The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  The crusades were launched in 1096 and 1146. We saw how Pope Urban II made his appeal in Clermont at a council concerned with the Truce of God. While he offered remission from temporal penalties for the taking of the Cross, and total remission of sins for death in battle, he also contrasted the impoverished condition of many nobles with the prosperity they would enjoy after conquering new fiefs in southern lands. A vast enthusiasm swept the assembly; they cried, ‘It is God’s will!’ The agitation was carried on by preachers, prophets and hermits.

  The decade 1085-95 had been harder than usual in north-east France and west Germany, with floods, droughts and famines; since 1083 there had been plague. Whole families moved with children and chattels piled on the carts, the horde of paupers swollen by all sorts of crooks and adventurers. Men felt that if they could only reach Jerusalem and capture it, they would enter a blessed life. The mass movement which had shown itself in such pilgrimages as those of 1033 and 1064 had become a militant, desperate eruption. The feeling that safety lay in destroying the enemies of the faith led to the first massacres of Jews in Europe; the first crusade led to the attack on Jews in Speyer by crusaders in May 1096. But this involved little murdering compared to the later large-scale destruction at Worms and Mainz, with sacking of synagogues, looting of houses, and murdering of all who refused to be baptized. Children were killed or taken off for baptism. Preparations for the second crusade provoked the people of Normandy and Picardy to kill more Jews. On the Rhine an ex-monk called on the populace to slaughter the Jews as a fitting send-off for the crusade.

  In 1198 a prophet, Fulk of Neuilly, called on the poor to start their own crusade; they perished on the coast of Spain. Soon after came the children’s crusade; almost all the children were drowned, starved, or sold into slavery. Prophetic movements at home demanded a total change of the world, the day of doom, the last judgment, a redeemed earth, paradise. The check to outward expansion, with its hope of land and liberation, turned aspirations inward, where they were given a deep imprint of collective hope.

  Tauchelm in the Lowlands in the late eleventh century denounced the churches as brothels and holy orders as hopelessly degraded. He called for the withholding of tithes. His area was one that had seen communal uprisings for years. Starting in 1074, town after town in the Rhine valley, Utrecht, Brabant, Flanders, and north France, struggled to get as free as possible from feudal overlords, lay or ecclesiastical: the merchants wanted to escape from the dues and levies. Tauchelm formed his followers into a devoted community, the one true church; he said he possessed the holy spirit as much as Christ and that he too was God; he ruled as a messianic king. St Norbert was brought in against him, a great noble who had taken the way of poverty.

  About the same time a monk called Henry was entangled in the struggles of the folk of Le Mans with their bishop. He preached against the clergy and held a bonfire of vanities. Later, in Italy and Provence, he more fully developed a creed of apostolic life and simplicity, saying that love of one’s neighbour was the essence of religion and that the authority of the church must be wholly re jected. Out of Brittany in the 1140s came Eudes of the Star, organiz ing his own church and calling himself the son of God. (The winter of 1144 was terrible, followed by two years of dearth.) He made his lair in a forest and raided and destroyed churches and monasteries. In 1148 he was captured by a band that the archbishop of Rouen sent against him, under a portentous comet. At a synod presided over by Pope Eugenius he was condemned and handed over to the arch bishop, who starved him to death in a tower. His chief followers were burned at the stake.

