Europe: A History (71 page)
22. The Church of Rome has never erred, and as Scripture attests, can never err in the future …
23. No one who opposes the Church of Rome can be considered Catholic.
27. The Pontiff can release the vassals of unjust men from their oath of loyalty…
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At first sight, since the Pope had no means of enforcement at his command, it appeared that the Emperor’s position was the stronger one. In practice, since many bishops resented their dependence on secular patrons, and since many barons resented their dependence on prince or emperor, the centrifugal forces of the feudal order worked to the Pope’s advantage. In the long run, the Contest ended in stalemate and compromise; but not before, in the first round, the Emperor suffered comprehensive humiliation.
Hildebrand’s challenge provoked an unholy brawl. At the Emperor’s command, the bishops of the Empire excommunicated the Pope. The Pope promptly excommunicated the Emperor, releasing the Emperor’s subjects from their allegiance. The German barons thereon rebelled, and chose Rudolf of Swabia as their ‘anticaesar’. Henry chose penitence. Crossing the Mont Cenis in winter with his wife and child, he sought out Hildebrand in the lonely castle of Canossa. There he stood barefoot for three days in the snow, dressed in rags and begging the Pope for forgiveness. On the fourth day Hildebrand relented, and Henry threw himself at his feet, crying ‘Holy Father, spare me!’ But the dramatics of Canossa achieved nothing; Henry soon returned to his habit of lay investiture. After a long civil war in Germany, and Henry’s second excommunication, a synod of imperial bishops met at Brixen and elected an ‘antipope’, Clement III. The West now had two Popes and two Emperors. In 1083–4 the imperial party captured Rome, with Hildebrand holed up in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Robert Guiscard saw them off with a Saracen army, which put Rome to the sack. Hildebrand died in exile. Henry died in 1106, but not before his second wife Adelaide had publicly laid charges against him with the Church. The Concordat of Worms in 1122 called a truce in the wrangles, with Pope and Emperor both granted a hand in investiture.
[MARSTON]
In 1075 the city of Pisa sought papal approval for its municipal code of laws, the
consuetudine di mare
. They were confirmed by an imperial patent six years later. As part of the arrangement, the local Duke of Tuscany renounced all jurisdiction within the city, and undertook to name no new marquis in the region without the Pisans’ consent. At the time Pisa was simply taking precautions against the brewing conflict between Pope and Emperor; but it was pioneering the process whereby leading cities could establish communal independence. Pisa had grown rich from the plunder of the campaigns against the Saracens in Sicily and Sardinia, as reflected in the marble splendours of its cathedral with the leaning baptistery tower (c.1089). In due course it was subdued by its maritime rival, Genoa, and absorbed by its landward neighbour, Florence. But the growth of wealthy city communes, replete with constitutions, military forces, and civic pride, was a feature of ensuing centuries. In France, Le Mans, St Quentin, and Beauvais were self-regulating cities by the end of the eleventh century. In Flanders, the charter
MARSTON
O
LD
Marston happens to be the nearest medieval parish to where this book is being written. It has had a continuous history for nearly 900 years. A chapel on the site was granted to the Austin Priory of St Frideswide in Oxford in 1122; and it was raised to the status of a parish in the following century. In 1451 a papal bull joined it to the neighbouring parish of Headington in an arrangement which lasted until 1637. For much of the modern period, the living lay in the gift of the lordship of Headington.
In its long history, Marston has seen few momentous events. This ‘marsh village’, three miles from the city of Oxford, had no interesting features other than the Marston Ferry, which plied across the River Cherwell from 1279 until the 1960s. At its greatest extent prior to the growth of the modern city suburbs, the village was inhabited by forty or fifty households, who worked some 600 acres of arable land and possessed some 200 horses and cattle and 800 sheep. After 1655, when the two main fields were enclosed for pasture, the population declined. During the English Civil War, Marston was occupied by the Parliamentary forces besieging the King’s headquarters in Oxford. The Parliamentary commander, Sir Thomas Fairfax, was billeted in 1643 with the Croke family at Marston Manor House, where he received a visit from Oliver Cromwell. There was no school in the village before 1816, when a boarding-house was established for paying pupils. The elementary school opened in 1851. The only charitable foundation in the parish was created in 1671 by the will of Mary Brett, widow, who left a house and a parcel of land worth 22s.
