Much about the lives of the men who served the local churches and communities across the medieval West is obscure.Footnote 1 Compared to the apparent richness of the evidence for their monastic counterparts, that surviving for the lower ranks of the secular clergy makes for slim pickings.Footnote 2 Thus we learn about the life of the village priest called Brihtric in the mid-twelfth-century village of Haselbury Plucknett in southern Somerset only from incidental references in the vita of the anchorite, Wulfric, who was enclosed in a cell attached to Brihtric's church. The vita’s author regarded Brihtric favourably, describing him as a devout and devoted servant of God: he ‘much resembled the blessed Wulfric in simplicity and humility, serving God day and night like him with psalms and prayers; and in so far as his ministry allowed him, he kept perpetual watch in his church’, riding to and from his house on horseback so as to maximize the time he spent in the church.Footnote 3 However, we are told, whilst he knew the psalms and prayers, the English Brihtric was unable to communicate with his Norman bishop in either Latin or French: thus when Wulfric cured a mute man and gave him the ability to speak French, Brihtric complained: ‘You have never given me the use of French and when I come before the bishop and the archdeacon I have to stand as mum as any mute.’Footnote 4 We are also told that Brihtric was seemingly married, in contravention of church law at the time, and had a son, Osbern, who in time succeeded him as priest.Footnote 5 Further details reveal that Osbern seems to have served a practical apprenticeship: Osbern told Wulfric's biographer how as a boy he used to enter the holy man's cell to serve when Wulfric celebrated mass. Osbern also assisted his father: ‘one Sunday when Master Brihtric went to bless the water in the church the aspersorium was missing. His son Osbern had accidentally taken it home and now the troubled lad did not know what to do.’ (He therefore borrowed Wulfric's aspersorium and thus came to witness the holy man having a vision.)Footnote 6
This master-apprentice model for the vocational training of those charged with responsibility for delivering pastoral care is likely to have been the most common model of training for the local priesthood, but it is one which, understandably, has left relatively little trace.Footnote 7 Education could also be found in monasteries, cathedrals and religious houses, but, in the words of William Dohar, ‘the curricula of those schools were not especially pastoral, though a student could certainly obtain the foundations for whatever education he needed in the cure of souls as well as advanced instruction in practical and speculative theology’.Footnote 8 The haphazard nature of the education available generated considerable anxiety, albeit only intermittently, about the state of learning and education of local priests amongst the diocesan bishops charged with responsibility for their oversight.
This anxiety has manifested itself at various points in the history of the church in the Latin West. Some of these points are well known. Although it was not until 1563 that the Council of Trent prescribed the establishment of seminaries in each diocese ‘to maintain, to educate religiously and to train in ecclesiastical discipline’, the curriculum the Tridentine fathers defined would have been familiar to their medieval predecessors.Footnote 9 The council required of those who were to be priests:
[T]hey shall learn grammar, singing, ecclesiastical computation, and the other liberal arts; they shall be instructed in sacred Scripture; ecclesiastical works; the homilies of the saints; the manner of administering the sacraments, especially those things which shall seem adapted to enable them to hear confessions; and the forms of the rites and ceremonies.Footnote 10
Previous church councils had prescribed the establishment of diocesan schools: thus canon 18 of the Third Lateran Council (1179) enjoined that in ‘every cathedral church a master is to be assigned some proper benefice so that he may teach the clerics and the poor scholars’, and this provision was repeated by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215).Footnote 11 These canons are testament to the wider interest shown in clerical education and the quality of the pastoral ministry in the thirteenth century, which, alongside promotion of support for the friars as preachers, led also to increased documentation of episcopal visitations of local priests, for example, as well as the composition of pastoral manuals for guidance and training, especially in how to hear confessions.Footnote 12 Whilst this pastoral revolution has long attracted the interest of modern scholars, in recent decades researchers, including Rosamond McKitterick, have also drawn attention to the significance attached by Frankish rulers and their bishops in the ninth century to pastoral education.Footnote 13 This episcopal interest is manifest both in their legislation, especially in the issuing of episcopal statutes (capitula), and in the investment the bishops made in composing treatises to train priests in elementary canon law and liturgy. Susan Keefe, Yitzhak Hen, Rob Meens, Niels Rasmussen, Carine van Rhijn and Monika Wenz, amongst others, have drawn attention to the existence of collections of pastoral texts seemingly made for local clergy during the eighth and ninth centuries.Footnote 14 This article investigates the period between these two great flourishings in pastoral care. It is not my intention to suggest that the tenth and eleventh centuries witnessed as formal or as widespread a movement as those of the ninth or thirteenth centuries, but rather to argue that the wealth of material suggests a lively and continuing interest in the education of local clergy in the post-Carolingian world on the part of both bishops and the clerics themselves.
