Concluding Remarks. Torn-up Communities?
p. 217-224
Texte intégral
1As we can see from the contributions to this volume, the Gregorian Reform movement is a phenomenon that is tricky to define. Even so, its consequences—increased papal involvement in all areas of life, increased need for written evidence, a shaking up of older and more local loyalties, a more professional and more highly educated higher clergy—are impossible to ignore, and meant that the ecclesiastical scene in western Europe by the middle of the twelfth century looked very different from the way it had appeared a century earlier. Looking at the effects of the Gregorian Reform on communities brings together two elements that belong together: leading figures in the Gregorian Reform movement took a strong interest in the workings of communities, especially ecclesiastical ones. To take just one example, we can note their enthusiastic backing for foundations of regular canons: in this case they were noting a developing trend and exploiting it as an opportunity to win more support.
2More widely, communities were on the increase in western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Churches of all sizes and purposes were increasing in number, as were monastic communities and schools, while towns were increasingly likely to identify themselves as having communities of citizens. In an age when populations were steadily growing, this is only to be expected, but nonetheless needs to be emphasized. Also worth emphasizing is the role that these communities played in the creation and preservation of written records, both documentary and narrative, the latter often deliberately composed to present the community for which they had been written in the best possible light.1 Documents themselves might include narratives,2 while narratives might include information about legal procedures (for example, the principal source for the 1049 Council of Rheims is a narrative of the consecration of the newly rebuilt Abbey of Saint-Remi at Rheims).3 The Gregorian Reform movement itself encouraged the use of writing and deployment of polemic, and writers in this period would make (often selective) use of its rhetorical features to strengthen their case4. Disputes and their settlements were recorded much more often than in previous centuries: this tempts the reader to think that disputes themselves occurred more frequently than before, but this is a dangerous assumption. It is true, however, that certain sorts of dispute do seem to have become more frequent in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, while a growing population meant that there were more potential litigants.
3The impacts of the Gregorian Reform movement on communities were not identical. Some found it easier to benefit, while others, suspected by reformers of being more old-fashioned, found themselves on the back foot. Even so they might recover some of their position by uttering reminders about their social and political significance and the weight of their traditions, as established in the form of saints’ cults,5 reinforced by long-established local rites,6 while the Gregorian movement itself offered scope for the development of powers on the part of communities, notably that of becoming electoral bodies to elect superiors.7 Some key differences emerge between the clerical and monastic communities picked out for discussion in this volume in the ways in which they were affected by the reform process: the latter appear to have done better out of reform, by and large, than the former, and especially so in France. Clerical communities serving cathedrals and the larger collegiate churches nonetheless did better than small local churches: parish communities tended to be disregarded by Gregorian reformers, who did not deal with smaller churches directly but through their lay patrons (Gregorian hostility to the latter was often a matter of form) and through the monasteries and other major churches they wished to see take them over.8
4Clerical communities close to a bishop might react with hostility to Gregorian Reform in the eleventh century. They had much to lose and at first sight little to gain from the tendency of popes from the time of Leo IX onwards to establish a deeper gulf than hitherto between the status of the bishop of Rome and the status of bishops of other sees. Cathedral clergy, as the protectors of diocesan traditions, found this perturbing; for those individuals in cathedral communities who were closely linked to bishops, for example as the nephews and other kinsmen of bishops who had hopes of being the latter’s successors, anxiety would have been especially acute.9 The clerics standing around in the background in Saint-Remy at Rheims in 1049 would have been looking at events attentively. Leo’s handling of the Council of Rheims was damaging to the position of his former metropolitan, Eberhard, while archbishop Guy of Rheims only managed to come out of the process relatively unscathed through careful manipulation of the organisation of the occasion and by promising to do penance.10 At Milan in 1059, too, the cathedral clergy would have been deeply worried by the activity of the papal legates, and the idea of having to swear oaths to clear themselves of heresy would have been deeply damaging to their self-esteem.11