6d
. for providing bread for the poor. The only inhabitant of the parish to achieve national fame was a fox-terrier bitch called ‘Trump’, who was purchased in the hamlet of Elsfield in 1815. Trump’s new master, the sporting parson, Revd. Jack Russell, used her to found the canine breed that bears his name.
1
The Parish Church of St Nicholas, Marston, built in Late Perpendicular Gothic, is described as ‘unpretentious’.
2
There is a low west tower with battlemented parapet. Only tiny portions of the original fabric survive. Most of the stonework dates from the fifteenth century, as restored in 1883. The plain oak furnishing of the interior is largely Elizabethan or Jacobean.
A list of officiating clergy from c. 121 Oto 1991 hangs on a board in the nave. Despite the interval between 1529 and 1637 when Marston was served by non-resident curates, the list conveys a strong sense of continuity. The name of the earliest recorded priest is Osbert, son of Hereward (c.1210). John de Bradeley (1349) died in the Black Death. Robert Kene (1397–8) was the first priest to use a surname. Thomas Fylldar (1529), a Dominican, was the last Catholic priest before the Reformation. John Allen (1637–85), an appointee of
Archbishop Laud, served the reconstituted parish for forty-eight years. So, too, did his Edwardian successor, John Hamilton Mortimer (1904–52).
All over Europe, tens of thousands of church parishes form a network of territorial authority, which is often much older and more continuous than that of the civil power. They answer to the bishop as opposed to the Crown. In England, they pre-dated the counties. They coincide in large measure with the village communities, where the parish priest has been a central figure of respect and influence regardless of the changes in political regime and land ownership. In recent times, the parish council has provided an element of local democracy and, together with the parish pump and the parish hall, a focus for social life.
Parish registers of births, marriages, and deaths, which in England have been kept since the reign of Elizabeth I, are one of the major sources of genealogical and demographic information. They provide the natural gateway into local history.
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Above all, the parish is the corner-stone of the ordered life of Europe’s countryside. The villagers’ ceaseless toil against the seasons has survived serfdom, plagues, famines, wars, poverty, and the CAP:
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their
way.
4
St Omer (1127) led the way for Bruges and Ghent. In north Germany, the self-government of Lübeck (1143) preceded that of Hamburg (1189). Within these communes, merchant associations and craft guilds began to form.
In May 1082 the city of Venice received a charter of liberties from the Byzantine Emperor, guaranteeing freedom of transit and exemption from taxes and duties throughout the Empire west of the Bosporus. Three quays were to be reserved for Venetian use on the Golden Horn. At the time the concessions must have, seemed a reasonable price to pay for Venice’s help in the Emperor’s Norman wars. Trade between Italy and the Levant had been severely restricted since the Muslim conquests of the seventh century, and the merchants of Venice, who had been the Emperor’s subjects as well as his allies, were hardly a major power. In the event the ‘Golden Bull’ of 1082 proved to be a milestone. Granted on the eve of the Crusades and the reopening of the eastern Mediterranean, it turned the Venetian lagoon into the principal emporium between East and West, the home base for a seaborne fortune that was to rival Constantinople itself. Previously the city of St Mark, whose relics had been brought to the Rialto in 828, had been overshadowed by the nearby island of Torcello. The ravages of the Magyars, like the earlier invasion of the Lombards which had propelled the first refugees into the lagoon in the
first place, had disrupted contacts with Germany. Henceforth, transalpine trade was to boom. With a chain of forts, trading stations and later colonies at Ragusa, Corfu, Corinth, Crete, and Cyprus, the Venetian galleys could protect the convoys carrying silks, spices, silver and slaves, timber, corn, and salt. The Republic of Venice did not have an easy relationship with Byzantium; in 1182 all its merchants in Constantinople were massacred. But it outlasted the Empire, surviving until destroyed by Napoleon in 1797.
