The Catholic Reformation of French rural communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has a rich historiography.Footnote 1 A central feature of reform was a focus on the parish as the center of lay religious life.Footnote 2 From at least the mid-sixteenth century, emphasis on parochial worship, to keep the laity under the eye of their priest and confessor, was part of a larger campaign for greater public order and moral regulation pursued by clergy and royal magistrates. During the religious wars after 1560, participation in communal rituals became an important statement of confessional allegiance.Footnote 3 Later, in the devotional revival of the seventeenth century, parish rites became more than simply a manifestation of orthodoxy, they were a means of shaping the beliefs of individuals through participation in the sacraments and teachings from the pulpit.Footnote 4 In this parish-based religious reform, the most frequently studied institution has been the clergy, in part because of the nature of surviving records: bishops through the records of their synods and visitations, missionaries through their own accounts, and parish priests through parish records. The responses of ordinary parishioners have not been neglected either through reconstruction of their testamentary behavior, confraternity membership, and parish registers. But one important group of the rural community, neither clerical nor ordinary, has received little specific attention: that of the lay seigneurial lords. The seigneur was an intermediary authority, influential with clergy and laity, with jurisdiction bridging private and public, and linking urban and rural spheres. The aim of this article is to examine the role of rural lords in the parish-based religious changes of the French Catholic Reformation.
In contrast to towns and cities, where the spirituality of lay elites has been studied in detail and found to be fundamental to religious change, the interests of their rural contemporaries are less well-known.Footnote 5 This is in marked contrast to England, where the gentry's religious activities have been studied in detail.Footnote 6 In scholarship, French rural elites have largely been subsumed into the wider parish community or assumed to be absent. This is because the rural nobility has left relatively little systematic documentary evidence for their religious lives. Also, in contrast to England, French rural parish churches today retain little of their once-rich array of noble monuments and fittings, for these were largely destroyed during the Revolution or in nineteenth-century refurbishments. But seigneurial lords were important in the early modern French countryside. All but a small amount of allodial land in France was feudal in tenure, subject to lordly authority of some kind. Most seigneurs were property owners and held at least petty rights of justice in their communities, which made them locally influential. Aristocrats and middling nobles had always patronized a range of religious institutions, which included rural parish churches. For less wealthy nobles and elites, the parish was the center of their religious world. The spiritual interests and activities of rural lords were therefore fundamental to the success of religious reform in their parishes. Their social status, education, and relative wealth gave them a prominence in the religious life of rural communities that has hitherto been little explored.
Further, religious change in the French countryside did not take place in a vacuum. It occurred alongside transformations in the composition and wealth of rural elites through shifts in land ownership, alterations in estate management, and changes in jurisdictional authority. From the later fifteenth century, the land market was increasingly dynamic in France, with property and rights that had once been associated with nobles being bought and sold by new families. Urban bourgeois and “outside” nobles acquired rural properties; some of these were simple estates with a combination of a manor, demesne land, and peasant tenures, without the status of fiefs. Others purchased lands and seigneuries. These families were keen to live “nobly.” Simultaneously, estate management practices were being transformed with the increased marketization of the rural economy, with changes such as the growth of sharecropping through métayage and the subdivision of peasant landholdings, leading to new relations between landowners and tenants. Added to socioeconomic shifts, the judicial and taxation framework of the state augmented its influence on the French countryside, eroding the jurisdictional and administrative functions of local seigneurs. There were also changes in the physical presence of local elites in the countryside: absentee landlordism grew in the early modern period, with many seigneurs and other estate owners choosing to live in towns rather than on their rural properties, which has led historians to underestimate the extent of seasonal occupation of country houses by local elite families.Footnote 7 There was therefore social fluidity in the French countryside which brought with it ongoing competition for recognition and status at the local level between different elite families over time. This was often played out in the public arena of the parish church.