  These outbreaks were part of a larger movement. Eudes may have been in touch with the Apostolic Brethren centred in the diocese of Chalons and found in most of the northern provinces of France. Their main tenets were that baptism was of no avail before the age of thirty, when Christ was baptized; that there was no resurrection of the body; that all property, meat and wine must be abjured. In the case of Arnold of Brescia, pupil of Abelard, apocalyptic views became directly political; he was inspired by the idea of Republican Rome to denounce the temporal powers of the papacy. After the defeat of his republic of Rome, one sect of Arnoldists called themselves the Poor Men. Other dissidents were the Pasagni or Circumcized in Italy, who preached the law of Moses and the Ebionite notion of Jesus. In France the Caputiati, with an image of the Virgin on their hats, sought a return to primal equality and freedom. The Apostolici, mostly poor workers, had their two main leaders burned. But the main centre of anti-papal heresies was Provence, where in the early twelfth century Pierre de Bruys denounced the worship of images and veneration of the cross; Christ should be execrated rather than venerated; only a man’s own faith could save him. He too was burned alive. Peter Waldo, a rich Lyon merchant, gave up his property to his wife and the poor, and went preaching in the streets. At the same time Catharism was appearing from the east, with its asceticism and its belief that the world was given up wholly to evil. In the early thirteenth century the papacy unloosed a bloody crusade against southern France and wiped out its brilliant civilization, in which the troubadors had founded modern literature with their subtle and complex poetry. The Franciscan friars, with their return to apostolic poverty, showed the effect of the heretical movements inside the monastic tradition; they did, however, become part of the church, though the section called Spirituals, who could not accept property even in a disguised form, was finally denounced by the papacy. Linked with the outlook of the Spirituals was the influential work of Joachim of Fiore, who found the Cistercian rule too easy and became a hermit in Calabria. The notes and introduction to his Everlasting Gospel announced the failure of Christianity and the birth of a new religion.[526]

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  During these years the English church seems to have been undisturbed by the deeper currents of inquiry and dissent. Yet these currents were strong in Flanders and north-east France, with which England has so many links. Catharism had appeared in the Rhineland and in Flanders by the mid-twelfth century. In 1157 Archbishop Samson of Rheims attacked a group described as publicani (clearly Paulicians); a group of heretics was burned at Cologne in 1163; in England a church council ordered the dissidents to be branded on the chin; in Burgundy the heretics were put to the ordeal in 1167 and then burned. Wandering weavers spread ideas, so that weaver and heretic became almost synonymous terms. But these ideas did not flourish in England to the extent of much disturbing the church. Perhaps the reason for this lay in the political situation. The mass of the English people, toiling in various degrees of subjection under alien lords and unable to find any effective basis on which to organize and struggle, may well have been in a condition of emotional and moral exhaustion and bewilderment, groping in darkness for the lost centres of their personal and social being, gathering new energies for resistance and renewal, but powerless as yet to find outlets for expression. The enemy and his nature were clear, and so there was not the recoil into deep fantasy hopes of a millenary kind. The distinctive aspects of the English situation were: that the ruling class was alien in a sense unknown in other feudalized regions of western Europe; that it had imposed a strong government also without parallel; and that, despite this alien rule, the folk courts and many other aspects of traditional Anglo-Saxon organization continued to function — the result being a maximum of tension between the popular and ruling levels. We must add that the urbanizing trends (with their basis in mercantile and craft activities) had not yet advanced in England to anything like the extent they had in Flanders and southern France.

  On a broad view the idea of a golden age — an earthly paradise, a saturnian earth of brotherhood and equality, a pastoral condition freed from all the conflicts of property and power which bedevil a class society — is derived from the memory of tribal society in its earlier phases — a memory which greatly simplifies and glamourizes the facts. Projected into the future, the image appears as the resolution of all existing contradictions and conflicts; but, since there is no actual basis for such a resolutio
n, the advent of the desired society of harmony and justice can only be conceived as brought about magically, by some divine intervention; and since productive powers are still at a low level, the achievement of plenty can also only be magically conceived. Hence the imagery of spontaneous production for human needs by nature in the utopias, whether secular or religious. In the tradition carried on by Christianity there were many ingredients, Persian, Greek (especially Stoic), Egyptian, and so on; but the reaction of people at any historical moment was entangled in turn with their specific relation to the tribal past and its surviving forms of association (such as the kindreds).