This article will investigate the evidence for the education of local clergy in three main sections. It will begin by considering the education for their preparation and ordination, go on to examine the instructions arising from local visitations and synods, and conclude with a consideration of some of the books which seem to have been made to support the work and education of the clergy. It focuses on evidence from three regions: late Anglo-Saxon England, tenth- and eleventh-century Italy, and north-east Frankia and Lotharingia in the same period. This last region constituted the heartlands of Carolingian authority, and witnessed the production of many of the texts associated with the ninth-century pastoral reforms, allowing us an insight into the extent of continuity in the changed political world of the tenth and eleventh centuries.Footnote 15 Although the kingdom of (northern) Italy was also under Carolingian rule, it seems to have been rather more peripheral in questions of clerical education.Footnote 16 Whilst Anglo-Saxon England had never formerly been under Carolingian rule, it came under Carolingian cultural influence in both the ninth and tenth centuries.Footnote 17
Church law emphasized that bishops should ensure the suitability of candidates for ordination to the priesthood. Regino of Prüm compiled a collection of canon law for the archbishops of Trier and Mainz in the early tenth century; his avowed intention was to compile a handbook of all the texts a bishop might need when visiting his diocese.Footnote 18 In it he included a canon on ‘how the bishop ought to conduct the ordination’, pertaining to the ordination of both priests and candidates for other orders. The bishop should call all the candidates for ordination to come to the city four days before their ordination; he should direct
priests and other prudent men with knowledge of divine laws and experienced in ecclesiastical sanctions diligently to investigate the life of the ordinands, their family, their native land, age, institution, the place where they were educated, whether they are well educated, whether they are instructed in the law of the Lord. Above all, whether they hold the catholic faith firmly, and if they can explain it with simple words. … For three continuous days they should be examined and on the Saturday the examiners who investigated them should represent them to the bishop.Footnote 19
There are no surviving earlier precedents for this particular canon, although it is consistent with the provisions made in earlier church law.Footnote 20 For example, Regino also cited a canon from the fifth-century collection, the Statuta ecclesia antiqua, which describes in greater detail what candidates for ordination were expected to know. The bishop or his delegate should examine the ordinand and investigate his character, education, training and knowledge. The ordinand should be prudent, temperate, educated, instructed in divine law, aware of the different senses of Scripture, trained in ecclesiastical dogmatics and able to explain the Creed in simple words.Footnote 21
It would be easy to dismiss such restatements of canon law as belonging to a closed textual world bound up with authority and precedent, rather than being an accurate reflection of reality, but Regino organized his law collection in a very systematic and practical way to support the work of the bishop. For example, he included a list of the questions he should ask of both the priest and the local community to establish the extent to which the priest and his flock conformed to current orthodoxy and orthopraxy.Footnote 22 Regino's collection circulated fairly widely in the Ottonian Reich and was incorporated into the twenty-book collection compiled by Burchard, bishop of Worms, in the early eleventh century.Footnote 23 Book 2 of Burchard's Decretum is devoted to holy orders.Footnote 24 In addition to Regino's material, he also copied provisions from the episcopal statutes issued by Haito of Basle on ‘what ought to be necessary for priests to learn and to know’.Footnote 25 Haito specified ‘[t]he necessary (books) for priests to acquire knowledge of: a sacramentary, a lectionary, an antiphonary, the baptismal rite, a computus, penitential canons, a psalter and appropriate homilies for days throughout the whole year on Sundays and important feast days’. If he lacks knowledge of any of these things, he can hardly be called a priest because ‘so great are the dangers of which the Evangelist speaks: If a blind man is led by a blind man, they both fall into the ditch’ (Matthew 15: 14).Footnote 26 The focus here is on knowledge of the liturgy as much as church law. Burchard's aspirations to be comprehensive mean that it is difficult to make too much of his inclusion of such material. Other evidence, however, reinforces the suggestion that some bishops at this time took the examination of candidates for the priesthood seriously.
