СНАР. І. STRIFE OF SECULARS AND REGULARS. 117 them immediately from their wives, or to inflict the sentence of deprivation.s The strife throughout Christendom between the monks and the secular clergy, if it rose not directly out Monks and of, was closely connected with, this controversy. secular clergy. In the monks the severer ecclesiastics had sure allies; they were themselves mostly monks: nearly all the great champions of the Church, the more intrepid vindicators of her immunities, the rigid administrators of her laws, were trained in the monasteries for their arduous conflict. It was an arduous, but against the married clergy, an unequal contest. The monastic school were united, determined, under strong convictions, with undoubting confidence in broad and intelligible principles; the married clergy in general doubtful, vacillating, mostly full of misgiving as to the righteousness of their own cause; content with the furtive and permissive licence, rather than disposed to claim it boldly as their inalienable right. The former had all the prejudices of centuries in their favour, the greatest names in the Church, long usage, positive laws, decrees of Popes, axioms of the most venerable fathers, some seemingly positive texts of Scripture: the latter only a vague appeal to an earlier antiquity with which they were little acquainted; the true sense of many passages of the sacred writings which had been explained away; a dangerous connection with suspicious or heretical names; the partial sanction of the unauthoritative Greek Church. Their strongest popular ground was the false charge of Manicheism against the adversaries of marriage. The great strength of the monastic party was in the revival of monasticism itself. This had taken place, more or less, in almost every part of Christendom. The great monasteries had sunk on account of their vast possessions-too tempting to maintain respect-some into patrimonies of noble families-some into appanages, as it were, of the crown. The kings granted them to favourites, not always ecclesiastical favourites. Many were held by lay abbots, who, by degrees, expelled the monks; the cloisters became the camps of their retainers, the stables of their coursers, the kennels of their hounds, the meutes of their Regesta, Greg. vii. i. 30. 118 LATIN CHRISTIANITY. hawks. In Germany we have seen the extensive appropriation of the wealthiest monasteries by the lordly prelates. But even now one of those periodical revolutions had begun, through which monasticism for many ages renewed its youth, either by restoring the discipline and austere devotion within the old convents, or by the institution of new orders, whose emulation always created a strong reaction throughout the world of Monachism. In France, William of Aquitaine, and Bruno of the royal house of Burgundy, began the reform. It had spread from Clugny under Odo and his successors; in Italy from Damiani, and from S. Gualberto in Vallombrosa; Herlembald was still upholding the banner of monkhood in Milan; in England the strong impulse given by Dunstan had not expired. Edward the Confessor, a monk upon the throne, had been not merely the second founder of the great Abbey of Westminster, but had edified and encouraged the monks by his example. Even in Germany a strong monastic party had begun to form the tyranny and usurpation of the crown and of the great prelates could not but cause a deep, if silent revulsion. Almost the first public act of Gregory VII. was a declaration of implacable war against these his two mortal enemies, simony, and the marriage of the clergy. He was no infant Hercules; but the mature ecclesiastical Hercules would begin his career by strangling these two serpents; the brood, as he esteemed them, and The decree of the synod held in parents of all evil. Rome in the eleventh month of his pontificate is not extant, but in its inexorable provisions it went It absolutely beyond the sternest of his predecessors. invalidated all sacraments performed by simoniacal or married priests: baptism was no regenerating rite; it might almost seem that the Eucharistic bread and wine in their unhallowed hands refused to be transubstantiated into the Gregory's synod at Rome. March 9, 10, h Gregorius Papa celebratâ synodo simoniacos anathematizavit, uxoratos sacerdotes a divino officio removit, et laicis missam eorum audire interdixit novo exemplo et (ut multis visum est) inconsiderato præjudicio contra sanctorum patrum sententiam qui scripserunt, quod sacramenta quæ in ecclesiâ fiunt, baptismus videlicet, chrisma, corpus et sanguis Christi, Spiritu sancto latenter operante eorundem sacramentorum effec- CHAP. I. VIEWS OF GREGORY. 119 body and blood of Christ. The communicants guilty of perseverance at least in the sin, shared in the sacerdotal guilt. Even the priesthood were startled at this new and awful doctrine, that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on their own sinlessness. Gregory, in his headstrong zeal, was promulgating a doctrine used afterwards by Wickliffe and his followers with such tremendous energy. And this was a fearless, democratical provocation to the people; for it left to notoriety, to public fame, to fix on any one the brand of the hidden sin of simony, or it might be the calumnious charge of concubinage; and so abandoned the holy priesthood to the judgment of the multitude. Gregory VII. of France. But the extirpation of these two internal enemies to the dignity and the power of the sacerdotal order was far below the holy ambition of Gregory; this and the King was but clearing the ground for the stately fabric of his Theocracy. If, for his own purposes, he had at first assumed some moderation in his intercourse with the empire, over the rest of Latin Christendom he took at once the tone and language of a sovereign. We must rapidly survey, before we follow him into his great war with the empire, Gregory VII. asserting his autocracy over the rest of Latin Christendom. In the monastery of Clugny, accompanying, or