A churchman living in east London despairs of his flock. “There are many people who do not believe that God exists, nor do they think that the human soul lives on after the death of the body,” he laments. “They consider that the universe has always been as it is now and is ruled by chance rather than providence.”
It’s a complaint many would make about their congregation – but what might be surprising is that Peter of Cornwall, prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, wrote this in 1200.
In the Western mind, history is often seen as linear, one of the strands of which is that there is a continuous trend from ignorance and religiosity towards enlightenment and atheism. It’s assumed that people in the Middle Ages were very Christian. Yet what many of the chroniclers suggest is that men at the time were far less religious than those of the later, early modern period.
They were rarely atheists – the concept only dates from Elizabethan times, although some prominent figures were known to express scepticism. But their attachment to Christianity seems confused and mixed up with folklore. It was only in the late Middle Ages, following the Black Death, that people began to take Christianity and its rules much more seriously.
To make a sweeping statement, medieval people were childlike in their behaviour. Repression was an alien, later concept. Men and women tended to show their emotions, which could swing from laughter to anger, which partly explains why 13th-century Oxford had twice the homicide rate of Baltimore or Detroit today.
This was reflected in their religious practice, too. One preacher, Alexander Ashby, complained that at the solemn moment of Mass, with “the hush as the priest prayed silently before consecrating the Eucharist, a hubbub of gossip and joking commonly broke out among the congregation”. The main reason that Edward the Confessor was considered holy was that he didn’t talk throughout Mass, as most people did in the 11th century.
At the time of Peter of Cornwall, the King of England was much less religious than our monarch eight centuries later. King John apparently did not take Holy Communion after childhood, and didn’t receive it at his coronation, while he openly ate meat on Fridays and hunted on feast days. He found attending Mass incredibly boring and made no secret of it. On one Easter Sunday, when St Hugh of Lincoln was giving the homily, John sent the bishop three notes telling him to hurry up so he could go to lunch. During services he would take out a gold coin at collection time, ostentatiously play with it, then put it back in his purse.
John’s misrule would culminate in a peace treaty with the leading barons in 1215 called the Great Charter, or Magna Carta, but he spent much more of his life in conflict with the Church, which led to several years when most people could not attend Mass because of a papal interdict. Yet what’s noticeable from the records is that almost no one seemed to care.
The interdict had started after the Archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, died following a fever caused by an infected carbuncle. John wanted his crony John de Gray to be given the post, but Pope Innocent III insisted on Stephen Langton, who turned out to be a formidable and influential figure in the Magna Carta story.
John’s refusal to accept this led the papacy to issue an interdict, under which all Church services in the country were suspended. Church bells were not rung and Christian marriages could not be properly made. For John, not an especially pious man, this was about as much of a punishment as a parent threatening to stop taking their child to church.
Still, although the king wasn’t popular, there wasn’t a single recorded protest about the interdict, which suggests that most people weren’t that bothered about Mass or other orthodox Catholic practices.
The one lasting effect of the interdict is that some scholars in Oxford, fed up with the increasingly hostile atmosphere in the town, moved to a small village to the east in the middle of a bog called Cambridge.
Eventually the Church got its way and Archbishop Langton took the role, becoming one of the most influential of churchmen in secular English history. Langton was a great scholar, who wrote page upon page of totally impenetrable commentary on the Bible. He was perhaps intellectually the most important figure behind Magna Carta, using the growing discipline of biblical commentary to articulate the role of a monarch.
However, the Church’s role in Magna Carta has rather been erased from English history. Likewise, the other great progressive revolution at the time – the jury system.
This replaced trial by ordeal because at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Church banned priests blessing the events, despite the loss of prestige and finance it suffered.
As a result, England moved towards the jury system, but the law also became more severe. Early medieval society saw justice as simply a way to prevent feuds, and the Anglo-Saxons had a system of blood money, or wergild, which dictated the amount a murderer had to pay to his victim’s family. As the medieval period went on, people began to regard these crimes as sins. Murder became a matter of the state in the 12th century.
This was all part of a trend towards moralisation, with Church rules on illegitimacy, cousin marriage, adultery and priestly celibacy all becoming stricter in the 11th and 12th centuries. The downside of this moralisation was intolerance, and the Lateran Council also ramped up hostility to Jews, who from 1218 had to wear a distinctive badge. Allied to this was growing violence towards heretics.
Europeans were also becoming stricter about the clergy. In the collective memory we tend to think of priests as being quite bawdy, often having mistresses or vast bellies. The stereotype of the chubby friar is fairly accurate; research on monks’ skeletons from three London monasteries showed that they were five times as likely as the population as a whole to get obesity-related diseases. Likewise, in the words of the historian AL Poole, a priest often “kept a hearth-girl in his house who kindled his fire but extinguished his virtue”.
But by the time of Thomas Cromwell this had ceased to be true, largely because Europeans had become less tolerant of clergy having mistresses, being drunk or excessively wealthy. Before then people just didn’t seem to care.
It was only in the later Middle Ages that people began to get seriously Christian. Perhaps this was due to education. Universities had sprung up from the 11th century and by the 14th there was a considerable body of people who could read. Contrary to the idea that education leads necessarily to secularisation, it’s also more likely to lead from base superstition and traditional folklore to disciplined and coherent religion. Christianity is complicated; its theology is extremely difficult to grasp and has beaten the finest minds in history. Many of its tenets are counter-intuitive. Illiterate peasants might have been Christian, but they seemed to have had quite a vague idea of the faith.
People became more seriously religious after the Black Death, for obvious reasons. There were the first stirrings of Protestantism with the Lollards, who began to take this Christianisation a step further by seeking to remove what they regarded as non-biblical traditions, such as pilgrimages and the veneration of relics.
Paradoxically, the late medieval period is also the time that historian Robert Tombs identifies as the age of “Merrie England”. Wages and living standards had risen hugely after the Black Death, with the English peasant now enjoying regular meat, white bread and hops-based beer, while Catholic ritual events like mystery plays or Corpus Christi, popularised only a century before, had become common. It must have looked at the time that England was becoming more Catholic as time went on, and could only become more so.
Ed West is a journalist and author
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