Turning to the ordination rites themselves, they suggest that churchmen should use the occasion as an opportunity for education. The rites are generally found in those collections of rites reserved to bishops which are known to modern scholars as pontificals.Footnote 27 In recent years scholars have increasingly recognized that the relationship between textual record and the enactment of the liturgy is far from straightforward. Rites are not simple guides as to how to conduct a service, but rather more complex records of the ‘ought world’ of medieval liturgists: how they thought their liturgical world should be.Footnote 28 It is, however, clear that ordination rites recorded across northern Europe and the former Carolingian empire stabilized fairly early.Footnote 29 It is striking, therefore, that there is a distinct group of four pontificals copied in late Anglo-Saxon England which suggest that their compilers were giving considerable thought to the rite of ordination itself.Footnote 30 It was usual for the ordination rites for the various grades of clergy in use across the Latin West to be preceded by two texts. One, generally entitled ‘Capitulum Sancti Gregorii’ (the Chapter of St Gregory), reminds the bishop that he should not ordain anyone before they reach the age of maturity or before they have been examined.Footnote 31 The other is a text belonging to the genre that Roger Reynolds termed ‘Ordinals of Christ’.Footnote 32 These texts list the various grades of clerical orders – generally seven – and justify them by linking them to the events in Christ's life; they therefore give ‘dominical sanction’, in Reynolds's phrasing, to ecclesiastical grades which had not been recorded in the New Testament.Footnote 33 The ‘Ordinals of Christ’ seem to have served two fundamental purposes: to inspire clerics to imitate Christ, and at the same time to serve as a mnemonic device for the seven clerical orders.Footnote 34
In the Anglo-Saxon group of manuscripts – the earliest of which is the pontifical made for Archbishop Dunstan in the 960s – this list of orders has been linked to a statement of the duties for each grade, as well as to events in Christ's life. The link to the events of Christ's life is thus well known, but this description of the pastoral duties of the priest is peculiar to Anglo-Saxon texts.
[Christ] was a priest when he accepted bread in his holy hands and similarly the chalice, gazing to God his Father in heaven, giving thanks and blessing the priests, appointed moreover deservedly and it is understood by wisdom, not age, and the priest ought to bless, to offer and to lead well, to preach and to baptize and to communicate because he is the senior of all these aforesaid grades and stands in place of the bishop in his church. For not on account of the decrepitude of old age but on account of wisdom they are called priests.Footnote 35
This text owes a good deal to patristic writings, particularly the works of Isidore of Seville.Footnote 36 What is also striking, however, is the emphasis on wisdom as fundamental to the conduct of the sacerdotal ministry, distinguishing the priest from other clerical orders. The rite itself includes an admonition to candidates for the priesthood and for the diaconate about their future behaviour: they must be assiduous, not fall asleep in the vigil, be sober not drunk, be chaste, guard the gifts of the faithful carefully, not leave anything putrid in the sacristy, and so forth.Footnote 37 In addition, this particular text has been amended in the Dunstan Pontifical manuscript to allow for the possibility of ordaining more than one candidate at once.Footnote 38 Such changes are not of themselves evidence of practical usage. Although Dunstan's pontifical was clearly a personal book made for him, as is evidenced by the inclusion at the beginning in the same script as that of the main text a copy of the papal letter granting him the pallium, the fact that the succeeding rite for the ordination of a bishop has been similarly amended with an interlinear reading in the plural is probably suggestive of a copyist with an interest in ensuring that the text of each of the ordination rites supports correct delivery in both the singular and the plural, rather than reflecting amendments for a particular occasion.Footnote 39 Minor and consistent changes like these ones in the Dunstan Pontifical therefore suggest an ongoing interest in ordination rites and the expectations of clerical office on the part of the compilers of such collections.Footnote 40
Nor were such concerns confined to England. One Italian pontifical, copied for the Tuscan see of Arezzo in the late eleventh century, testifies to a similar anxiety in its revisions to the ordination rite. Its compilers laid striking emphasis upon the behaviour and duties of the priest, using the occasion to emphasize the practical and moral requirements of the priesthood rather than as an opportunity for more theological reflection.Footnote 41 In addition to the ‘Ordinals of Christ’, this pontifical includes a text enjoining those examining candidates for the priesthood and diaconate to explore the candidates’ morals, knowledge and nature. They should also check whether candidates have committed any serious sins, whether they are penitents and whether they are married.Footnote 42 The emphasis is on ensuring compliance with the canonical requirements of office.
