disreputable path between. The popes endorsed this disreputable path of relaxation of the Rule, and hypocrisy.

The novice still vowed himself to lifelong obedience. The minister who admitted him still promised eternal life as a reward for this obedience. But, meanwhile, the Vicar of Christ sent him to the stake in this world, and to hell in the next, for presuming to obey too literally these precepts of which the Saint himself had protested on his deathbed: “By God’s grace, they are plain and simple enough to need no explanation”.

G G Coulton, Ten Medieval Studies

So the popes explained them away! This was the price S Francis paid for hoping to be a “heretic” within the Church. He tried to introduce the simple devout lifestyle advocated by the Christ of the gospels, and practiced by almost no one except the Cathar heretics, into the Church. His deference to that corrupt institution was his self-defeating weakness. The worst treason to the spread of goodness is obedience to the evil-doer in authority. The reforming friar was always the tool of the papacy, and it was clear soon sfter S Francis died. The original critics of indulgences grew rich handing them out.

The Devil used friars for his ministers wherein heaven was sold for little money.

Bishop Gardiner

The existence of the female sex to the chaste monks was also considered a temptation “of God’s providence”. Monastic rules were devised to keep the monks free from temptation. Is it any wonder that Franciscans and Dominicans looked upon people who lived life confident in an ultimate salvation, as the heretics did, as demonic? So, Gregory, Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas thought that one of the joys of the blessed in heaven was to look down upon the wicked burning in hell-fire. That being so, the Inquisitors had the approval of God to begin the pleasure for the faithful on earth by obliging them to see heretics burning on earth.

S Bonaventura wrote:

Keep my heart with all diligence, and let it be given up to spiritual exercises only. Suffer no images of earthly things to leave their impress thereon that so it may remain a stranger to all things created, and free to devote itself solely to its creator.

One wonders what these people thought the Creator God of the Christians had created the world for. No images of earthly things were to leave an impress on the human being. Christians were to be strangers to the real world. Could anything be more insane? Had God given us brains and senses? If so, why? Nature was evil, so God meant to test us by letting us have cognizance of it? Temptations of God’s providence! The Christian interpretations of their own God make him out to be a fool or a cheat.

Even so, they believed it and devised monasteries that were meant to be self-sustaining so that the monks were confined to them and therefore free from all worldly attractions, especially women. In the Benedictine Rule which was the basis of many monastic rules, clause 66 reads:

The monastery, if possible, should be so constructed that all necessary works… may be done inside the monastery, that the monks may not be compelled to wander outside, which is altogether unrofitable to their souls. Moreover, we will that this rule be often read out loud in the congregation in order that no monk may excuse himself on the score of ignorance.

Monks were able to excuse themselves even so because they could not understand the Latin, and so the rule was read out in the vulgar tongue too. Thus, there was no excuse at all. Young monks of the strict houses, thought immature, were not permitted to visit a dying parent. The archbishop of York would not let his monks labour in the fields for the danger to their souls, though Benedictines had a low view of labouring anyway, even when not gallivanting, preferring to waste their time reading their bibles throughout, once a year, and singing psalms. S Gregory would forbid the monks and nuns even from taking business journeys, with rare exceptions.

Temptations remained, even for the saintly. The Fioretto showed that the Devil could appear to a saintly man, Ruffino, in the form of Christ himself, warning him he was heading for damnation. Perhaps the Devil learnt a better trick. Can any modern Christian explain why they are more certain than Ruffino that they have not experienced the Devil not Christ coaxing them into self-righteous smugness with his faith-not-works criterion of salvation. He assures the dopey clappies they are saved for no other reason than saying they are Christians! But that manifestly is not the gospel message of Christ himself, and so, in fact, they are damned for their smugness.

The medieval texts says that the Devil appeared more often than not as Christ or the Virgin Mary, often with all the glory of heaven and offering every conceivable temptation to men of singular perfection and spotless religious reputation. This Devilish Christ would even urge the saintly monks to self-imposed martyrdom—suicide—and that had been declared a sin by S Augustine of Hippo!

The Crimes of Monks and Nuns

The story of the monasteries, as told by the monks and bishops themselves, is frequently a wearisome story of embezzlement and robbery from generation to generation. Coulton says this to disabuse those medieval romanticists and Christian apologists who try to picture the monastic life as an ideal in hard times, spoilt only by Thomas Cromwell going about his destructive business at the bidding of Henry VIII. To tell the truth about monastic decay is not to defend Henry and Cromwell. They robbed the monasteries of whatever wealth they had “brutally”, “recklessly” and “dishonestly”, but they were not mainly robbing innocent do-gooders.