[GHETTO] [MORES]
In 1084, at the monastery of Chartreuse near Grenoble, the Carthusian Order was founded by St Bruno of Cologne (1033–1101). Its strict contemplative rules directed the monks to live in silence in closed cells. At the time it must have seemed just an austere variation on the older Cluniac model; in fact it was the sign that the Latin Church was moving into an era of systematic institutionalization. In 1098, at Citeaux in Burgundy, the long career of the Cistercian Order was launched. It owed its main development to St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). Elsewhere, secular clerics or ‘regular canons’ entered organized communities governed by the three vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Most adopted the Rule of St Augustine, and hence were known as Augustinians. One such group, the Premonstratensians or Norbertines, founded by St Norbert at Prémontré near Laon in 1120, spread widely in Eastern as well as Western Europe. In those same years, the monks at Cluny were building a church which for five centuries remained the largest in Western Christendom.
In the summer of 1085 Alfonso VI of Castile-Leon captured the Muslim city of Toledo. At the time, it appeared to be just one more incident on the Christian-Muslim frontier: Alfonso was in league with the Emir of Seville, and was keeping the Emir’s daughter as his concubine. In fact it proved to be the first step in the Christian
Reconquista
—the 400-year-struggle for possession of the Iberian peninsula. Toledo was the largest and most central of some twenty-five
taifa
or ‘party’ kingdoms into which the old Cordoban emirate had fragmented. Their disunity gave the Christian rulers their chance. Within the decade, Alfonso’s champion, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, had entered Valencia. Within a century, the wars of Christian and Muslim had turned into a general contest of attrition on all fronts. The Moors suffered a decisive defeat at the pass of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. The capture of Cordova in 1236, of Seville in 1248, and of Murcia in 1266 put the greater part of the Peninsula into Christian hands,
[EL CID]
On 27 November 1095, at the synod of Clermont in Auvergne, Pope Urban II appealed to all Christians to fight for the delivery of Jerusalem. Enthroned on a dais on the hillside below Notre Dame du Port, he addressed a great throng of mitred bishops, knights, and common people. At the time he was seeking to promote the so-called Truce of God, and to bring a halt to the endemic warfare of feudal society. He was also pursuing a policy of reconciliation with the Byzantine Patriarch, wishing to share the Byzantines’ distress at the Turkish advance. Yet his appeal struck a chordof popular sympathy: the crowd roared
Dios b volt
, ‘God wishes it’; a cardinal fell on his knees and, in the name of the multitude, seized with convulsive trembling, recited the
Confiteor
. There and then, men jostled to
join. The proposal for a Crusade, a ‘War of the Cross’, was taken up throughout the Latin Church. Preachers such as Peter the Hermit spread the word. Henceforth, for six or seven generations, counts, kings, commoners, and even children flocked ‘to take the Cross’ and to fight the infidel in the Holy Land.
MORES
I
N
the late eleventh century, when a Byzantine princess arrived in Venice to marry the Doge, it was found that she ate her food with a golden fork. She was reprimanded by the Bishop for anti-social behaviour. People in the medieval West took meat with their fingers from a common dish. The fork came into general use only during the Renaissance, and only for lifting morsels to one’s own plate.
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The table set of knife, fork, and spoon was an eighteenth-century innovation.
European manners can be thoroughly studied from the stream of manuals written to teach people how to behave. The earliest such manuals, such as
De institutione novitarum
by Hugh St Victor (d. 1141), were addressed to clerics. The thirteenth-century Bavarian
Hofzucht
(Courtly Manners), attributed to Tannhäuser, was directed at boorish courtiers, as was John Russell’s fifteenth-century
Book of Courtesy e
. The most influential publication of the genre, the
De Civilitate Morum Puerilium
(1530) by Erasmus, ran into 130 editions. It was reprinted in Russia when Peter the Great sought to ‘civilize’ his court 200 years later.