Ordination rites inform us about what should happen. However, there is another category of texts of relevance to this investigation: these set out the questions which should be asked of candidates prior to their ordination, often referred to as ‘priests’ exams’.Footnote 43 They first emerge around 800 and seem to have been composed in response to the Frankish rulers’ concerns about the standards of education amongst local priests, as part of a wider programme to ensure that lay Christians led correct and righteous lives.Footnote 44 Various examples of priests’ exams are extant: there are nine different texts surviving in twenty-two different manuscripts from the ninth century.Footnote 45 These priests’ exams were not widely copied in later periods. Of the nine Frankish priests’ exam texts identified, only two appear to have been copied after the ninth century: that attributed to Bishop Waltcaud of Liège (d. 831), and the early ninth-century southern French text, ‘Dic mihi pro quid’.Footnote 46 This temporal pattern is all the more surprising when contrasted with that for episcopal statutes, with which they have often been confused by modern editors: Bishop Theodulf of Orléans's early ninth-century capitula, for example, survive in more tenth- and eleventh-century copies than in copies made in the ninth century.Footnote 47 Studies by Wilfried Hartmann and Carine van Rhijn suggest these ninth-century priests’ exams were generally copied into priests’ handbooks alongside other forms of pastoral and didactic material, such as handbooks of penance; expositions of the Lord's Prayer, the creed and the baptismal liturgy; sermons; and texts on the clerical grades.Footnote 48 In later periods, however, priests’ exams seem to have been copied in much more monastic contexts.Footnote 49
Although the later period was not much interested in priests’ exams, one new text was copied in England. It is included in a collection copied at Worcester towards the end of the eleventh century: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 121.Footnote 50 This manuscript contains a variety of pastoral texts, in both Old English and Latin, including statutes, homilies, penitentials and other didactic texts, many of which focus on the duties of priests and bishops. The codex probably belonged to the late eleventh-century bishop of Worcester known as St Wulfstan (1062–95), but several of the texts it contains are associated with his predecessor, the early eleventh-century bishop of Worcester and concurrently archbishop of York, Wulfstan I (1002–23).Footnote 51 Amongst these texts is a priest's exam in Old English.Footnote 52 Whilst its provisions broadly echo the contents of the ninth-century Frankish Latin texts, it is not a straight translation of any of them, but seems rather to have been compiled independently by a more pragmatic author, almost certainly Archbishop Wulfstan himself.Footnote 53 Unlike the Carolingian exams, this text is presented as a sermon, and begins with an extract translated from Haito's ninth-century Visio Wettini, which warns priests of the punishments awaiting them if they do not keep the commitments made at their ordination, before lamenting the fact that ‘there are too many who desire the high order more than they should’, and suggesting that prelates should therefore be more cautious in accepting candidates for higher orders than they have been in the past.Footnote 54 Other aspects, however, suggest that it was compiled by a pragmatic realist. The demand that anyone desiring to enter holy orders should come before the bishop a full month before he wishes to be ordained so that he may be examined is not found in the Frankish tradition; the request that the candidate should bring his own supplies so as not to be a burden on those examining him is also novel.Footnote 55 Further testimony to the pragmatism of its compiler is the provision that the candidate should present a token from his teacher, testifying to his standard of education.Footnote 56 The content of the exam itself is more traditional. It begins by asking the candidate to explain his faith in clear terms to other men; then asks him to explain ‘how he knows his ministry, and how he understands baptism, and how he comprehends the symbolism of the mass and also of the other church services’, and whether he knows the canons and his computus so ‘he can divide the course of the year’.Footnote 57 Some of the Frankish ninth-century texts go into more detail, demanding that the candidate also be grilled about his knowledge of how to baptize, and whether he can use the correct Latin forms for masculine and feminine, plural and singular candidates for baptism, his knowledge of the different texts of the creed, and of the exorcism, as well as his knowledge of the gospels, homilies, books of pastoral care and canons.Footnote 58 However, the Anglo-Saxon author was more pessimistic – or realistic – than his Frankish predecessors, for MS Junius 121 continues:
If he is certain in all these things, he is then the better worthy of orders. If he knows too little of these things, he is first to learn, and afterwards receive orders. And nevertheless, if one must out of necessity ordain a half-educated man, who knows all too little, one is then to do so, if there is great necessity, on condition that he find surety for himself that he will learn afterwards as eagerly as ever he possibly can.Footnote 59
Unlike the Frankish texts, the Worcester exam goes into further detail about how the teacher or examiner should present the candidate to the bishop and give an account of his learning, before handing him over to be ordained and receiving him back afterwards.Footnote 60 It concludes by enjoining those who are ordained as mass-priests to celebrate thirty masses for the bishop, whilst those who are ordained deacon should sing thirty psalms, and both should pray zealously for the bishop for their whole lifetime.Footnote 61 For the author of this text, ordination clearly establishes a bond of confraternity between the ordinand and the bishop.
