Chapter Ten

ODO RIGALDI got to know Luke, the vicar at St-Mellon-de-Pontoise, well over a 20-year period. As Archbishop of Rouen, Odo was responsible for supervising most religious personnel in his dioceses. Bishops commonly have “visitation” rights – or rights of inspection – at Benedictine abbeys, but Odo took his responsibilities more seriously than most.

Four years later in 1254, Odo reported Vicar Luke was “infamatus of two women, one of whom is dead, by whom, as he believes, he had a son whom he is bringing up; of another who is yet alive, and this recently; we warned him to abstain from this woman, otherwise we would proceed against him according to law, if we found him again diffamatus in this matter.”

In 1258, Odo recorded “Luke, the vicar, was foully infamatus in many ways of scandalous... and we have warned him several times to abstain there from, yet he hath not amended himself...” In 1263, “we found Luke the vicar, as on other occasions, grievously diffamatus of the vice of incontinence, especially with a certain lame woman, whom he confessed to have known carnally not a year since...” In 1265 Luke was again “diffamatus of dicing, tavern-haunting and the mayor of the town had imprisoned him at the complaint of a certain woman upon whom he was said to have attempted rape.”

Odo apparently never actually disciplined Luke the wayward vicar, nor was Luke unusual in the journal of Odo’s visitations. At the Abbey of Jumieges he “found that Brother William de Beaunay and Brother William de Bourg-Echard were ill-famed of abominable vice” and “decreed that they should be banished to other monasteries, there to expiate their [unnatural] transgressions.” At the nunnery of Bival, he found some of the nuns “defamed of the vice of incontinence.”

At Panliu he found a priest “ill-famed of drunkenness; he selleth his wine and maketh his parishioners drunken...The Dean is ill-famed of exacting money, and it is said that he had forty shillings from the priest of Essigny for dealing gently with him in his incontinence... The prior of Criel is ill-famed of trading, he selleth rams...” At the priory of St.-Austreberte, two nuns were living by themselves, in violation of the rule, and their nunnery would not take them back because one was a “scold” who disturbed all the rest.

As monastic discipline declined, so too did the population of monks and nuns. Between 1248 and 1266, Odo observed the population of the Benedictine monastery of Bec, famous as the home of Lanfranc and Anselm, decline from 96 to 40 monks. At the monastery of Camajore, there were only five monks left in 1334; in 1339 just three; in 1369 one was “vagabond;” and in 1381 the abbot had not a single monk. Reichenau was reduced from 100 monks to “eight or ten” by 1339, while the ancient German abbey of Echternach had its community reduced to seven.

In the past, holy relics had demonstrated miraculous fund raising power for the monasteries, so they turned there again with increasingly cynical intent. In 1286, when the Cistercian mother-house of Citeaux was in dire financial straits, the abbot of Citeaux happily discovered one joint of St. John the Baptist’s neck, the whole head of St. Corona, and three stones which supposedly had served for the martyrdom of St. Stephen. These holy relics were quickly put on display for the veneration of the coin-carrying faithful, and the deal was sweetened by the Bishop of Chalon who offered pilgrims 40 days' indulgence on top of the miraculous powers of the saintly remains.

This loss of monastic manpower – which was aggravated by the Black Death in 1348-49 – put many abbeys in a real bind. Fewer monks meant fewer scribes to toil in the great scriptoria at monasteries like Meaux and St. Martin of Tours which produced the beautiful illuminated Bibles and Psalters that found such a ready market among European nobility wishing to upgrade their religious experience. This is part of the reason that the apogee of medieval hand-illuminated manuscript production had passed almost a century before Guttenberg’s Bible was printed in 1450.

Loss of monastic manpower also affected the monks’ prayer load, which had become staggering at many Benedictine and Cluniac monasteries by the 14th century. For hundreds of years, the monasteries had sold their prayers – essentially non-transferable shares of their spiritual capital – to laymen in the form of confraternities, which were promises to pray for someone’s soul forever in exchange for money, property or other valuables. This was a very lucrative trade for the monasteries since their material costs were virtually nil, but the income from most of these transactions had been spent long ago and now ever-more work had to be shouldered by ever-fewer monks.

Many monasteries responded by removing the names of past confraters from their prayer lists, and stopped saying prayers for the souls of the departed. Pumice was used to erase names from the memorial stones, while others were quietly disposed of. Memorial stones have been found buried in the foundations of monasteries, and at Hulton Abbey memorial stones of this sort were used to line the bottom of the monastery's kitchen drain. Molinier noted that “the majority of Obituaries bear traces of erasures.”

Lacking such happy discoveries, other monasteries resorted to relic fraud. Bury St. Edmunds, for instance, boasted the remains of St. Edmund, an early Christian King of the East Saxons who was shot full of arrows and beheaded by the Danes in 870. When the monks of Bury St. Edmunds opened the tomb of the saint in the 12th century, however, they found that the head of the corpse therein was still firmly attached to the body. Another miracle! Or so the monks concluded with many heartfelt prayers. The corpse’s lack of arrow wounds remained a problem, though, so the abbot had the corpse stabbed all over with knives and stained with blood before it was reinterred.

Pious body snatching was another popular option...

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"The History of the Corporation, Volume One" © Copyright 2003 Bruce Brown
Jacket illustration and design by Running Dog.