2
//
Cortegiano
(The Courtier, 1528), by Baldassare Castiglione, and a similar Latin treatise (1566) by Lukasz Górnicki, enjoyed long-standing international fame. Thereafter, numerous guides to the conduct of ‘high society’, especially on the French model, were used to spread the cultivation of manners into ever-widening social circles.
At one time, historians treated manners as a subject of passing fashions. But serious analysts have argued that they provide the outward evidence for profound social and psychological changes. Attitudes to every activity can be plotted overtime, and related to long-term trends.
Injunctions about spitting, for example, reveal a number of basic shifts:
Do not spit over or on the table. (English c.1463)
Do not spit across the table as hunters do. (German, 15th cent.)
Turn away when spitting, lest your saliva fall on someone. If anything purulent falls to the ground, it should be trodden upon. (Erasmus, 1530)
You should abstain from spitting at table, if possible. (Italian, 1558)
Formerly, it was permitted to spit on the ground before people of rank…. Today, that is an indecency. (French, 1572)
Frequent spitting is disagreeable. At important houses, one spits into one’s handkerchief … Do not spit so far that you have to look for the saliva to stamp on it. (Liège, 1714)
It is very ill-mannered to swallow what should be spat… After spitting into your handkerchief, you should fold it once, without looking at it, and put it in your pocket. (La Salle, 1729)
It is unpardonably gross for children to spit in the faces of their playmates. (La Salle, 1774)
Spitting is at all times a disgusting habit. Besides being coarse and atrocious, it is very bad for the health. (English, 1859)
Have you noticed that today we [hide] what our fathers did not hesitate to display openly? … The spittoon is a piece of furniture no longer found in modern households. (Cabanès, 1910)
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It emerges that the need to spit was not challenged until the eighteenth century, although the constraints about where, when, and how to spit had grown steadily. In the nineteenth century, spitting fell into disrepute, perhaps through fear of tuberculosis. Yet a certain hypocrisy separated the rules of good manners and the widespread use of the spittoon—a vessel required by the habit of tobacco-chewing. Only in the twentieth century did a total ban become effective. ‘No Spitting’ notices were retained on London buses until the 1960s. By that time certain rock groups were urging their fans to spit as a mark of social defiance. Spitting may yet return to respectability.
Just as ‘the civilizing process’ is seen gradually to build up self-restraint within society as a whole, so the training of infants builds up self-restraint within adults:
Thus the sociohistorical process of centuries, in which the standard of what is shameful and offensive is slowly raised, is re-enacted in abbreviated form in the life of the individual human being … One could speak, as a parallel to the laws of biogenesis, of a fundamental law of sociogenesis and psychogenesis.
4
Critics of this ‘civilizing’ theory might object to such a narrow definition of civilization. Some might think it a peculiarly German theory—all tidy habits and empty heads. Many would insist that the art of
savoir vivre
demands rather more than the ability to control one’s spittle, sphincter, and silverware. The ‘civilisation curves’ of Norbert Elias and his theory of unilinear progress will not convince everyone. But all would admit to the gulf which separates so-called ‘Western civilized man’ from medieval modes of behaviour, where modern concepts of hygiene, of individual respect, of privacy, and of ‘personal space’ were virtually absent. One has only to ponder some other assorted medieval injunctions:
It is bad manners … to wear a helmet when serving ladies.
Don’t blow your nose with the fingers you hold the meat with.
If you have to scrape [the back of] your throat, do so politely with your
Farts may be concealed by coughing. [coat
Before you sit down, make sure that your seat has not been fouled.
It is impolite to greet someone who is urinating or defecating.
When you eat, do not forget the poor. God will reward you.
5