If this be attributed to the unbridled turbulence of Stephen’s reign, we may turn to the comparatively calmer times of Henry II., when Alexander III., amid his ceaseless efforts to restore the church discipline of England, in 1171, ordered the Bishops of Exeter and Worcester and the Abbot of Feversham to examine and report as to the evil reputation of Clarembald, abbot-elect of St. Augustine’s of Canterbury. In the execution of this duty they found that that venerable patriarch had seventeen bastards in one village; purity he ridiculed as an impossibility, while even licentiousness had no attraction for his exhausted senses unless spiced with the zest of publicity.[688] That a man whose profligacy was so openly and shamelessly defiant could be elected to the highest place in the oldest and most honored religious community in England is a fact which lends color to the assertion of a writer of the time of King John, that clergy and laity were indistinguishably bad,[689] and perhaps justifies the anecdote told of Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, who assumed that the clergy were much worse than the laity.[690] How little these scandals shocked the public is shown by the fact that it required papal interference to cause the reformation of the nunnery of Avesbury. The abbess had borne three children and the nuns, as the chronicler informs us, were worse than their superior, but when Alexander forced an investigation no canonical punishment was inflicted on the guilty. Such of the nuns as promised to live chastely in future were allowed to remain, and the rest were simply dismissed, while the abbess was pensioned liberally with ten marks a year to preserve her from disgrace and want. The vacancies thus created were filled with nuns from Fontevraud, who proved to be as bad as those whom they replaced.[691] The same insensibility is manifested in a legal transaction of the period, when Witgar, the priest of Mendlesham, desired to secure the reversion of his benefice to his son Nicholas, and applied to the patron of his church, Martin, Abbot of Battle Abbey, who agreed to conform to his wishes on condition that the annual payment exacted from the church in question should be increased from ten shillings to forty. Witgar agreed, and on an appointed day, accompanied by his son, he met the abbot and his attendants at Colchester, where oaths were publicly interchanged and a formal agreement was entered into.[692]
The efforts of Alexander and his successors were seconded by frequent national and local synods, to whose special injunctions it is scarcely worth while to refer in full. One noticeable point about them, however, is that the term “wife” disappears, and is replaced by “concubina” or “focaria”—the latter meaning a person who was a permanent occupant of the priest’s hearth, but was not recognized by the authorities as a lawful wife. Deans and archdeacons were enjoined to hunt up these illegal companions, but from the frequency of the injunctions, we may safely conclude that the search was not often successful, and that the officials found the duty assigned to them too difficult or too unprofitable for execution. That it was not impossible, however, when earnestly undertaken, is shown by the readiness with which King John unearthed the unfortunate creatures when it suited his policy to do so. During the long dispute over the election of Giraldus Cambrensis to the see of St. David’s, the king, who was resolved that no Welshman should hold that preferment, instructed his officers, in 1202, to seize the women of all the cathedral chapter who persisted in supporting Giraldus.[693] The measure was doubtless an efficacious one, and he repeated it when, in 1208, he persecuted the clergy in his blind impotence of wrath at the interdict set upon his kingdom by Innocent III. Discerning in these quasi-conjugal relations the tenderest spot in which to strike those who had rebelled against his authority by obeying the interdict, and at the same time as the surest and readiest means of extorting money, among his other schemes of spoliation he caused all these women to be seized, and then forced the unfortunate churchmen to buy their partners back at exorbitant prices.[694]
The ease, indeed, with which the eyes of the officials were blinded to that which was patent to the public was the subject of constantly recurring legislation, the reiteration and increasing violence of which bears irrefragable testimony at once to its necessity and its impotence. Not only in grave synods and pastorals was the abuse reprehended and deplored, but it offered too favorable a subject for popular animadversion to escape the shafts of satire. In the preceding century, Thomas à Becket, in a vehement attack upon simony, includes this among the many manifestations of that multiform sin—
Symon auffert, Symon donat;
Hunc expellit, hunc coronat;
Hunc circumdat gravi peste,
Illum nuptiali veste.[695]
There were few more popular poems in the Middle Ages than the “Apocalypsis Goliæ,” the more than doubtful authorship of which, at the close of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century, is claimed for Walter Mapes in England and Gautier de Châtillon in France; and the enduring reputation of which is attested by an English version as late as the sixteenth century. The author, whoever he be, inveighing against the evil courses of the archdeacons, assumes that the extortion of the “cullagium” was almost universal.
Seductam nuntii fraude præambuli