The final piece of evidence for episcopal anxiety about the quality of the candidates they appointed to the priesthood is to be found in the epistolae formata.Footnote 62 These are letters of reference written by bishops on behalf of members of the lower clergy, usually addressed to the bishop of another diocese, and testifying to such matters as the subject's education, ordination, suitability for pastoral office, or possession of permission to travel outside his diocese.Footnote 63 They survive sporadically both in formulary collections and accidentally across the Latin West from the ninth to eleventh centuries, attesting to their widespread use.Footnote 64 The correspondence of Ratbod, archbishop of Trier (883–915), preserves two such letters; one, dated 906, from Ratbod to the bishop of Metz testifying to the education that the priest Gislemarus has received in his diocese; another from the bishop of Verdun to Ratbod vouching for the priest Adruinus.Footnote 65 The continued use of templates such as these testifies that education of the priesthood – at least of those sufficiently close to the bishop to obtain his support when moving to a different diocese – remained valued in the tenth century. However, they were only ever probably in use for the few: what of the many?
Pessimism is depressingly common amongst modern commentators on contemporary education, and tenth-century bishops were no exceptions to what seems to be a more universal trait. In a letter addressed to his diocesan clergy written during Lent in 966, Bishop Rather of Verona grumbled that he had summoned his clergy three times to the synod and found them to be ignorant.Footnote 66 In a letter written later that year Rather related the background to his diocesan letter. He recounts how he had sent his archpriest and archdeacon together with the cathedral canons to conduct a two-day visitation of the parishes and ‘make examination’ (discuterent) and report back to him ‘all that had to be corrected’ (emendenda omnia).Footnote 67 He complained that those conducting the visitation had focused on whether the priests knew the Psalms ‘and such’, and had found that they did; however, when he probed, Rather discovered that ‘many of them did not even know’ the Apostles’ Creed.Footnote 68 He had therefore composed his letter to all the diocesan clergy, instructing them to learn the three creeds and to recite them by heart when they were next summoned if they wished to remain priests in his diocese.Footnote 69 He went on to provide simple instruction on why the Lord's day is so called and how it should be observed, writing:
I grieve that you do not all know this and things like this, in fact I lament that you do not care about them at all; as your pastor I instruct you to hasten to learn them, and earnestly try, I beg, to teach God's people by good example because you do not know how to do so by words.Footnote 70
Rather then went on to quote the text of a synodal address, known to modern commentators as the Admonitio synodalis, which circulated widely in the tenth century.Footnote 71 He enjoined the parish priests in his diocese that the creeds, in particular, should be ‘written down and memorized’, but was disappointed to discover that the cathedral canons, in particular, objected to the singing of the Athanasian Creed, despite the willingness of parish priests to do so.Footnote 72 Rather had a stormy and difficult relationship with the clergy of Verona and with the local count, which resulted in his being ejected from the see some two years after this synod.Footnote 73 His account has therefore to be read in the light of his unsuccessful attempts to impose his authority upon the diocese.
