Practical and Popular Religion

The speculative thought of the universities and the subtle distinctions of the lawyers had little direct effect upon the religious beliefs of the generality of the population of western Europe, although in the thirteenth century a great effort was made to disseminate at parochial level the essential elements of the new pastoral theology through the publication of manuals for confessors and parish priests.

Medieval Western Christianity was a sacerdotal religion, and the exclusive status of the priestly caste had been emphasised by the Gregorian reformers. Theory did not, however, correspond to reality. There was a great divide between those ‘sublime and literate persons’ from whom were recruited bishops and the higher clergy, and the vast majority of village priests whose economic condition was little better than that of their parishioners, and whose learning was often enough limited to the mere recitation of the offices of the Church. The laity were bound to support their local minister by the payment of tithe and various obligatory offerings, which was enforced by law, and this naturally led to grumbling and tension. That allegedly rampant late medieval anti-clericalism, however, which is so often cited as a cause of the success of the Reformation, was not directed at the priesthood as a whole, or its function within Christian society. Vociferous complaints were directed at isolated instances of flagrant immorality or neglect by parish priests, but general resentment was reserved for exploitative ecclesiastical landlords and for the agents of the ecclesiastical courts, whose jurisdiction touched so many aspects of life.

For the vast majority of western European Christians, the church of their village or market town was the focus not only of their spiritual but of their social life. The Mass was the channel of mediation between God and man, but it was also an assertion of corporate identity during which blessing was invoked upon the extended brotherhood, living and dead, and enemies of the group were anathematised.

The festivals of the Church clearly delineated the divisions of the agricultural year, and the course of human life was marked by baptism, marriage, the purification of women after childbirth and the requiem. In the church or churchyard the penitent would discharge his debt of guilt to God and to his local community. The priest, on the instructions of king or archbishop, transmitted to his flock news of momentous events and arranged processions to pray for the success of royal armies, for deliverance from plague or for clement weather. In every parish church lights were maintained in honour of various saints, and most especially in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose cult, as the supreme mediatrix, attained tremendous popularity in the twelfth century. In larger churches a chantry chapel might be established by the lordly patron or by a rich merchant, dedicated to his patron saint, wherein prayers for the soul of the founder and his kin would be offered for all time. There might also be a guild or confraternity, an association established for pious, charitable and social purposes, whose members would organise the maintenance of the poor and the commemoration of deceased brethren, and in towns would produce cycles of mystery plays which provided both entertainment and instruction. The church building itself was a teaching medium of vital importance. The rood, set on a screen separating the congregation from the mystery of the altar, displayed Christ’s sacrifice for mankind. Above the door was often depicted the Last Judgement, a stern warning of the consequences of unrepented sin. The walls were covered with colourful representations of the Bible story and the lives of saints. The central position of the parish church in the corporate and religious life of medieval communities is clearly demonstrated by the vast resources invested in frequent rebuilding. In England, for example, the sumptuous wool churches of the Cotswolds and East Anglia are an expression of ostentatious wealth, but also of a determination to rebuild on a grand scale to the greater glory of God.

Beyond the confines of their own parish, Christians might make gifts or death-bed bequests to the religious orders, and increasingly in the later Middle Ages to the four orders of friars or to one of the increasing number of hospitals for lepers, the insane or the aged. They were encouraged to acts of piety and charity by the issue of indulgences, that is the promise of remission of a specified number of days or years of those penalties due for sin which in the later twelfth century were embraced within the concept of Purgatory. Such remission could be granted by the Church because of the existence of the Treasury of Merits, an inexhaustible store accumulated mainly by Christ, but supplemented by the saints, who had far more than were needed for their own salvation. The bishops’ power of remission was restricted to forty days, but the Pope, because of his plenitude of power, might grant whatever pardon he wished. The plenary indulgence, granting complete immunity for all sins committed before it was acquired to those contrite, confessed and of good intent, was originally offered to crusaders, but it was gradually extended to contributors to the holy war and other papally approved causes. In 1300 Boniface VIII offered a plenary indulgence to all visitors to Rome in that year and in subsequent Jubilee years, and the interval between Jubilees was gradually reduced from a hundred to twenty-five years. In the later Middle Ages full remission of sins was granted to visitors to various holy places at specified times. This explains the extraordinary popularity of pilgrimages, usually to churches which were the repositories of outstanding relics. No doubt many pilgrims were motivated by a desire to see the world, and proceeded in the holiday mood described in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but behind this jovial sociability lay the utterly serious purpose of the search for salvation, achieved through the veneration of the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, the Holy Blood of Hailes or the Holy Rood of Bromholm. Every region had its quota of such shrines, and the adventurous from all over the continent wouldjourney to sites ofintema- tional repute such as the sanctuary of Santiago de Compostella.