5By the end of the eleventh century many bishops in southern France were encouraging their cathedral canons to adopt the Augustinian rule, and here Gregorian inspiration is clear.12 However, kings and other secular rulers often spotted rather different potential in cathedral communities in this period, as they wanted to see cathedral prebends bestowed on clerics who would help them with administrative tasks.13 In those areas of Europe where kings were able to impose their wishes on bishops, cathedral communities began to recruit canons from a much wider geographical range, sometimes involving migration from other kingdoms; at the same time, higher education was increasingly being regarded as useful for career formation.14
6In response to these demands, cathedral communities could draw on real strengths that would protect their identities in the longer term. One of these was their institutional structure. The various dignitaries had distinctive roles that can sometimes acquire qualities of a caricature in sources of the time, but they also helped the community to function. The provost (in those communities that were led by one, chiefly the case in Germany, Lotharingia and some parts of eastern France) was a dominant figure, easily accused of arrogance and related sins. A clear example was Raoul le Vert at Rheims, brought to life for us by Sebastian Gensicke, who was accused of ’ambition and envy’ in trying to become archbishop of Rheims.15 The cantor was often the protector of the traditions of the community, as in the case of Richer at Rheims, who accused Raoul of these faults and tried to win support for the community’s chosen candidate.16 Archdeacons, like Gervase of Rethel or Arias Muñiz, were mobile and independent figures.17 Equally, the more varied recruitment policies demanded by rulers might benefit chapters, giving them access to wider networks; moreover, different groups within a chapter were not necessarily at loggerheads with each other.18 Married clergy or sons of clerics, for example, were not invariably hostile to the new vogue for celibacy, as we can see in the cases of the cathedral chapters at Lucca and Milan, which were prepared to accept a more regular form of life in the late eleventh century.19 In one major respect, the Gregorian movement strengthened cathedral communities by giving them a clearly defined role as bodies capable of electing bishops. One sign of this is that it was in this period that communities of canons began to be referred to as chapters.20 In practice, the powers of canons to elect bishops could often be limited by a variety of other ecclesiastical and political agencies, as can be observed at Rheims between 1106 and 1108.21
7Monastic communities presented a much more united face to the outside world than cathedrals did: this makes it harder for modern scholars to find out much about individual members of these communities. Obit books may preserve names to us, but it is trickier to flesh these out with information than it is in the cases of canons. Writings by members of monastic communities were normally ones commissioned by the head of the house, and tended to present a communal rather than an individual view. Even so, it is often possible to see signs of fracture within monastic communities. Moreover, even if there were no internal fractures, monastic communities very frequently had sharp divisions of opinion with other abbeys, or with their diocesan bishops. All of these forms of strife feature in the contributions to this volume. We need to ask how far the Gregorian movement increased the frequency of these disputes and the degree of hostility manifested in them. Disputed elections, as at Saint-Gall in 1077,22 were not a novelty; nor were other internal disputes, such as the one that occurred late during the abbatiate of Bernard at Marmoutier at the very end of the eleventh century. In the latter case, the problem came from pressure from the diocesan, the archbishop of Tours, who was keen to make the abbot profess obedience to him.23 As Jean-Hervé Foulon observes, disputes between monasteries and their bishops were not simply a result of the Gregorian reform process, but had long been a feature of monastic life.24 The most powerful French monasteries, especially those, such as Marmoutier, that had many cells or dependent priories, were able to put up resistance to bishops, whereas the latter had only limited resources at their disposal for bringing them to heel. Abbatial professions of obedience, modelled on much older episcopal professions to metropolitans, were an attempt by bishops to widen the range of tools available to them.25 Marmoutier fought back by acquiring papal bulls, in some cases forged, to limit the powers of the archbishop of Tours: here we can see one of the most significant effects of the Gregorian process, a great expansion in the use of written records,26 a process that encouraged communities to seek to record rights they had not previously needed to document, which in turn led to the production of forgeries.27 To begin with, powerful French abbeys were most active in seeking papal privileges, but interest in the latter began to spread more widely, for example in Lotharingia in the second quarter of the twelfth century.28