The injustice with which [Henry VIII] carried out his designs [for the dissolution of the monasteries] was incomparably less revolting than that which a fourteenth century king and pope suppressed the Order of the Templars. The barefaced dishonesty with which he pocketed the spoils compares favourably with that of the popes…

G G Coulton, Ten Medieval Studies

Cromwell’s agents are said to have carried away to London cartloads of jewelry from the monasteries, but, if that is so, the constant robbery of them by their own inmates in the previous 300 years shows what vast incomes they had enjoyed. The author of Piers Plowman describes the monasteries as deeply decayed and squandering their great revenues. The Chancellor of Oxford University in 1450 complained of monastic uselessness and waste, and pleaded for disendowment. Though speaking from a position in disagreement theologically, Wycliff agreed about the monasteries. So Cromwell did not start the dissolution of the monasteries. They were already dissolute!

In the thirteenth century, bishops visited monasteries in their dioceses from time to time to check that they were being run in a proper and orderly fashion. Needless to say, they often were not. 33 nuns of 373 at Rouen were unchaste. This was considered exemplary. The prior of Walsingham in East Anglia was found to have been a serial thief and had even murdered a peasant. His punishment was to be retired “under assurance of a competent annual pension for the rest of his life”.

Bishop Nicke of Norwich visited Wymondham Abbey in 1514 and found a trail of immorality and ineptitude. One monk, told he had been accused by the bishop, publicly replied that the bishop and his lady should be told he did not care. He was publicly exposing the bishop’s own hypocrisy in his statement. Another monk was suspected of adultery, another was an adulterous drunkard, another’s cell was frequented by suspected women, and a litany of other religious crimes was listed. This community of monks consisted of eleven men! They complained of the bishop’s reform by blaspheming his name in public places outside the monastery. The action the bishop took is recorded:

The Lord Bishop enjoined that henceforth no layman should be admitted to any office within the aforesaid abbey until he had first pledged himself to keep faithfully the secrets of the abbey.

The record of the Exeter visitations shows the prior of S James’ Priory in 1334 to have been an embezzler and a fornicator. The priory was waste, the church in ruins, mass was not served. The bishop excommunicated the prior—but he remained in post! The bishop then wrote to the parent house of S Martin asking that the prior be replaced, but nothing happened. He is still recorded as the prior in 1339, and there is no record of his removal. Tavistock Abbey and Barnstaple Priory were in almost as bad a mess.

The registers of episcopal visitations were not complete and apologists for the Church like to argue that only the bad cases were recorded, but the truth is the opposite, if anything. The bishops were chary of drawing the state of the monasteries to public attention. Only the conscientious, reforming bishops did it, and they were a small minority.

The 26 monks of the great priory of Lewes in Sussex enjoyed an annual income that would be nigh on £1 million at present value. Yet it was around £3 million in debt, according to the visitation of 1279. A report on the visitations of the Cluniac (Benedictine) houses in England, in 1280, concludes they “are much decayed spiritually and financially”. A decade later, the report did not criticize their spiritual side but declared tham “ill-managed” financially and in debt. Other visitations over a long period confirmed the state of affairs until the reporting ceased during the 100 years war. Even so, a petition to the king in 1331 stated “the order of Cluny is come to shame, and none dare speak of religion”.

The nunneries were no different. Rusper Nunnery only had five registered episcopal visitations, but they show it was run as a private workhouse for the prioress. In 1442, she had never presented any accounts. In 1478, there was no inventory of the convent’s possessions. In 1521, the house was in decay, and “much burdened with expenses by reason of the prioress’s friends and relations who constantly stayed there”. In 1527, the house was ruinous and occupied only by the prioress and two other nuns.

The nearby nunnery of Easebourne was in every respect the same. In 1441, the prioress’s extravagance had put the convent around £40,000 at present value in debt. She constantly travelled beyond the priory and feasted sumptuously wherever she went. The fur trimmings for her cloak would today have cost about £5000. The nuns complained, to the bishop, they were not given any payment, yet monks and nuns were not supposed to be paid on peril of their souls. So, this very appeal, notwithstanding the extravagance of the prioress, is a symptom of decay. Subsequent visitations chart its continuation.

