The Synod of 1108, he says, was occupied by the question of investiture. About the Cardinal, John of Cremona, he merely says:—
“The said John, who in the council had most especially condemned all priests who kept concubines, being detected himself in the same vice, excused the vice because he said that he was not himself a priest, but a reprover of priests.”
The three strenuous efforts made in 1102, 1108, and in 1125, show the importance attached to the question of priests’ marriages by the Church of Rome.
The deans of 1102, the canons of 1125, and the statutes of 1127 are a revelation of the abuses which were then prevalent in the Church. It would be interesting to compare these ordinances with the condition of the Church in the following centuries. The canons (see Appendix) declared the whole of the Church offices except marriage, viz., chrism, oil, baptism, penance, visitation of the sick, Holy Communion and burial, open to all without fee; they forbade the inheritance of Church patronage; they ordered clerks holding benefices to be ordained priests without delay; that the office of Dean or Prior should be held by a priest; and that of Archdeacon by a deacon at least; that the Bishop alone should have the power of ejecting any person from a benefice; that an excommunicated person should not receive communion from any; that pluralists should be made illegal; that priests should have no women in their houses except such as were free from suspicion; that marriage should be prohibited; that sorcerers should be excommunicated; that priests who kept their concubines should be deprived of their benefice; that the concubines should be expelled the parish; that priests should not hold farms; that tithes be paid honestly; that no abbess or nun was to wear garments more costly than lamb’s wool or cat’s skin.
These regulations were stringent in the highest degree. Nevertheless they appear to have been totally disregarded. A hundred years later, when the Interdict was laid upon England, we find that the priests’ concubines throughout the country had to pay ransom.
For the priests did not give up their wives: they continued to marry; they also continued to present their sons to benefices. In a word, the law became, like most of the mediæval laws, ineffectual, because there was no means of enforcing it and the opinion of the people was against it. On the one hand, there was the danger of the priesthood becoming an hereditary caste, and of benefices descending as by right from father to son—a danger which the subsequent history of the Anglican Church shows to have been imaginary or exaggerated; on the other hand, there were the great dangers resulting from the enforced suppression of the most powerful passion, the most overwhelming of all passions, in some men simply irresistible, by denying the natural custom of wedlock. And as history abundantly proves, these dangers were not imaginary.
As to the quarrel between Henry and Anselm, that belongs to the history of the country rather than to that of London.
[CHAPTER IX]
SOCIAL LIFE
Let us pass on to consider the daily life of the people. To begin with, they were a busy people; there were no idle men: everybody followed some pursuit; there were the wholesale merchants, the retailers, and the craftsmen. I have submitted a rough division of London streets into belts. In thinking of the aspect of the City, understand that there were no shops in the streets at all; nor was there any crying of things up and down the streets. All the retail trade was carried on in the markets, West Chepe and East Chepe, and the wholesale trade was conducted in Thames Street beside the quays and the warehouses.