It cannot be doubted that Edward made efforts to effect a reform among his sensual and self-indulgent subjects, but his want of success is developed in the description of the Saxon clergy at the time of the Conquest. The Norman chroniclers speak of them as abandoned to sloth, ignorance, and the lusts of the flesh; even monastic institutions were matters rather of tradition than of actual existence, and the monks themselves were hardly distinguishable by their mode of life from the laity.[434] There doubtless may be some contemptuous exaggeration in this, and yet one author of the period, who is wholly Saxon in his feelings, does not hesitate to attribute the ruin of the Saxon monarchy and the devastation of the kingdom to the just wrath of God, provoked by the vices of the clergy.[435]
The rule of the Normans removed England from her isolation. Brought into the commonwealth of Christendom and under the active supremacy of the Holy See, her history henceforth becomes more closely connected with the general ecclesiastical movement which received its irresistible impulsion about this period. That movement it is now our business to examine.
[XII.]
PETER DAMIANI.
In a previous section I have shown the laxity prevailing throughout Continental Europe at the commencement of the eleventh century. It is not to be supposed, however, that even where this was tacitly permitted, it was openly and unreservedly authorized. The perversity of a sinful generation might render impossible the enforcement of the ancient canons; they might even be forgotten by the worldly and unthinking; but they were still the law of the church, and their authority was still admitted by some ardent devotees who longed to restore the purity of earlier ages. Burckhardt, who was Bishop of Worms from the year 1000 to 1025, in his voluminous collection of canons, gives a fair selection from the councils and decretals prohibiting all female intercourse to the clergy.[436] Benedict VIII. and the Emperor St. Henry II.—whose admiration of virginity was evinced by the personal sacrifice to which reference has just been made—in 1022 endeavored in the most solemn manner to reform the universal laxity. At the synod of Pavia a series of canons was adopted pronouncing sentence of deposition upon all priests, deacons, and subdeacons having wives or concubines, and upon all bishops keeping women near them, while special stress was laid upon the continued servitude of the children of all such ecclesiastics as were serfs of the church.[437] These canons, signed by the pope and attendant bishops, were laid before the emperor, who indorsed them with his sanction, declared them to be municipal as well as ecclesiastical law, promised that their observance should be enforced by the civil magistrates, and thanked Benedict and his prelates for their vigilance in seeking a remedy for the incontinence of the clergy, the evils whereof swept like a storm over the face of Christendom.[438]
In France, the long reign of Robert the Pious seems to have been marked with almost entire indifference to the subject, but the accession of his son Henry I. was attended with a strenuous effort to effect a reform. The council of Bourges, held in November, 1031, but four months after the death of Robert, may perhaps have been assembled at the request of the dying monarch, desirous of redeeming his own sins with the vicarious penance of his subjects. It addressed itself vigorously to eradicating the evil by a comprehensive series of measures, admirably adapted to the end in view. Priests, deacons, and subdeacons were forbidden to have wives or concubines, and all such consorts were ordered to be dismissed at once and forever. Those who refused obedience were to be degraded to the rank of lectors or chanters, and in future no ecclesiastic was to be permitted to take either wife or concubine. A vow of chastity was commanded as a necessary prerequisite to assuming the subdiaconate, and no bishop was to ordain a candidate without exacting from him a promise to take neither wife nor concubine. Children of the clergy in orders, born during the ministry of their parents, were pronounced incapable of entering the church, in justification of which was cited the provision of the municipal law which incapacitated illegitimates from receiving inheritance or bearing witness in court; but those who were born after their fathers had been reduced to the condition of laymen were not to be considered as the children of ecclesiastics.[439]
Nothing could be more reasonable than all this, considered from the high-church stand-point, and nothing better adapted to effect the object in view. All that was wanting was the enforcement of the legislation—and laws, when opposed to the spirit of the age, are not apt to be enforced. How much was really gained by the united efforts of the pope, the emperor, and the Gallican hierarchy can readily be gathered from a few out of innumerable incidents afforded by the history of the period.
The able and energetic, though unscrupulous, Benedict VIII. was no more, and the great House of Tusculum, which ruled the Eternal City, had filled the chair of St. Peter with a worthless scion of their stock, as though to declare their contempt for the lofty pretensions of the Apostolic Episcopate. A fit descendant of the infamous Marozia and Alberic, Benedict IX., a child of ten years old at the time of his elevation in 1032, grew up in unrestrained license, and shocked even the dull sensibilities of a gross and barbarous age by the scandals of his daily life.[440] The popular appreciation of his character is shown by the legend of his appearing after death to a holy man, in the figure of a bear, with the ears and tail of an ass, and declaring that, as he had lived in bestiality, so he was destined to wear the form of a beast and to suffer fiery torments until the Day of Judgment, after which he was to be plunged, body and soul, into the fathomless pit of hell.[441] When the Vicegerent of God, the head of the Christian church, was thus utterly depraved, the prospect of reforming the corruption of the clergy was not promising, and the good work was not likely to be prosecuted with vigor.
Nor were the members of the hierarchy unworthy of their superior. We hear of Rainbaldo, Bishop of Fiesole, who, not contented with numerous concubines, had publicly married a wife, and whose children were established as a wide-spread and powerful family—and, what is perhaps more remarkable, this dissolute prelate was gifted with the power of working miracles.[442] The bishops, indeed, at this period, were still rather warrior nobles than Christian ministers. Bisantio, the good Bishop of Bari, is praised quite as much for his terrible prowess in battle as for his pious benevolence and munificence; and on his death, in 1035, his flock chose a military official as his successor.[443]