At Durford, the nine monks enjoyed an income of almost £100,000 each year but by Cromwell’s time the monastery was “far in debt and great decay”. One Sussex bishop had to warn his priors not to throw the broken victuals meant to feed the poor to their hunting dogs! Forging the convent seal so as to embezzle the monastery’s possessions was commonplace. Priors often bought their position so that they could milk the monastic estate. A prior of Sele bought his post for £10,000 and spent the next eight years wasting “the property of the house and allowing the buildings to fall into decay”. The costly jewels given by Rufus to Battle Abbey went missing within 20 years. By 1530, the seventeen monks who lived there had an income of £880,000 annually, but their library, which had been one of the best in England, was derelict.

Even when excesses and iniquities were exposed, the nepotism and back-scratching that threaded the whole system made it difficult indeed to get rid of dissolute abbots and priors, and especially bishops. Gregory X, in 1274, made a determined effort to depose Henry, who had been Bishop of Liège for almost thirty years, whose concubines included two abbesses and a nun, and who boasted of having 14 children in 22 months. Archbishop Eudeo Rigaud, a friend of S Bonaventura, was one of the most rigorous medieval reformers, yet whenever he could he avoided scandal by warning immoral clerics not by publicly punishing them.

Master Roberts 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.

A F Leach, in a book on the Southwell visitations, concludes:

Neglect of duty and sexual immorality were so common that they were never punished, except when some public scandal was created by them.

A Frisian Abbot, the father of Rudolph Agricola, when he was elected abbot also learned his mistress had delivered him a son. He exulted: “Today, I have twice become a father. God’s blessing on it.”

Pierre d’Ailly (de Reformatione) was a puritan who decried the increasing numbers of churches, festivals, saints, images, hymns, holy days, and the lengths of services in Catholicism after the destruction of its rivals. He criticised the mendicant friars for accepting alms that would have benefited leper houses and hospitals, and the masses of destitute people who had nothing other than begging to keep them alive. He said they were as bad as the liars who sold indulgences making the church ridiculous. In declaring that salvation cost money, the Protestant evangelist, Gene Scott, was no different from these earlier tricksters.

Plainly, the monastic orders began with the severest discipline. Yet, the Cluniac visitors cited here found nothing resembling this discipline, and medieval romantics and Christian apologists blame Thomas Cromwell for unreasonably enforcing Rule 66, on the grounds that “a rigorous confinement would breed discontent”. Cromwell knew they could not keep it up, but the apologists ignore the fact that the rule was meant to be strict to save souls, yet was rarely enforced strictly by the monks themselves. And, lest anyone should suppose that the Cluniac Houses were unusually bad, Coulton cites the works of the monks Busch, Ambrose of Capaldoli, and Trittenheim, as showing that the same was true of medieval monasteries in general.

The Notoriety of the Priesthood

Services such as vespers and matins were most often literally deserted, only the priest and his deacon being in attendance. But all night vigils were sometimes well attended, baudy and led by priests playing dice. It was when they had been granted some sort of allowance, perhaps by the municipality, to support them. The accounts of Strasbourg show a gift of 1100 litres of wine for those who “watched in prayer” in the church on S Adolphus night. Nicolas de Clemages tells us that people would go to distant churches for such events, nominally in pilgrimage, but really for a good night out. Prostitutes did good buiness at these times. In the same vein, Thomas à Kempis wrote that those who go on pilgrimages rarely become saints.

276 cases of immorality were tried at Ripon and 56 of them were priests. From the known ratio of priests in the population, the figure should have been pro rata about twelve, and six might have been more likely. Possibly more priests were listed for the reason that they were supposed to have been moral, but even so the figures show that many were not.

In the eleventh century, the popes and bishops of Christendom were more interested in wine and women than the souls of their flocks. G G Coulton says the thirteenth century papal court was just as notorious a den of corruption as it was before and afterwards, although the Church prides itself on the names of some of its popes like Innocent III. A contemporary cardinal observed that, while the papal court was at Lyons, it had turned the city into a huge brothel. Similar things were said of Avignon, Constance and Rome when the papal court was resident in those cities.

