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Authors: Barbara W. Tuchman
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the Church, and none were more crass than the sellers of pardons.
Supposed to be commissioned by the Church, the pardoners would sell absolution for any sin from gluttony to homicide, cancel any vow of chastity or fasting, remit any penance for money, most of which they pocketed. When commissioned to raise money for a crusade, according to Matteo Villani, they would take from the poor, in lieu of money, “linen and woolen stuffs or furnishings, grain and fodder … deceiving the people. That was the way they gave the Cross.” What they were peddling was salvation, taking advantage of the people’s need and credulity to sell its counterfeit. The only really detestable character in Chaucer’s company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch’s hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare’s, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade.
The regular clergy detested the pardoner for undoing the work of penance, for endangering souls insofar as his goods were spurious, and for invading clerical territory, taking collections on feast days or performing burial and other services for a fee that should have gone to the parish priest. Yet the system permitted him to function because it shared in the profits.
The sins of monks and itinerant friars were more disturbing because their pretensions as men of God were higher. They were notorious as seducers of women. Peddling furs and girdles for wenches and wives, and small gentle dogs “to get love of them,” the friar in a 14th century poem “came to our dame when the gode man is from home.”
He spares nauther for synne ne shame,
For may he tyl a woman synne
In priveyte, he will not blynne
Er he a childe put hir withinne
And perchance two at ones.
In the tales of Boccaccio, in the
fabliaux
of France, in all popular literature of the time, clerical celibacy is a joke. Priests lived with mistresses or else went in hunt of them. “A priest lay with a lady who was wed to a knight,” begins one tale matter-of-factly. In another, “the priest and his lady went off to bed.” In the nunnery where Piers Plowman served as cook, Sister Pernell was “a priest’s wench” who “bore a child in cherry time.” Boccaccio’s rascally friars were invariably caught in embarrassing situations as victims of their own lechery. In real life their sinfulness was not funny but threatening, for when a friar failed so far in holiness how could he save souls? This sense of betrayal explains why the friars were so often the object of active hostility, sometimes even of physical assault, because, as a chronicle of 1327 stated simply, “they did not behave as friars ought.”
According to the ideal of St. Francis, they were supposed to wander the world to do good, to walk barefoot among the poor and the outcasts bringing Christian love to the lowest, to beg for the necessaries of life in kind, never in money. By a supreme paradox, the Order that Francis founded on rejection of property attracted the support and donations of the wealthy because its purity seemed to offer assurance of holiness. Upon the approach of death, knights and noble ladies would have themselves clad in the Franciscan habit, believing that if they died and were buried in it, they could not go to hell.
The Order acquired lands and riches, built itself churches and cloisters, developed its own hierarchy—all the opposite of the founder’s intent. Yet St. Francis had understood the process. Replying to a novice who wished to have a psalter, he once said, “When you have a psalter you will wish to have a breviary, and when you have a breviary you will sit in a chair like a great prelate and say to your brother, ‘Brother, bring me my breviary.’ ”
In some monastic orders the monks had regular pocket money and private funds which they lent at interest. In some they had an allowance of a gallon of ale a day, ate meat, wore jewels and fur-trimmed gowns, and
Supposed to be commissioned by the Church, the pardoners would sell absolution for any sin from gluttony to homicide, cancel any vow of chastity or fasting, remit any penance for money, most of which they pocketed. When commissioned to raise money for a crusade, according to Matteo Villani, they would take from the poor, in lieu of money, “linen and woolen stuffs or furnishings, grain and fodder … deceiving the people. That was the way they gave the Cross.” What they were peddling was salvation, taking advantage of the people’s need and credulity to sell its counterfeit. The only really detestable character in Chaucer’s company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch’s hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare’s, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade.
The regular clergy detested the pardoner for undoing the work of penance, for endangering souls insofar as his goods were spurious, and for invading clerical territory, taking collections on feast days or performing burial and other services for a fee that should have gone to the parish priest. Yet the system permitted him to function because it shared in the profits.
The sins of monks and itinerant friars were more disturbing because their pretensions as men of God were higher. They were notorious as seducers of women. Peddling furs and girdles for wenches and wives, and small gentle dogs “to get love of them,” the friar in a 14th century poem “came to our dame when the gode man is from home.”
He spares nauther for synne ne shame,
For may he tyl a woman synne
In priveyte, he will not blynne
Er he a childe put hir withinne
And perchance two at ones.
In the tales of Boccaccio, in the
fabliaux
of France, in all popular literature of the time, clerical celibacy is a joke. Priests lived with mistresses or else went in hunt of them. “A priest lay with a lady who was wed to a knight,” begins one tale matter-of-factly. In another, “the priest and his lady went off to bed.” In the nunnery where Piers Plowman served as cook, Sister Pernell was “a priest’s wench” who “bore a child in cherry time.” Boccaccio’s rascally friars were invariably caught in embarrassing situations as victims of their own lechery. In real life their sinfulness was not funny but threatening, for when a friar failed so far in holiness how could he save souls? This sense of betrayal explains why the friars were so often the object of active hostility, sometimes even of physical assault, because, as a chronicle of 1327 stated simply, “they did not behave as friars ought.”
According to the ideal of St. Francis, they were supposed to wander the world to do good, to walk barefoot among the poor and the outcasts bringing Christian love to the lowest, to beg for the necessaries of life in kind, never in money. By a supreme paradox, the Order that Francis founded on rejection of property attracted the support and donations of the wealthy because its purity seemed to offer assurance of holiness. Upon the approach of death, knights and noble ladies would have themselves clad in the Franciscan habit, believing that if they died and were buried in it, they could not go to hell.
The Order acquired lands and riches, built itself churches and cloisters, developed its own hierarchy—all the opposite of the founder’s intent. Yet St. Francis had understood the process. Replying to a novice who wished to have a psalter, he once said, “When you have a psalter you will wish to have a breviary, and when you have a breviary you will sit in a chair like a great prelate and say to your brother, ‘Brother, bring me my breviary.’ ”
In some monastic orders the monks had regular pocket money and private funds which they lent at interest. In some they had an allowance of a gallon of ale a day, ate meat, wore jewels and fur-trimmed gowns, and