8The form of property acquisition where monasteries benefited most from the Gregorians was a new ability to acquire parish churches. Previously it had been harder to split churches off from the estates on which they had been built: we are thus seeing a new phenomenon.29 It was one that led to a large number of disputes and a great deal of documentation, mostly written by the monasteries involved. Although many of the disputes, as recorded, were with the lay patrons of these churches, these hostilities were often fictive, with correct Gregorian expressions about the need to free churches from lay control being inserted into texts that otherwise seem to display a reasonable degree of harmony about proceedings.30 Some Gregorian motifs, such as simony or nicolaitism, are often ignored in these texts.31 In several instances the lay patrons seem to have looked forward to relinquishing control of minor churches with the expectation that the monasteries taking them over would invest in their new acquisitions.32 Even where a church formed part of a fortified site, or lay next to one, lay patrons might agree to a monastic takeover without too much reluctance, and many churches and chapels that had been built within castles became Augustinian priories in this period.33 Violence did occur in disputes over minor churches, but usually between rival lay interests, each group supporting a rival monastery.34 Bishops might be cautious about exercising judgement, even where there was bloodshed35, while the clergy serving the churches, although they might be deeply involved in events, do not appear to have been strongly motivated by “Gregorian” or “non-Gregorian” principles.36 By contrast, disputes between monasteries for control over parish churches were much more intense.37 The people who are not at all noticeable in these documents are the parishioners, or at least the majority of them: it is possible to see their existence through the mention of tithe and other dues, but no individual figures emerge, and documents provide us with no image of a rural community at prayer.
9Urban communities, by contrast, do come into focus rather more than rural ones, but not everywhere and not all at once. The area where they are most visible is Italy, represented in this volume by Lucca and Milan. The Milanese community in the 1050s as portrayed by Peter Damian is essentially clerical, though it is possible to sense lay figures in the background38; at Lucca, after countess Matilda had been forced to leave the city in 1081, the dominant figures in the community were lawyers, often with close dynastic relations with members of the cathedral community.39 Urban communities emerge at the same period in Germany, but with less definition because they did not have the large groups of literate lawyers producing documentation that were a feature of Italian cities.40 The impression the reader gains from the accounts presented here is that urban communities reacted to events rather than leaping to exploit new possibilities. In Lucca, indeed, the leaders of local opinion seem to have tried to bind up wounds rather than to open them up further.41
10To conclude: it is easy to form the impression from the sources of the period that the era of the Gregorian Reform was unusually disputatious or indeed unusually violent. It seems likely, on reflection, that it was simply more active in producing records of disputes and their settlements than previous ages had been. The increasing documentation of the age was encouraged by the Gregorians, who appreciated the value of polemic and self-justification in winning their fights, but we are also seeing a response by ruling classes in society at large to the new dynamic: this was an age that required legally trained minds and the use of the written word. This is not to argue that there were no new tensions emerging: we can see this in disputes over the control of parish churches (more often between individual monastic houses than between lay patrons and Gregorians), and also in some internal disputes within monasteries or within cathedral chapters. However, it is important to avoid categorizing rival sides automatically as Gregorian and non-Gregorian, and we also need to note that many forces in society, such as the lawyers in Lucca, were working to stitch up the tears in the fabric.
Notes de bas de page
1Jégou Laurent, “Église ordonnée ou Église déchirée ? Une cartographie de l’action conciliaire au concile de Reims (1049)”, this volume; Foulon Jean-Hervé, “L’abbaye de Marmoutier et la réforme pontificale. Tensions ou renforcement d’une identité communautaire (1050-1150) ?”, this volume; Jeanneau Cédric, “Le Bas-Poitou et la réforme grégorienne”, this volume; Tomei Paolo, “Des communautés déchirées en Toscane grégorienne. Le cas de Lucques”, this volume; Rosé Isabelle, “Milan en loques ? Une communauté urbaine déchirée par les hérésies cléricales à l’époque de la légation de Pierre Damien (1059)”, this volume.
2Rosé Isabelle, art. cit.
3Jégou Laurent, art. cit.
4Jeanneau Cédric, art. cit.; Rosé Isabelle, art. cit.
