The churches of London, with the houses, were at first built of wood. You may see a Saxon church, such as those which were dotted all over the City area, still standing at Greenstead, near Chipping Ongar, in Essex (see p. [211]). When the houses began to be built of stone, the churches followed suit; you may see a stone Saxon church at Bradford-on-Avon, near Bath. The churches were quite small at first, and continued to be small for many centuries. They were by degrees provided with glass, with richly decorated altars, with chapels and with organs: in the last respect being better off than their successors in the eighteenth century, when many City churches had no organ. Bede describes an organ as a “kind of tower made with various pipes, from which, by the blowing of bellows, a most copious sound is issued; and that a becoming modulation may accompany this, it is furnished with certain wooden tongues from the interior part, which the master’s fingers skilfully repressing, produce a grand and almost a sweet melody.”
And Dunstan, who was a great artificer in metals as well as a great painter, constructed for himself an organ of brass pipes.
It is interesting to gather, from the dedications of the City churches, those which certainly date from Saxon times. Thus there are five dedicated to Allhallows, of which four are certainly ancient; of the churches dedicated to Apostles, there are two of St. Andrew, three of St. Bartholomew, one of St. James, one of St. Paul, three of St. Peter, one of St. Stephen, four of St. Mary, one of Mary Magdalene; of later saints, St. Martin, St. Bridget, St. Benedict, St. Anne, St. Clement, St. Giles are represented, while Saxon or Danish saints are found in St. Ethelburga, St. Swithin, St. Botolph, St. Olave, St. Magnus, St. Vedast, and St. Dunstan. None of the Norman saints seem to have crossed the water. None, certainly, supplanted the Saxon saints, while not one British saint remained in Saxon England, which shows how different was the Norman Conquest from the Saxon occupation.
THE LAST DAY
Nero MS. C iv.
If ecclesiastical law means anything, then the London citizen must have spent most of his time in doing penance. Besides the common crimes of violence, perjury, theft, and so forth, the Church advanced the doctrine that there were eight capital crimes, namely, pride, vainglory, envy, anger, despondency, avarice, greed, and luxury. For greed a man had to fast and do penance for three years. For despondency, he had to fast on bread and water till he became once more exhilarated.
The chief weapon of the Church at a time when the executive is weak is penance. For the Anglo-Saxon his priest was armed with a code of penances so long and so heavy that one cannot believe that it was ever enforced. Can we, for instance, believe that free men would consent to live on the coarsest food and do penance for three years as a punishment for eating with too great enjoyment? We are told that if a man killed any one in public battle he was to fast forty nights. Then King Alfred must have been doing penance all the days of his life—which is absurd. Again, can one believe that sinners consented to wear iron chains round the body, to lie naked at the feet of the person offended, to go about with a rope round their necks, to abstain from water, hot or cold? Can we believe that any one, especially any rich or noble person, would sell his estate, give one-third to the poor, one-third to the clergy, and keep no more than one-third for himself and his family?
Penance, however, could be commuted by payments in money. This shows, not the greed and avarice of the Church, but the weakness of the Church. Another way of getting through penance was by paying people to perform the penance for the sinner. Thus, a man who was ordered a thirty-six days’ fast could engage twelve men to fast for three days each. Or if he was ordered a year’s fast, he would arrange for 120 men to fast, in the same way, for three days each. As I said above, it is the weakness of the Church that one perceives. The Bishops denounced crime; they showed the people how grievous a sin was this or that, by imposing heavy penance; then because only a few would consent to perform such penances, they were obliged to be content with evasions and vicarious performance. As the Church grew stronger, penance became more reasonable.
There was a church in nearly every street, and a parish to every church. Some of the churches were built as an act of penance. We are sometimes tempted to believe that the power of the Church must have been an intolerable tyranny; yet the violence of the time called for the exercise of arbitrary authority, and, at the very worst, it was better to be in the hands of the Church than in those of the King.
IV. The Temporal Government