vigilantly watching the German pontiffs in their Transalpine spiritual campaigns, Gregory had taken the measure of the weakness which had fallen on the monarchy of France. The first kings of the house of Capet were rather the heads of a coequal feudal federalty than kings; their personal character had not raised them above their unroyal position. King Robert, the son of Hugh Capet, had abandoned his wife Bertha, to whom he was deeply attached, because the imperious Church had discovered some remote impediment, both of consanguinity and spiritual affinity. He had undergone seven years' penance; the Archbishop of Tours, who had sanctioned the incestuous wedlock, must submit to deposition. But Robert aspired to be, and was, a saint. Leo IX. had held his council at Rheims in despite of Robert's successor (Henry I.), and compelled the prelates to desert the feudal iShe was his cousin in the fourth degree: he had been godfather to one of Bertha's children by her former marriage. banner of their king for that of their spiritual liege lord.* Hildebrand's letters to Philip I., King of France, are in the haughtiest, most criminatory terms. "No king has reached such a height of detestable guilt in oppressing the churches of his kingdom as Philip of France.' He puts the King to the test; his immediate admission of a Bishop of Macon, elected by the clergy and people, without payment to the crown. Either let the King repudiate this base traffic of simony, and allow fit persons to be promoted to bishoprics, or the Franks, unless apostates from Christianity, will be struck with the sword of excommunication, and refuse any longer to obey him." In a later epistle to the Bishops of France, describing the enormous wickedness of the land, among other crimes the plunder and imprisonment of pilgrims on their way to Rome, he charges the King, or rather the tyrant of France, as the head and cause of all this guilt. Instead of suppressing, he is the example of all wickedness." The plunder of all merchants, especially Italians, who visit France, takes place by royal authority. He exhorts the bishops to admonish him, rebukes their cowardly fears and want of dignity; if the King is disobedient, the Pope commands them to excommunicate him, and to suspend all religious services throughout France. At one time, in the affair of the Archbishop Manasseh of Rheims, all the Archbishops of France were under excommunication. Whether, as part of the new Roman policy, which looked to the Italian Normans as its body-guard England. in the approaching contest with the Transalpine powers, and therefore would propitiate that brave and rising race throughout the world, Hildebrand's predecessor (and Alexander II. did no momentous act without the counsel of Hildebrand) had given a direct sanction to the Norman Conquest of England. The banner of St. Peter floated in the van of the Bastard at Hastings. The reliques, over which Harold had been betrayed into the oath of abandoning his claims on the throne to William, Concil. Rem., A.D. 998. m Ad Roderic. Cabillon, i. 35, Dec. 4, 1079. Ad Episcop. Franc. ii. 5, Sept. 10, 1074, still stronger, ii. 32, Dec. 8, 1074. Compare Letter to Philip, i. 75, to the Count of Ponthieu, ii. 18, Nov. 13, 1074. • Regest., v. 17. P Compare Letter to Lanfranc, Regest. v., also on England, viii. 1, ix. 5. CHAP. I. THE POPE AND WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 121 were ostentatiously displayed. It was with the full papal approbation, or rather with the actual authority of the Pope, that Stigand, the Anglo-Saxon primate, was deposed, and the Anglo-Saxon hierarchy ejected from all the higher dignities, the bishoprics and abbacies. A papal bull declared it illegal to elect a Saxon to a high benefice. The holiness of the sainted Confessor was forgotten; the Norman Abbey of Bec must furnish primates, the Norman hierarchy prelates, not all of the same high ecclesiastical character as Lanfranc and Anselm, for conquered England. Hildebrand may have felt some admiration, even awe, of the congenial mind of the Conqueror. Yet with England the first intercourse of Gregory was an imperious letter to Archbishop Lanfranc concerning the Abbey of St. Edmondsbury, over which he claimed papal jurisdiction." To the King his language is courteous. He advances the claim to Peter's pence over the kingdom. William admits this claim it was among the stipulations, it was the price which the Pope had imposed for his assent to the Conquest. But to the demand of fealty, the Conqueror returns an answer of haughty brevity,-"I have not, nor will I swear fealty, which was never sworn by any of my predecessors to yours." And William maintained his Teutonic independence; created bishops and abbots at his will; was absolute lord over his ecclesiastical, as over his feudal liegemen." To the Kings of Spain, in one of his earliest letters, Pope Gregory boldly asserts that the whole realm of Spain is not only within the spiritual juris- Spain, diction of the Holy See, but her property; whatever part may be conquered from the usurping infidels may be granted by the Pope, or held by the conquerors as his vassals. He reminds the Kings of Spain, Alphonso of Castile, and Sancho of Arragon, of the ancient obedience of Spain to the Apostolic See, and exhorts them not to receive the services of Toledo, but that of Rome.* Alexandri Epist. apud Lanfranc, iv. Fidelitatem facere nolui nec volo, quia nec ego promisi, nec antecessores meos antecessoribus tuis id fecisse comperio.- Lanfranc. Oper. Epist. x. " William's temper in such matters was known. An abbot of Evreux went to complain at Rome. William said, "I have a great respect for the Pope's Le Gregory and gate in things which concern religion. Mais, ajouta-t-il, si un moine de mes terres osait porter plainte contre moi, je le ferai pendre à l'arbre le plus élevé de la forêt."-Depping, Hist. des Normands, p. 350. Regest. i. 7, April 30, 1073, regnum Hispaniæ ab antiquo proprii juris S. Petri fuisse. He appeals to a legend of |