The aim of this article is to examine the role of seigneurs in religious change in the French countryside during this period of socioeconomic transformation. Here, focus will be on the changing religious interests and values of lords and how these were expressed in rural parishes. This is a preliminary study, a pilot for a wider examination of rural noble religious culture and the parish church which will go on to examine the reception and impact of lordly ideas by rural populations. The article is concerned with lay seigneurs, men and women, because clerical lords, although widespread, had different imperatives, at least some of the time. It also addresses middling and lesser lords, the rough equivalent of the English gentry, who held land in a single province or even pays and were thus frequently present in their parishes, rather than the great nobles who operated at a national level. The period under study is that of 1550 to 1700, to capture the growth of Protestantism and the early Catholic Reformation, the religious wars, and the “classic” phase of Baroque Reform. Focus will be on northern France and particularly on Brittany as a case study, for it was a province rich in rural lords who resided there for at least some of the year and because relatively good source material survives. It will be argued that seigneurs were important patrons of religious innovation in the countryside. They were rarely innovators themselves, but they lent support and resources to the introduction and maintenance of new devotional practices. Lords worked closely with clergy, sharing their aspirations and ideas, and in some cases, themselves acted as vectors of reformed ideas into the countryside. Four areas were particularly prominent in eliciting their support: appointment of clergy, patronage of missionaries, new devotional practices, and funding of building projects and liturgies in parish churches. These causes combined family strategies of enhancing social status and individual means to salvation, which were indivisible in the world of the lay rural nobility. First, however, it is important to set the context of the rights, duties, and obligations of seigneurs toward the church in the early modern French countryside. It was from a traditional understanding of lordship that patronage of religious reform stemmed.
I. The Religious Rights, Duties, and Obligations of Seigneurs in Rural French Parishes
Before the French Revolution of 1789, almost all the territory of France was subject to lordship, and it remained an important institution in rural life in the aftermath of the Revolution, as the cahiers de doléances of 1789 attest.Footnote 8 This was certainly true of the duchy of Brittany where article 328 of the Customary Code stated, “No one can hold land in Brittany without a lord, for there is no free allodial land in this country.”Footnote 9 By the mid-sixteenth century, this no longer comprised ties that bound people personally to lords, even if formal ceremonies of homage continued when land changed hands. Rather, it took the form of authority over land, either direct exploitation of demesne property or the ownership of rights over individuals who lived in the defined territory of the manor or lordship. In the early modern period, these were mostly economic rights: to collect rents and dues; monopolies over mills, bread ovens, rivers, and forests; to exercise powers of police and justice; and to collect the fines these accrued.Footnote 10 Although the monetary value of feudal rights declined in the early modern period, the prestige of the ownership of a seigneurie continued to make lordships attractive until their final abolition in 1789.Footnote 11 The status and wealth of lords also made their religious opinions and activities important in their local communities, and their frequent visits to towns opened them to new ideas which they carried into the countryside.
Lordship was not a monolithic institution.Footnote 12 There were seigneuries of different sizes, from the great lordships which retained the exercise of high justice, to those incorporating fractions of parishes and few jurisdictional powers.Footnote 13 This often—although not ubiquitously—equated to status and wealth. There were also many landowners who did not hold seigneurial authority. In Brittany, for example, in Carnac parish in Vannes diocese, there were two seigneurs, the Largouët and the Molac families, and seven other manorial lords without feudal rights.Footnote 14 Until 1668 and the first “reformation of the nobility” of the duchy, social mobility remained fluid. Thereafter, proof of lineage necessary for nobility reduced the size of the group and made movement into it harder; Jean Meyer estimates that the 6,000 houses recorded in 1668 fell to 4,000 by 1696 as the monarchy sought to limit the numbers of the second estate.Footnote 15 Thus, for much of the period under study, fluidity of land ownership and concomitant assertion of legitimacy and tradition was a significant feature of the parish community. There was competition for social status at the local level which François Billaçois argues hardened and became more precise from the sixteenth century, shown in complaints about new nobles and studies of heraldry.Footnote 16 Status and competition arising from transformations in land ownership were important in rural parish churches, as we will see.