5Jégou Laurent, art. cit. (St Remigius); Foulon Jean-Hervé, art. cit. (St Martin); Isla Amancio, “Diego Gelmírez and the canons of Santiago de Compostela. A Gregorian Conflict?”, this volume (St James).
6Amancio Isla, ibid., comments on the Visigothic rite in Iberia; Rosé Isabelle, art. cit., notes the significance of the Ambrosian rite for Milan.
7Foulon Jean-Hervé, art. cit.; Gensicke Sebastian, “Ni voulu par le peuple, ni élu par le clergé. Le chapitre cathédral de Reims et l’élection contestée de 1106-1108”, this volume.
8Ó Súilleabháin Niall, “Ecclesiastical Proprietary Communities and the Restitution of local Churches in the Loire Valley during the Age of Reform, c. 1050-c. 1150”, this volume; Jeanneau Cédric, art. cit.
9Rosé Isabelle, art. cit., notes the role of archbishop Guido’s nephew; for the uncle-nephew relationship between bishop Anselm I of Lucca (pope Alexander II) and bishop Anselm II of Lucca, see Tomei Paolo, art. cit.
10Jégou Laurent, art. cit.
11Rosé Isabelle, art. cit.
12Henriet Patrick, “Les communautés déchirées, entre complexité historique et ’pangrégorianisme’”, this volume.
13Isla Amancio, art. cit.
14Ibid.
15Gensicke Sebastian, art. cit.
16Ibid.; in a rather different way, John the cantor’s sons at Lucca contributed to the community’s stability and influence in the eleventh century (Tomei Paolo, art. cit.).
17Gensicke Sebastian, art. cit.; Isla Amancio, art. cit.
18Ibid.
19Tomei Paolo, art. cit.
20The term capitulum begins to be used to define a cathedral chapter in the final decades of the eleventh century, for example at Poitiers in 1089: Chartes poitevines de l’abbaye de Saint-Florent près Saumur, éd. Paul Marchegay, Poitiers, Imprimerie de Henri Oudin, 1873, p. 128, no 87.
21Gensicke Sebastian, art. cit.
22Kohl Thomas, “Division and Unity. Shaping Communities in eleventh-century Germany”, this volume.
23Foulon Jean-Hervé, art. cit.
24Ibid.
25Ibid.
26Ibid.
27For discussion of some English examples of the early twelfth century, see Barrow Julia, “English cathedral Communities and Reform in the late tenth and the eleventh Centuries”, in David Rollason, Margaret Harvey et Michael Prestwich (ed.), Anglo-Norman Durham, 1093-1193, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 1994, p. 37-39.
28Engl Hannes, “Négociations et reconfigurations du pouvoir. Les communautés religieuses en Lorraine face à la ’réforme grégorienne’ (fin du xie-début du xiie siècle)”, this volume.
29Ibid.
30Jeanneau Cédric, art. cit.; Ó Súilleabháin Niall, art. cit.
31Jeanneau Cédric, art. cit.
32Ó Súilleabháin Niall, art. cit.
33Ibid.; Jeanneau Cédric, art. cit. Note also Musset Lucien, “Recherches sur les communautés des clercs séculiers en Normandie au xie siècle”, Bulletin de la Société des antiquaires de Normandie, vol. 55, 1959-1960, p. 5-38.
34Jeanneau Cédric, art. cit.; Grélois Emmanuel, “Chevaliers, moines et évêques en Auvergne vers 1075-1110. L’église de Saint-Sandoux, témoin des enjeux locaux de la réforme, au prisme de deux documents étroitement liés”, this volume.
35Ibid.
36Ó Súilleabháin Niall, art. cit.; Grélois Emmanuel, art. cit.
37Engl Hannes, art. cit.; Jeanneau Cédric, art. cit.
38Rosé Isabelle, art. cit.
39Tomei Paolo, art. cit.
40Kohl Thomas, art. cit.
41Tomei Paolo, art. cit.
Auteur
-
Julia Barrow
Université de Leeds.
Julia Barrow est professeur émérite d’études médiévales à l’université de Leeds, où elle a enseigné de 2012 à 2024. Ses recherches se concentrent sur les évêques, le clergé et les chartes de la période 800-1250.

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