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.

    60/842 (page 40)
    that frequency of pilgrimages that they make, going to the city of Rome and back; for the greater part of them come to ruin, few remaining intact. For there are very few cities in Lombardy or Franconia or France wherein is no adulteress or harlot of English race; and this is a scandal and a foul blot upon your Church.”1' He goes on to speak of the extent to which earls or great men, “manslayers of the poor”, seized upon the abbeys and appro¬ priated the wealth “which had been bought with the blood of Christ”. Finally, he reprobates the extravagant worldly dress of clergy and monks, harbingers of Antichrist, whose cunning it was “to introduce, through his ministers, fornication and lechery into the monastic cloisters”.11 This was written probably in 745; and, just ten years earlier, the Venerable Bede had drawn a still gloomier picture in his appeal for reform to Archbishop Egbert of Canterbury. Egbert, he hopes, will not act like so many of his fellow-bishops, and surround himself with men not of religion or continence, but rather buffoons and belly-gods. Every nerve must be strained to teach the so-called Christian folk at least the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer in their own tongue; it is significant that there is no mention here of the Hail Mary, which in the parallel episcopal injunctions of five centuries later had become a third item inseparable from those two. This teaching is necessary “not only for the layfolk, who are yet living the life of the people, but even for clerics or monks who are ignorant of the Latin tongue... wherefore I myself have oftentimes given both these, the Creed and the Prayer, translated into the English tongue, to many unlearned priests”. There are many remote villages and hamlets in which a bishop has never been seen for many years past; and thus the folk are never confirmed; for this rite, all through the Middle Ages, was performed normally only by bishops on their travels of visitation. Greed of money is here at fault: bishops grasp, for money’s sake, at a greater extent of territory than they can truly administer. Bede complains how, in this “modern” Church of the eighth century a.d., by contrast with that of the first age, too many Churchmen not only do not sell the possessions they have, but even grasp at such as they have not. The whole of England [together with Southern Scotland] is divided into only twelve bishoprics. The abbeys are rich, and this wealth should be employed in part for the foundation of new sees; * See below here, Chapter li.