There were two further features of rural lordship that had an impact on religious affairs: the numbers of lords and their physical presence in rural parishes. Parishes rarely depended on a single lord, at least in the large parishes of western France. Some contained numerous fiefs. Theix, near Vannes, had ten seigneuries (nine lay and one ecclesiastical) and Grandchamp held twelve (ten lay and two ecclesiastical).Footnote 17 The physical presence of lords in the countryside, whether old noble or bourgeois incomer, varied according to region. Over the early modern period, historians have shown that nobles lived increasingly in towns.Footnote 18 In Brittany, Tim Le Goff's work on the Vannetais shows that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, middling and lesser nobles dominated the countryside, but during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, lords were more likely to be absent rather than resident.Footnote 19 Using the capitation rolls of 1696, Jean Meyer estimates that 22.7 percent of Breton nobles were resident for most of the year in towns. For these families, lands were an investment rather than a residence. But these figures also signify that there were large numbers of rural-based noble families in Brittany. In the diocese of Quimper, for example, the parishes of Pordic had twenty-five families, Plélo had sixteen, and Plouha had forty-six. The northwest and southwest of the diocese of Rennes had dense noble occupation, as did the southern banks of the Loire and the Guérande region of the Nantes diocese.Footnote 20 Often, it was the lower and less well-off lordly families who resided year-round in the countryside. But seasonal occupation of middling and upper elite families has been underestimated and frequent movement between the city and the rural estate was common and widespread. Absence and presence affected the social and cultural role of the nobility in parishes. In England, the social presence of the gentry in parish life has been questioned from the later middle ages onwards. Nigel Saul argues that even when resident in the countryside, nobles used their own chapels rather than the parish church, where they were irregular attenders and rarely acted as church wardens or other officials. However, the parish church itself was increasingly used by local noble families for burial, memorialization, and display of their social position through building, furnishings, and heraldry.Footnote 21 As permanent residents and seasonal visitors, nobles took an interest in their parish church for this reason if for no other.
Parish churches were therefore important to lords because in the countryside they were the main place where seigneurial authority was displayed. Possession of a seigneurie endowed its holder with a series of rights over the religious life of the community, particularly in the parish church. These were known as pre-eminences and were defined in law.Footnote 22 The main rights of the seigneur were to have a special pew in the chancel or even to own a family chapel next to the choir; to be buried in an ancestral vault with funerary monuments erected close to it; to put coats of arms on walls, pillars, and in the windows of the church; and to display “litres” or funerary hatchments of arms of the deceased seigneur on the walls of the church for a year after the funeral.Footnote 23 Seigneurial families were permitted cushions and carpets, were censed, were the first to receive the blessed bread, and prayers were said for them during the parish Mass. Certain pre-eminences were limited to a pew or to a lateral chapel; others were more complete, such as in the church of Ambon where the seigneur of Bavalan had a pew with armrests, a private tomb in front of the high altar, four armorial badges in the glass of the east window, and patronage of seven other chapels in the parish.Footnote 24 As Simon Roffey has noted, tombs, pews, and other furnishings were deliberately positioned to “intrude” on the rituals of the church; their “location was highly visible and forged an all-important visual association with the Mass being celebrated.”Footnote 25 The accumulation of tombs and monuments in a single space increased the prestige and legitimacy of a family, expressing “the noble ideals of the continuity of lineage and its indissoluble links with the land.”Footnote 26 Lordly authority was thus visibly manifest in much of the church's decorative scheme. This gave seigneurial families ongoing interests in churches and their management.
Where there was more than one seigneurial family in a parish, there was a strict hierarchy of status. The highest pre-eminence in a church was granted to its reputed founder, which in many parishes was the leading seigneurial family. Seigneurs with rights of high justice were next in the hierarchy, if there was a difference between the founder and the judicial lord. Thereafter, there was a ranking determined by custom. A description from 1718 of the east window of the parish church of Mûr showed that the arms of the founder were at the top; below them, in order of the size of the fief, were the arms of the other seigneurs of the parish.Footnote 27 The churchyard calvary of Locmaria-Lann, erected by Tanguy de Carman and his wife Louise de Lafforest, had their arms on the back of the monument, for the superior Rohan family's arms were placed on the front.Footnote 28 For landowners without fiefs, rights were fewer, largely confined to ownership of a tombstone in the parish church.Footnote 29 The increased importance of parish churches to competing lords from the fifteenth century onwards can be seen in an explosion in the practice of marking space through heraldry and a multiplication of conflicts over pre-eminences. Already in 1464, Bishop Jacques d'Espinay of Rennes forbade the erection of arms in a church without his permission. In 1496, Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet of Saint-Malo forbade the placing of pews, tombs, and new heraldry; this was repeated by his successor Bishop Denis Briçonnet in statutes of 1515.Footnote 30 It did not prevent disputes. In 1539, a royal edict for Brittany forbade any new possession if it was not for the founding patron, and in 1567, an arrêt of the parlement of Brittany forbade “all, of whatever quality they are, from assuming rights of pre-eminence, pews, benches, heraldry, or any other sort of prerogative in churches, unless they are the patrons or founders and they can prove it by title deeds.”Footnote 31 This all had limited effect. In the early seventeenth century, Charles Loyseau observed that gentlemen “prefer to fight rather than to go to justice for these causes. . . . I believe there are at present more than two thousand quarrels between the gentlemen of France over these church honors and it is possible that every year more than two hundred gentlemen are killed over this issue.”Footnote 32 Competition over status was played out in the public space of the parish church.
