Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton.

  • George Gordon Coulton
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    58/842 (page 38)
    All this had cost Boniface not only much faith and energy, but also much of difficult—we may even say, of bitter—compromise. The clergy at the court of Charles Martel disgusted him; yet (as he wrote to his former bishop in England, Daniel) he cannot break with them entirely: for “without the patronage of the Frankish King I can neither govern the people nor defend priests or deacons, monks or nuns, nor even forbid the pagan rites and idolatrous sacrileges in Germany without the commands and the fear of that man [Charles].5,4 Among those pagan rites were actual human sacrifices. The story told by Boniface’s letters to the Holy See and to English bishops is gloomy indeed. The one all-im¬ portant point is that religious and cultural progress is being made, yet with a slowness disappointing to those who were giving their lives to the work. Anarchy or tyranny in the State reacted upon the Church.5 The layfolk had invaded ecclesiastical offices and revenues; Charles Martel, recently dead, had been the worst offender here; it was with Church plunder that he had maintained the army which saved Europe from the Saracens. Moreover, the Church herself was struggling but slowly from that quagmire of ignorance which had inevitably followed the barbarian invasions. We see this most plainly, perhaps, in her hesitation about marriage, not yet formally claimed as a Sacrament in those days. In 742, Boniface appealed to Pope Zacharias concerning a great difficulty which had arisen in the person of a layman of great authority who “asserted that he had received licence from Pope Gregory of holy memory to take in marriage the widow of his own uncle, who herself also was the wife of his cousin, and she, during his lifetime, departed from him... moreover she vowed to God the vow of chastity, and took the veil, and then cast it away and was married for the second time. For the man aforesaid asserts that the Holy See hath permitted him such a marriage.” Zacharias, who was a saint and a strong Pope, naturally supported Boniface in so glaring a case as this; yet Boniface’s question was not so superfluous as it might seem, since he had received from the preceding Pope, Gregory II, a matrimonial decision most embarrassing to many theologians of to-day.6 It ran: “As to the point you propose, what if a woman, who has been seized by an infirmity, is incapable, what shall her husband do? It would be good if he would so remain, and give himself to abstinence. But, since this is for great souls, he who cannot observe continence should rather marry; but