  Still, if the situation in England was such that it held back the growth of large dissident movements, millenary-utopian or directly political, we can perhaps find an oblique connection with the Provencal developments in the cult of St Gilles, which had been particularly favoured by the counts of Toulouse; they fostered the town of St Gilles and Raymond IV said that he would prefer to have Count of St Gilles as his title. There is a charming legend about a white hind that gave the saint milk and was chased by a royal hunter; the latter’s arrow hit the hermit by mistake. But what gave Gilles his special appeal was an anti-clerical note: the belief that he could forgive sins without the sinner having to confess them to a priest. To support the belief in this power a tale was invented about Charlemagne being unable to tell him some grave sin, which Gilles then read in an angel-borne scroll; he handed the scroll to the king and gave him absolution. As we saw, private confession was a comparatively recent custom, which vastly increased the church’s hold on people, so that the legend of St Gilles and the practices it encouraged were opposed to this development and represented embryonic protestant views of the direct relation between Christian and God — even though here a saint still meditates.[527] The papal crusade destroyed the culture of Provence and Toulouse, and did much damage to the town of St Gilles; but the cult spread much in north France and England. In France the saint’s name was given to clowns of popular farces and to their waistcoats (gilets); the saint was the patron of the poor, especially cripples (called in England Hopping or Hobbling Giles) and outcasts such as lepers or beggars.

  In England he was in particular the saint of country workers, and some hundred churches were dedicated to him, mostly in small places. He had almost twice as many churches as even the popular martyr (killed by the king, the State) St Thomas of Canterbury. He was only beaten later by St George, but that was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of his earliest churches here was built under Rufus when Hugolina founded a monastery of six Augustinian canons near Cambridge castle with a church dedicated to St Giles; in 1112 the canons moved across the river to Barnwell, where they raised a church to Giles and Andrew. Under Rufus also came the first of the hospitals dedicated to him, outside Cripplegate, London. The founder was Alfune, friend of Rahere, the converted jester, who, after a vision of St Bartholomew, built a church for that saint at Smithfield on a site used for dumping rubbish and hanging criminals. Alfune was the first warden of Rahere’s hospital. Soon after, Matilda, wife of Henry I, in 1117 founded a hospital of St Giles for lepers in fields outside London: St Giles in the Fields. Guillaume de Berneville (Barnwell Priory) wrote a Life of St Giles in Anglo-Norman verse, which was one of the sources of Lydgate’s Life of the saint in Middle English. ‘O gracious Giles, of poor folk chief patron.’[528]

  St Giles, then, with his belief in forgiveness of sins without sacramental confession (against the church’s doctrine), his links with folk drama and his championship of the poor and the outcast, preserved many signs of his origins in heretical southern France.

  Looking back at the eccentricities of Rufus, we cannot rule out the possibility that he had been influenced by the heretical freethinking of Toulouse and Provence. William IX of Aquitaine was friendly with him, came to his aid in his campaigns in France, and eventually pledged his duchy to him. This duke, who was also William VII of Poitou, was the first known troubador; his Song of Nothing is a witty and paradoxical expression of unorthodox ideas, foreshadowing the dialectic of chastity-copulation, dearth-plenty, of the whole troubador ethic and aesthetic. That there was much exchange of ideas between certain elements of Anglo-Norman culture and the south, is shown by the career of Bletheris or Bleddri whom we find cited by the second continuator of the Conte del Graal as narrating the adventures of Gawain and a dwarf knight, a poet ‘who was born and reared in Wales...and who told it [the story] to the count of Poitiers, who loved the story and held it more than any other firmly in memory’. The story seems quite in the vein of many tales told by Girald of Wales; and other references, including one which says Blihis (Bliheris) insisted that the secrets of the Grail must not be revealed, authenticate the activities of the Welsh poet in France. The count of Poitou whom he knew must be our William (who ruled from about 1086 to 1127), not his son William VIII. The earliest known reference to Tristram as a famous lover came in the cos from two troubadors, Cercamon and Bernard de Ventador, both closely connected with the court of Poitou.[529]