Lordship brought other rights over the religious life of a parish as well. Firstly, if the seigneur was the recognized founder of the church, he or she might hold the advowson, or right to appoint the parish priest. In Brittany, most parishes were in the gift of bishops and religious houses by the sixteenth century, also some higher lords still held a few appointments. More frequently, lords held the right to present the chaplain of any chapel they founded. Secondly, there was a close relationship between seigneurial judicial authority and the local church: lordly jurisdiction included police authority to regulate and punish irreligious behavior, blasphemy, and immorality.Footnote 33 Sergeants made proclamations after high Mass and attached the texts of judicial sentences to church doors while the Poteau de justice, symbolizing the local jurisdiction as well as the manorial shackles or stocks, were frequently erected in the churchyard.Footnote 34 Seigneurs who held civil jurisdictions in their parishes—who Bruno Restif argues were active until the second quarter of the seventeenth century—had oversight over parish fabrics and their accounts. He argues that, while the majority of lords did not concern themselves with the daily administration of churches, which was the responsibility of the parish community through the générale and its annually elected churchwardens, in the sixteenth century, supervision of the fiscal affairs of a parish, including the church, were frequently considered the business of the seigneurial court. Thus, in 1505–1506, the annual accounts of the wardens of Sens parish were rendered in the presence of the adult male parishioners, including the “worthiest” or notable members listed by name, headed by the noble esquire Gilles de Champaigne, seigneur de Bouessay.Footnote 35 More formally, the accounts of Louvigné-en-Bias of 1503–1504 were approved by the seigneurial court of Sauldecourt, acting in parallel with the court of the officialité.Footnote 36 During the wars of religion, Restif argues that ecclesiastical jurisdictions lost much of their control of parish accounts, replaced instead by seigneurial jurisdictions acting with the authority of the seneschal. Thus, in Coulons-en-Montfort, for twenty years after 1575–1576, the parish accounts were examined by the seneschal of the seigneurial jurisdiction of Montfort; in Paramé, from 1573, the accounts were examined by “noble and esquire Jehan de La Chapelle, seigneur du Vausalmon, commissaire député by Monsieur the seneschal of Rennes,” who also assisted with the preparation of the accounts.Footnote 37 It was only in the 1630s that church authorities took over the supervision of parish générales and their accounts and attempted to replace seigneurial control with that of clerical oversight.Footnote 38 Even then, when decisions were made with significant financial implications, such as for the renovation of buildings, lords wanted to be consulted, personally or through their land agents, across the period.
Rights brought with them responsibilities and duties, for lordship brought obligations. The first responsibility was to God; patrons and donors always highlighted spiritual motives in religious patronage, such as good works to help save their souls and those of their forebears and descendants. Secondly, there was a duty to their tenants. While sentiments that tied vassals to lords had greatly weakened by the early modern period, a sense of responsibility for tenurial dependents lingered, as did an appreciation of rightful ownership of religious “property” on the fief. Thirdly, there was also genuine piety and a desire to improve the religious understanding of tenants and other parishioners. The relationship between personal piety and seigneurial proprietorial rights is well illustrated by the advent of Protestantism in Brittany. The creation of Protestant churches and centers of evangelization by the aristocratic Rohan and Rieux families in their seigneurial centers in the small towns of La Roche-Bernard, Blain, and Vitré is well-known.Footnote 39 The same practices occurred in rural parishes as well. For example, in 1554, Bishop Antoine de Crequi of Nantes ordered a visitation to investigate heresy. Where rural Protestantism existed, it was clearly associated with local noble families: in the parishes of Saint-Viaud, Saint-Michel-Chef-Chef, and Sainte-Opportune, no nobleman took part in parish processions; at Gestigné, Pierre Sellier, seigneur of Le Gast, stayed in the church porch during the consecration of the Mass and, suspected of heresy, was summoned to the ecclesiastical court.Footnote 40 Noble residences became centers of Protestant worship here as in other regions. At Corsept, at the château of Plessis-la-Ghaisne, residence of Gilles Buhort, the visit of a minister was reported. Before each meal, he would preach a homily to which the residents would listen, kneeling, and the seigneur never went to Mass.Footnote 41 The rights of seigneurs to direct religious life in their jurisdictions was recognized by the Crown. The edict of Saint-Germain of 1562 stated that preaching was not to take place in parishes without the will and consent of seigneurs, rectors, vicars, and churchwardens.Footnote 42 In the edict of Amboise of 1563, Protestant seigneurs with higher jurisdictions were granted the freedom of worship on their estates; other lords, without jurisdictions, could hold reformed worship in their houses, so long as the higher seigneur did not object.Footnote 43 These rights were maintained in most of the edicts of the religious wars, including that of Nantes of 1598; there remained Protestant lords in rural Brittany even during the League wars.Footnote 44 The legal position continued until 1666, after which it was eroded.Footnote 45 Seigneurs expected, by custom and law, to have a predominant influence on the religious life of their lands and parishes.