Balthazar Cossa, chamberlain to pope Boniface IX, scandalized the people of Rome with his shameless immorality. The pope’s resolution of the problem was to promote him to the cardinalate, and send him as a papal legate to Bologna. His shocking behaviour there exceeded even his previous excesses, and his reward was to be made pope, albeit a schismatic one, John XXIII. He was charged with a list of crimes at the Council of Constance, and forced to abdicate, but after a period of imprisonment, he spent his last few months alive as a bishop.

The popes embezzled for their private purposes vast sums collected by the people for the crusades.

Pious theft was as definitely encouraged by high medieval moralists as pious fraud.

G G Coulton Ten Medieval Studies

The state of the Church was such that Coulton thought the failure of the crusades could have led to Europe becoming Moslem. Salimbene declared that people would refuse Christian charity to friars but would instead give their alms to common tramps saying:

Take this in Mohammed’s name, for he is greater than the Church nowadays!

The universities were run by clerics to teach clerics to read Latin, and to give them a few other skills useful to their devotional calling, but at Oxford, drunkeness was so common, it was not listed as an offence. Manners and language was utterly coarse. All Catholics swore like troopers. Indeed, to object to profane language was considered by the Inquisition to be a sign of heresy. Everyone swore, even clergymen! In Chaucer, the poor parson who objected to swearing was suspected of being a Lollard.

Blasphemy, in law, was subject to terible punishments such as lip-slitting and cutting out tongues. Why then was swearing as great a plague then as it is today? The answer is that, even by the cruel standards of the middle ages, the punishments for just saying words was too severe, and were never applied except in short periods of clerical vengeance or fanaticism. The law was restated in some such times. A marginal gloss to the ordinance of 1397 in France says: “At present, 1411, these oaths are general throuout the country without being punished.” Reformers like Pierre d’Ailly and Jean Gerson asked for the law to be implemented with lighter penalties, but they failed to get any change. Coulton tells us that few medicinal books could be translated for modern audiences, they were so vulgar, and songs were also too risqué to translate.

The beautiful poem from which Neale took Jerusalem the Golden is in many parts quite untranslatable.

In 1222, five of 17 curates of Salisbury were found not to know the Latin of a single sentence of the Latin mass that they had mumbled daily for years. It was not untypical, and in the same year, the Provincial Council of Oxford made an injunction that had to be repeated fifteen years later at another similar council:

Let the Archdeacons at their visitations see that… the priests can rightly pronounce at least the formula of consecration, and that of baptism, and that they clearly understand the meaning of these…

It is plain evidence that thirteenth century priests often knew no Latin—not enough even to recite and comprehend two short passages of a few words each meant to be of critical importance to believing Christians. Yet, the mass, like all Church services, was in Latin, the bible was in Latin, and all religious and theological books were in Latin. The five Salisbury priests were exposed in their ignorance by the examinations that the archdeacons made of their priests and monks in their visitations. The actual reports of the examiners in the cases cited were:

• A curate, four years in priest’s orders could not construe a Latin passage, and “knew by heart no part of the divine service or the psalter”.
• A priest of six years “is young and knows nothing”.
• A priest of four years “knew nothing either of reading or singing”.
• The curate of Sandhurst for four years “could give no answers” to the questions asked by the examiner.

Priests who knew no Latin normally learnt the mass off by heart and delivered it by rote learning, but those who did not even know it by rote simply mumbled it—whence mumbo-jumbo. There is no record that any of these priests were sacked. Another injunction of a Church council read:

Henceforward, let no Bishop be suffered to confer deacon’s or priest’s orders on an illiterate man, and let any such, who may already have been ordained, be now compelled to learn… what doth he in the Church of God if he be not skilled to read.

The mass being mumbled in mumbo-jumbo, the congregation typically ignored it, using it as an occasion to meet and to chatter. People freely wandered in and out of the church during the mass, shouted across to friends, joked and told tales, and even lurched in drunk from the tavern. The tertiaries of the Dominicans and the Franciscans had a rule that they should not talk during the service, showing that the rule was necessary. Priests were scarcely any different. A Bull of Clement V, in 1311, complained of the priests gabbling the service, curtailing them, and using profane language during them. Yet, despite their negligence, the clergy insisted on their tythes of a tenth of all produce, fines, death duties and so forth.

The “Church Ale” was an important source of revenue for the parish priests before the Reformation. Atchbishop Reynolds, in 1325, angrily wrote:

Certain sons of gluttony and drunkenness, whose god is their belly, hastily swallow the Lord’s body at Easter, and then sit down in the church itself to eat and drink as if they were in a tavern.