Nonetheless this encounter is interesting for what it reveals about the difference in interpretation of the inherited Carolingian clerical standards between the Veronese higher clergy and their Lotharingian-educated bishop. Rather's expectations of the education of the clergy in his diocese conform to those of his Frankish predecessors. In the Admonitio generalis (789), Charlemagne and his advisors set out what local priests should know:
To priests. Let the bishops diligently examine the priests throughout their parishes, their faith, their baptism, and their celebrations of masses, that the priests might hold upright faith and observe catholic baptism and understand well the prayers of the Mass. And that the psalms might be sung in a fitting manner according to the division of the verses and that the priests themselves might understand the Lord's prayer and preach for the understanding of all … .Footnote 74
For Charlemagne and his bishops knowledge of the faith, encompassed in knowledge of the various creeds, sat alongside knowledge of baptism, the mass, the Psalms and the Lord's Prayer.Footnote 75 Whilst Rather chose to stress the importance of knowing all three creeds, the Veronese higher clergy's focus on priests’ knowledge of ‘the psalms and such’ also fits with these earlier Carolingian regulations.Footnote 76 Indeed, Bishop Waltcaud of Liège in his early ninth-century capitula adapted the precepts of the Admonitio generalis into questions which stressed the need for memorization, emphasising that priests should understand the Athanasian and Apostles’ Creeds, and also that they memorize the Psalms.Footnote 77 Half a century later, Archbishop Hincmar of Reims in his capitula in 852 also stressed the importance of memorizing certain texts, including the Psalms: Priests should learn the Creed and the Lord's Prayer, but should also
understand, have learnt by memory and deliver distinctly the prefaces and canon of the mass and should be able to read well the prayers of the mass and the epistle and gospel lessons and know also by heart how to pronounce the words and distinctions of the psalms according to rule with the usual canticles.Footnote 78
Nor were such requirements reserved to local parish priests. Churchmen in the post-Carolingian centuries continued to attach importance to memorizing key liturgical texts. Indeed, monastic customaries from the tenth and eleventh centuries specify the role of memorization in the education of young boys. Their curriculum consisted essentially of training in the liturgy; between services, the oblates were to practise reading and singing in groups; readings, in particular, were usually to be performed from memory.Footnote 79 Rather's critique of the visitation undertaken by his senior clergy revealed conflicting interpretations of this Carolingian legacy within mid-tenth-century Verona rather than, as he implied, demonstrating the negligence of his senior clergy.Footnote 80
Carolingian precedents cast a long shadow over tenth- and eleventh-century Europe. Turning to England, we find widespread copying and citation of Frankish legislation about the duties expected of local priests; such copies turn up both in canon law collections and in pontifical manuscripts.Footnote 81 However, late Anglo-Saxon England is unique in Europe for its widespread use of the vernacular, Old English. One of the reasons for this is explained in an admonitory letter written on behalf of Archbishop Wulfstan to his priests by Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham c.1006.Footnote 82 This letter thus belongs to the same genre, although it is written in a more measured tone than Rather's splenetic letter on the same theme. It begins: ‘It befits us bishops that we reveal to you priests the written instructions which our canon teaches us, and also the gospel, in the English language; for not all of you can understand the Latin’, and goes on: ‘I know for certain that this our admonition will displease far too many of you. Yet one or other will be so inspired by God that he will desire to hear the holy teaching and to correct himself for the benefit of his soul.’Footnote 83 Its contents repeat precepts about the conduct, duties and knowledge expected of priests, taken from Carolingian legislation. It specifies the books a priest should own, and that his vestments should be clean, his chalice made of imperishable material, and his altar kept clean and free from mouse-droppings.Footnote 84 But the very act of translation from Latin into Old English brings into stark relief how the higher elite conceived of priestly office, describing books and communion vessels as a priest's tools, and comparing the knowledge required for the priestly ministry to the skills of worldly craftsmen:
Why should you be less competent than worldly craftsmen (woruldcræftan) in your spiritual ministry for God's services, in that you do not have the weapons for the spiritual conflict, namely the things which we have now told you of? The smith gets for himself hammer and anvil and tongs and bellows and every sort of tool; the carpenter also axe and auger and all the tools which belong to woodwork. The fisherman and the huntsman provide nets for themselves, and all men skilled in worldly crafts (woruld-cræftige men) make their tools; and the husbandman does not plough unless he knows how to plough. Take heed for yourself now, I pray you, that you may be better in your spiritual craft (gastlicum cræfte) for Christ's services, as it befits you that you should be, than the laymen in their worldly crafts (woruldcræftum).Footnote 85
Cræft here reflects the range of the Latin ars, that is art, skill or trade,Footnote 86 and the comparison with lay professions makes explicit how the work and learning of a priest is viewed not so much as academic learning for learning's sake, but rather as a craft, based on the acquisition of skills and requiring physical tools.Footnote 87
Foremost amongst the tools that Wulfstan specified a priest needed were books. In the words of the letter: ‘You must be equipped with books as befits your order. A mass-priest must have a missal and a book of the epistles, and a hymn-book and a reading-book and a psalter and a manual and a penitential and a computus; and they are to be well-corrected.’Footnote 88 Similar lists of the books a priest should be owned can be traced back to the early ninth-century Carolingian episcopal capitula. The early ninth-century list of works which are necessary for priests to know specified by Haito, bishop of Basle (806x812/13) included ‘a sacramentary, a lectionary, an antiphonary, the baptismal rite, a computus, the penitential canons, a psalter, homilies for days throughout the year on Sunday and important feast days’.Footnote 89 The contents of such lists often varied somewhat. That of Archbishop Ruotger of Trier (915x929), for example, included a collection of homilies: ‘That priests have their own necessary and corrected books, that is a psalter, a lectionary, a gospel book, a missal, capitula, 40 homilies and a martyrology.’Footnote 90 That quoted by Rather in 966 was more minimalist: ‘Let each church have a full missal, lectionary, and antiphonary.’Footnote 91 Such lists seem to go back to early ninth-century lists such as that of Gharbald of Liège's Capitula (c.801/2x809), which listed: ‘a missal, a lectionary, a martyrology, a penitential, psalter and other books’.Footnote 92 As Gharbald emphasizes, it was the priest's responsibility to ensure secundum possibilitatem (according to his means or status) that his church was properly equipped. Whilst local priests were generally answerable for possession of ‘the necessary books’ in episcopal capitula, inventories and estate surveys make clear that local churches were endowed with basic book collections from the ninth century onwards.Footnote 93 In practice, therefore, the holdings of local priests often became elided with those of their church.