The hardening of Catholic identity, which accompanied religious conflict from the later 1550s and the introduction of Tridentine spirituality from the 1580s, was as much the concern of rural lords as it was of the elites of urban communities, and in any case, there was overlap between these groups, especially with increased purchases of lands by townspeople. Landowners were concerned to maintain Catholicism in their lordships. In Brittany, Tridentine influences were felt early, although initially in small pockets. For example, Bishop Nicolas Langelier of Saint-Brieuc undertook a visitation of his diocese in 1578, and in 1588, Bishop Aymar Hennequin of Rennes issued a missal based on the Roman rite of Pius V, which surviving parish accounts show was purchased by churches over the next decade.Footnote 46 Limited by the religious wars, after 1600, the Council of Trent's rulings saw more systematic adoption. A reforming synod was held by Bishop Guillaume Le Gouverneur of Saint-Malo in 1612 and was followed by others across the province. Bishops undertook personal visitations. Reform of liturgy through the introduction of the Roman rite was often the first of wider transformations in parish churches. The Ritual of Paul V was introduced into Nantes diocese over the period 1610–1615, to Vannes in 1613, and into Saint-Malo in 1617.Footnote 47 Liturgical changes were informed by the expanding emphasis on the sacraments in religious life, above all that of the Eucharist.Footnote 48 New devotions appeared, such as the oratoire, the display of the holy sacrament and relics on the altars of churches for up to a week at a time.Footnote 49 Confraternities also grew, particularly those associated with the Rosary and the Holy Sacrament. These changes had a direct impact on the worship experiences of seigneurial families, perhaps first in towns, where they had residences or sent children to be educated, or in convents of the mendicant orders with whom nobles had close links. While it would be false to claim ubiquitous interest in religious reform by all seigneurs, a significant number were personally engaged and patronized new devotions in their rural parishes. It was often their support that contributed to its success.
Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, therefore, the rural seigneur had a range of interests and obligations regarding the religious life of the parish. Status was displayed in churches, so their fabric was a concern; the role of patron brought financial and personnel responsibilities as well. Also, as the wealthier inhabitants of their communities, with access to urban education, culture, and religiosity, seigneurs were witting or unwitting vectors of new ideas in rural areas. This complex mix of factors made them important agents in religious change. It is the nature of their involvement to which we now turn.
II. Personal Piety and Parish Reform
The personal religious engagement of rural nobles is difficult to determine, for few autobiographical writings have come down to us from this group. There are writings of dévôt aristocrats, whose influence on their estate parishes could be profound, but most seigneurs did not record their inner thoughts.Footnote 50 For some contemporary moralists and preachers, “seigneurs de paroisse” appeared to be mediocre Christians and guilty of many vices, particularly blasphemy, usurping church property, interfering in appointments to benefices, not paying tithes, and withholding pious legacies. They altered the times of local services, vexed the clergy, and behaved immodestly in church.Footnote 51 More dispassionate observers, past and present, have seen a variety of behaviors from the devout to the indifferent, but mostly rural lords were conventional, observant Catholics with religiosity expressed most clearly on the deathbed or in the augmentation and maintenance of family monuments and pre-eminences in churches and chapels. Most seigneurs had a sense of their religious duties. The testament of René Fleuriot, seigneur de Carnabat in Plouizy, written to instruct his son in how to be a virtuous nobleman, urged the young man to avoid vice (cards, dice, debauchery, drunkenness, blasphemy), to be less lukewarm in his piety, to pray daily for God's mercy and blessings, to give alms and judicial protection to the deserving poor, and to pray for the dead.Footnote 52 We see here the traditional piety of the nobility closely linked to family and tenurial community, the model of a good lord. Yet a significant and influential minority also engaged in extra devotional activities learned perhaps in towns and religious houses, through reading pious works and listening to sermons. These were then sponsored or supported in rural parishes. While it is impossible to quantify such engagements, individual examples demonstrate the sorts of activities that took place.