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  In England, as elsewhere in these years, one of the main sources of strain in people was the persisting and not always consciously perceived conflict between the church and ingrained pagan attitudes. One result was a pervasive sense of insecurity. People felt surrounded by hostile and unsettling forces which they could not identify. The sacraments of the church gave a certain relief, but could only palliate their fears. Indeed in many ways the church increased the strain by opposing magical ideas of its own to the pagan ones, for example asserting that everywhere the air was thick with swarming demons who sought entry into human beings. Such beliefs easily merged with the old attitudes set out for instance in the Anglo-Saxon Leechbooks, that men were surrounded by dwarfs who could make themselves invisible, by elves who shot tiny shafts at their victims and caused diseases, by little wormlike things that wriggled under men’s skin, and by elf breath that was wafted on the air to spread illness. There were nine specific venoms, Onflying Things, ‘the Loathed Things that run through the land’. Sudden pains were the result of spears shot into a man by wicked women (witches) in league with the elves. Pagan and Christian imagery merged in magical formulas: ‘A drink for a fiend-sick man: when a devil possesses a man or affects him from within with disease, a drink is to be drunk out of a church-bell...’ Hell was the Mouth of the devouring Whale; and there were numerous paintings in the churches depicting the hell mouth.

  William of Newburgh tells us of a man named Ketell, who lived in the village of Farnham, Yorkshire, and who had the gift of seeing devils if they were present. Once he entered a domus potationis and saw a little devil sitting on each man’s drinking-cup. When prayers were said ‘as the custom is’, the devils flew away and only came back when the rustics resumed their seats and their drinking. (Whether the domus of drinking was in a village or a market town we don’t know; Aethelred II had laid down penalties for a breach of the peace in an ale-house, but we don’t know if the law referred to villages as well as towns. The ale-house must have been an important gathering place of the folk, but we know little of it.) From the tenth-century Blicking homilies to the later sermons of Friars and other ecclesiastics, the moment when the preacher comes warmly and passionately to life is when he reaches the theme of death, burial, judgment, and hell-pains — events that are seen as taking place in a vast panorama of swarming devils.

  Gazing into the unknown abyss, helpless upon his deathbed, the devils whirling above him, or lurking under the furniture, friends and acquaintances waiting at his side, the stoutest medieval sinner becomes a trembling savage again. There in the awful air, in every nook and cranny we behold primeval monsters of the past, implacable spirits returned to haunt the enfeebled race (Owst).

  The image of the individual death was linked with that of Judgment Day, the Day of Doom. ‘Alwey when I thenke on the last Day, for drede my bodie quaketh.’ Here was the personal anxiety reflecting the general social crisis.

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p; Yet, while stimulating certain elements of paganism, the church had to fight obvious survivals of pagan cults. Much of the conflict could not but be subterranean, ambiguous, and confused; but it continually irrupted into the open. Under Aethelred we read, ‘If anyone is guilty of offering obstruction or open opposition anywhere to the law of Christ or of the king, he shall pay wergild or wite or lahslit, according to the nature of the offence.’ Thus ecclesiastical offences became secular crimes as well. The principle seems to have been observed; for in the Law of the Northumbrian Priests secular penalties are listed that are not given in any extant royal codes. Offences include the oppression and sale of churches, heathenism and witchcraft. Under Cnut we meet an increased concern with heathen practices. (At the end of the ninth century the Mercian kingdom had been overrun by heathen Danes; one of the greatest Mercian kings, Penda, was a heathen. Sweyn son of Harald Bluetooth, was baptized as a child, but as a man he waged a religious war against his father; as late as the end of the thirteenth century a Norwegian king was called Priest-hater.) Edgar is said to have attacked, at Dunstan’s request, the unlawfully married, false coiners, faith-breakers, sorcerers (veneficii compistores), whoremongers, traitors, kinsmen-slayers, women who killed husbands ‘by adulterous deceits’, and those whose life was odious to God. His laws specified the unseemly marriage of widows, heathen practices, and witchcraft; he appealed to every Christian ‘zealously to accustom his children to Christianity’.