In recent decades scholars have begun to identify codices which contain combinations of such pastoral texts and to suggest that they were intended either for use by, or to train, local priests.Footnote 94 To date, most attention has been paid to ninth-century collections. In 2002 Susan Keefe identified some eighteen ninth-century manuscripts made as ‘instruction-readers’ for local priests, together with a further twenty-nine codices whose make-up and contents suggest they were made for schools to educate local clergy, and thirteen made for bishops as pastoral manuals or reference collections. Subsequent research has identified other examples.Footnote 95 Keefe concluded from her study of baptismal instruction manuscripts that the Carolingian reform movement had been largely an episcopal undertaking, with variations between dioceses.Footnote 96 The copying of similar manuscripts from the tenth and eleventh centuries, albeit on a smaller scale, points to the sporadic continuation of such efforts in this period, as illustrated by three manuscripts compiled in northern France, Rome and southern England.Footnote 97
Taking these in chronological order, the first codex, now London, BL, Add. MS 19725, is a medium-sized, eminently portable codex: it survives as 129 folios measuring 175–180 × 150 mm.Footnote 98 It was written at the turn of the ninth and tenth centuries in a centre somewhere in north-east Frankia under the influence of a scribe trained at Rheims. Although known to scholars, it has never, to my knowledge, been considered as a collection in its own right. Various pastorally orientated texts are gathered together including:
To these initial texts various others were added in different hands over the course of the tenth to twelfth centuries. These additions include a prayer for Palm Sunday, which is only otherwise found in manuscripts compiled under a north-east Frankish influence;Footnote 104 an exorcism rite in an eleventh-century hand; and various medical recipes for curing both human illnesses, including gout, and animal diseases, including swine fever.Footnote 105 Finally the text of a letter purporting to have come direct from heaven about how Sunday should be observed was added on a blank leaf in a twelfth-century hand.Footnote 106 In other words, the contents of this manuscript suggest a codex made for a local church serving a rural community in north-east Frankia: remember that a martyrology, computus and penitential are amongst the sort of books that a local priest, as we have seen, was supposed to own. In this particular case, the only two obits added to the martyrology are for two women, suggesting it may have been used, at least at one time, by a priest serving a female community.Footnote 107 These amendments suggest that the modes of delivery of pastoral care may have been more complex than those envisaged by those modern scholars, who tend to project a model of a local church served by a local priest onto the post-Carolingian centuries.