From the mid-fourteenth century, however, the Papacy increasingly granted indulgences which allowed the recipient to obtain from his chosen confessor at the moment of death full remission of all his sins. The charge for this wonderful benefit was remarkably small, and it is hardly surprising that subsequent Roman Jubilees never attracted the huge concourse of pilgrims which descended on the Holy City in 1300.

The crusade indulgence was one of the main inducements for men to embark on those armed pilgrimages which expanded the frontiers of Western Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The desire for salvation and for worldly gain was nicely balanced in the minds of participants in expeditions to the Holy Land, the Reconquista by which Spain was recovered from Islam, and the Drang nach Osten, wherein German eastward expansion was fused with the Christianisation of the northern Slavs. Endemic warfare against Islam had far-reaching consequences for the West, and was one of the formative factors in the development of Western European civilisation, although in the Muslim world the Crusades were seen as no more than minor frontier conflicts. The Papacy gained great prestige from the launching of the First Crusade in 1095 and its supervisory role in subsequent expeditions, and the holy wars may be seen as the logical culmination of the peace movement preached in the eleventh century by the French bishops, an attempt to redirect the bellicose energies of the feudal aristocracy away from internecine strife into a common effort against the enemies of the faith. In the wake of the First Crusade knighthood became a Christian vocation, by the conscientious practice of which salvation might be achieved outside the monastic cloister. Through the Crusades the Christian Church, in its origins pacifist, became reconciled to the regrettable necessity for armed action, and Latin theologians and canon lawyers evolved a theory of the just war which has been echoed down to the present day.

Contact with the superior civilisation of Islam in the Near East, and more especially in Spain and in Sicily, conquered from the Muslims by Norman princes who in the twelfth century encouraged the development of a remarkably tolerant and cosmopolitan society, led to great advances in the West in philosophy and all branches of the sciences. There were, however, less happy consequences. Norman participation in the Crusades increased hostility between those fierce but pious adherents of muscular Latin Christianity and the Byzantines, whom they had recently ejected from southern Italy, and Norman pressure on the Papacy caused the rift between Latin and Greek Churches to develop into schism, finally rendered permanent by the Western sack of Constantinople in 1204. Moreover, the new sentimental regard for the holy places associated with the life and sufferings of Christ led on the eve of the First Crusade to violent recrimination by popular preachers against the Jews and to widespread massacres, shamefully repeated thereafter at regular intervals.

There was no element in the life of the Western Church in the period from 1100 to 1500 which did not attract vociferous criticism from groups who were convinced that Latin Christianity had strayed far from the pathway of perfection described in the New Testament. The hostility of the hierarchy to their sincere, if sometimes naive, strictures was paralleled by the paranoiac conviction of secular rulers that any challenge to ecclesiastical authority would lead to the undermining of the established structure of society. Christian fundamentalists—the Waldensians and the English Lollards—were persecuted as vigorously as members of the lunatic fringe, such as the adherents of the Free Spirit, who believed that their special relationship with God freed them from all moral restrictions. The final collapse of the medieval religious system was not, however, brought about by the attacks of any heretical group, but by the growing conviction among increasingly well-educated and completely orthodox men and women, such as the Brethren of the Common Life, that the organisational framework of the Catholic Church was of little relevance to their search for salvation, which might best be achieved not through unquestioning obedience to the Papacy, donations to the religious orders or participation in holy war, but by a sincere attempt to follow the precepts of the most popular of later medieval religious treatises, Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ.

Practical and Popular Religion

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