Whatever he was describing was too early to have been called a “Church Ale” but it is plainly enough what was eventually so named. The Puritans put a stop to them, but with difficulty, they were so popular. It seems the occasion was an extension of the Saxon and Viking revels in honour of their ancestors, trnasfered into Christian celebrations, as many were. Church buildings were used for Sunday markets too. The Puritans objected to that as well and preferred to leave their churches mainly unused until recently when they themselves started to use them as youth clubs, coffee bars and for jumble sales. It highlights Christian hypocrisy and inconsistency.

Bishop Hooper, burnt as a heretic himself a few years later, complained in 1552 that “scores of clergy could not say who was the author of the Lord’s Prayer, or where it was to be found”! Eudes Rigaud at Rouen and Johann Busch at Halle found the same ignorance. Scholars went to the universities without enough Latin to understand the lectures. According to Coulton, Dr Rashdall says, in Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, that it took the Reformation to initiate a proper religious education at the universities.

Episcopal registers show that there were two categories of parish priests. Beneficed clergy were three fourths of them. They were from wealthy parents and were given “livings” as youths or even boys before they were properly educated and ordained. The other quarter were poor curates, often uneducated and destined for poverty in poor parishes or as stand-ins for an absent priest living it up elsewhere and merely milking the parish. S Thomas Aquinas wrote of…

…the inexperience of many priests, who are in some parts found to be so ignorant that they cannot even speak Latin, and among whom very few are found who have learnt Holy Scripture.

Roger Bacon said:

Boys gabble through the Psalter which they have learnt, just as clerks and country priests recite the Church services of which they know little or nothing, like brute beasts.

Some boyhood priests were devout but barely sane. Blessed Peter of Luxembourg died in 1387 aged 17. Known as “the under-witted saint”, he was a member of the noble house of Luxembourg, and, in his brief life, got a reputation as a narrow-minded ascetic, honoured as a nobleman and a churchman with many clerical titles, including bishop of Metz, aged 15, and soon after being made a cardinal. Because there was no description in the New Testament of Christ ever having laughed, he would not do it, and rebuked others who did. Obsessed with sin, he spent his time noting down in a pocket book every bad thought and transgression, but stood conspicuous in his filthy rags covered in vermin in the resplendent courts of France. At the end of every day, at midnight, he insisted in confessing his day’s sins in any circumstances. After his death, a chest filled with scraps of paper with his sins noted on them was found.

According to Gerson, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the plea of the prelate was, “It is enough that we are Christians”, and, “There is no need to seek things so lofty for us”, remarkably modern sounding Christian pleas, since the modern Protestant idea is merely to profess Christianity means salvation. Gerson, placing himself in the situation of the Church, cried to the popes:

What priest wilt thou give me that knowest God’s laws?

The frequent repetition of these injuctions shows a concern of the Church, but apologists try to argue that it shows that the Church authorities constantly acted to improve the education of its agents. In fact, it obviously shows that they complained but did not act to correct the ignorance, or the injunctions and complaints would have ceased. Nor is there any direct evidence that any action was taken. The priesthood remained “dumb dogs”!

Etienne of Bourbon said the heretics…

…learn by heart the Gospels of the New Testament in the vulgar tongue, and repeat them aloud to each other… I have seen a young cowherd who had dwelt but one year in the house of a Waldensian heretic, yet had attended so diligently and repeated so carefully all that he heard, as to have learned by heart within that year forty Sunday Gospels, not counting those for feast days… This I say on account of their diligence in evil and the negligence of the Catholic in good, for many of the latter are so negligent of their own and their families’ salvation as scarce to know their Pater or their Creed…

The petty, infantile view of the majority of Christians has always been to enforce by lies, violence and hypocrisy an outward unity that they could pretend was the sign of divine strength. Like the senseless conformists who think they are patriots, they follow their corrupt leaders without allowing their consciences to intervene. Christians conform to divine models that violate their God’s precepts and are utterly blind to it in their senseless loyalty. They profess to believe in an almighty God, but are quite unable to distinguish their God’s will from the self-serving commands of rogues and criminals. The criminal shepherds insist on keeping the sheep ignorant and obedient, and they remain ignorant and obedient enough to comply!

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