The second codex is now in the Vatican Library: BAV, Archivio S. Pietro H. 58. This is a slightly larger (285 × 200 mm) and more complex codex; it is copied in two hands: one hand copied folios 81–121 in Rome c.1000; the other folios 1–80 and 122–150, probably also in Rome but slightly later.Footnote 108 Quite when the two parts were joined together is unclear, but, as I argued in a paper delivered to this society in 2000, there are good reasons for believing that they were brought together early on, for the contents fit with the duties enjoined on priests in the Admonitio synodalis (see Table 1).Footnote 109
The manuscript also includes three collections of canons, as well as miscellaneous canons from Greek councils and early papal letters; a didactic poem on the duties of the priest, falsely attributed to Sedulius; the hagiographical Passion of St Lucy and lections for St Eustratius; and a sermon by Haymo of Auxerre. The didactic poem on the ‘Vita pastoralis’ sets out the duties and behaviour of a priest. He is to guard his sheep carefully; read and study; know the seven canonical hours and when they should be observed; remember the importance of attending the synod; know the significance of baptism, and of the mass and how it is celebrated; refrain from accepting money for his services, carrying arms or marrying; and know the importance and significance of penance and the rites for the dying.Footnote 110 Written in simple Latin, this poem would seem to have a pedagogic function. This book has been tentatively attributed to the community of canons serving SS. XII Apostoli in Rome, on the grounds of the hagiography it contains; it is therefore possible that this community had a role in training boys to become priests using (amongst other didactic tools) simple, mnemonic texts such as this one.Footnote 111
The final codex is a slightly different sort of collection: now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 422, and known as the ‘Red Book of Darley’ after its sixteenth-century provenance.Footnote 112 It is rather smaller than the other two manuscripts: it now measures 194 mm × 129 mm.Footnote 113 It is generally dated to around 1061 on the grounds of both the Easter tables and palaeography.Footnote 114 Where it was written is uncertain, but current opinion favours Sherborne; by the end of the sixteenth century it was in the hands of a family in Darley Dale, Derbyshire, although it may have been acquired by the church there as early as the twelfth century.Footnote 115 Its contents are much more focused on liturgical rites than the two previous books considered. It includes a calendar, Easter tables and other computus, the canon of the mass, various votive mass texts, rites for blessing marriage and candles at Candlemas, prayers for matins and for the sinner, ordeals by water, fire and bread and cheese, rites for baptism, visiting the sick, burial and funeral masses, together with those for various offices.Footnote 116 In Helen Gittos's words, it contains ‘almost everything that the putative parish priest required’, or indeed a local parish priest: a computus, a sacramentary, and occasional offices for baptism and burial.Footnote 117 The only major elements missing are lectionary, gospel book, homiliary and penitential. Moreover, the rites for both baptism and the visitation of the sick include rubrics in Old English, although the prayers and responses remain in Latin.Footnote 118 Thus the rite for baptism includes rubrics on the role of the godparents in Old English. Similarly that for the visitation of the sick makes provision for the priest to address the sick person in Old English, although the priests’ prayers and chants are in Latin. What Gittos has described as this ‘casual bilingualism’ suggests this is a world in which Old English had high status; it could be and was used where appropriate to explain to priests with poor Latin how to administer rites.Footnote 119 Its use is therefore a reflection of a lively and ongoing interest in the education of the local clergy in southern England.Footnote 120
The absence of formal structures for the education of the local clergy remained a source of anxiety amongst bishops in the post-Carolingian world. This study suggests that in regions both in the Carolingian heartlands and on their periphery, higher clergy gave time and thought to the education of the clergy before ordination, through the revision of ordination rites, priests’ exams and letters formata. They were also dedicated to raising standards for those in post through visitations and synods. More informally, several codices point to the ongoing commitment to pastoral education demonstrated not only by bishops but also by communities of local clergy and local priests.
In highlighting bishops’ commitment to the education of the local clergy, I do not mean to suggest that the tenth and eleventh centuries witnessed a pastoral project on the scale of those of either the ninth or thirteenth centuries. This intermediate period visibly lacked the overall leadership, direction and urgency provided by the Frankish rulers and the thirteenth-century popes in council. That said, the work of Susan Keefe and Yitzhak Hen on priestly manuals has drawn attention to the absence of evidence for the implementation of any unified reform movement in the ninth century, highlighting instead the degree of variation in the texts produced between dioceses in the execution of the Frankish reforms, and the significance of local episcopal agency.Footnote 121 At the same time, researchers working on the thirteenth-century church have begun to highlight the different ways in which individual bishops approached the reform of their clergy.Footnote 122 The picture outlined in this study is one which was also a consequence of local episcopal agency: the bishops of the tenth and eleventh centuries are rather more comparable to both their predecessors and their successors in this regard than has often been acknowledged. Despite the introduction of some innovations, across all three regions their debt to their Frankish predecessors remained substantial. The continued commitment by bishops in these three very different regions to enforcing and raising standards amongst their pastoral clergy, both before and even more after ordination, was not expressed through the uncritical repetition of pre-existing precepts, but was rather the result of continued reflection upon, reworking of, and development of earlier texts. In this way, the higher clergy in Frankia, England and Italy sought to ensure that local priests had the necessary training in the tools and skills needed to conduct their craft.