The published Lives of counter-reformation missionaries who worked in Brittany provide numerous examples of pious lords in country parishes, even when the constructed nature of the sources is taken into account. For example, in the Life of Julien Maunoir, the seigneur of Bannalec underwent a personal conversion after witnessing the missionary work of Maunoir; as a result, he participated in regular retreats with Père Huby at the Jesuit house in Vannes and undertook charitable work with the poor of his parishes.Footnote 53 The wives and daughters of seigneurial families were particularly notable participants in the new spirituality. In the Life of Michel Le Nobletz, who was born in the château of Kerodern in the parish of Plouguerneau in the late sixteenth century, his sisters are shown to have joined their brother in pious living. Marguerite gave away her possessions, lived with paupers, and undertook charitable and educational work among poor women and girls; her sister Anne, after the death of their parents, retired to a tiny thatched cottage near to the parish church so she could attend Mass at all times, engaging in prayer, pious reading, and, again, charity and education of poor women.Footnote 54 In the Life of Anne-Marie de Goulaine, born in 1599 to the baron of Faouët and his wife, Anne-Marie spent her late teens and early twenties in pious devotions, refusing to marry, spending Saturdays visiting a deserted chapel dedicated to Our Lady; then, after her father died, she lived like a nun in a little room in the château, giving herself over to prayer, bodily austerity, and visiting the sick. In 1629, she joined the Calvariennes in Morlaix.Footnote 55 Again, in the Life of Madame de Quevern, she was shown living piously: she raised her children so well in the love and fear of God that they all joined religious orders and she ensured that her father was not influenced by Protestant relatives on his death bed. When her husband died, she turned her household into a form of religious community focused on prayer, good works, and attendance at parish Masses, and she was a noted peacemaker in disputes between her tenants.Footnote 56 One of the key features of Catholic spirituality, that of personal conversion, an affective response to God accompanied by prayer and good works, was thus clearly evident among lay rural elites. They acted as models and inspirations to the wider parish, at least in the view of clerical writers.
Wider evidence for the adoption of new religious forms is provided by wills. From the late sixteenth century, devotion to the Eucharist clearly became the leading mode of piety, sometimes linked to statements of confessional identity. In the will of Jean Bouan, seigneur of Logissière and other fiefs, who died at his château of Tizé in the parish of Thorigné, he recommended himself to God and the saints “with the help of the very holy and very salutary sacrifice of the Mass which is celebrated every day in the apostolic, Roman and Catholic Church, the faith and religion in which I wish to live and die.”Footnote 57 Postmortem foundations could be intensely personal to the donor. These could be traditional in form, such as the foundation of a chantry Mass in 1594 at the altar of Saint Sebastian in Plougoulin Church for his patron saint by Sebastien, Sieur de Poulensque.Footnote 58 But more contemporary influences are also seen. The resurgence of belief in purgatory and prayer for the dead is a striking feature of seventeenth-century Catholic spirituality: in 1664, Mathurin Le Beau Sieur du Bois in Ancenis and his wife made a joint will in which they left several bequests for chantries and obits for deceased relatives because they “had insufficiently acquitted their consciences with regard to praying to God for the repose of . . . the souls of their relatives and friends . . . so to make good this lack and to alleviate the pains of those who are still in Purgatory.”Footnote 59 Heresy and its rejection is an occasional motive. Thus, in 1666, Jean de Lespronnière, seigneur and chevalier, had a chapel built on his manorial demesne to “honor God from the essence of our being, to make vows and sacrifices to Him of our goods” because “his birth, like that of other men, is stained with original sin, this monstrosity that renders mankind criminal without individual offences” and because of his former profession of Protestantism for which he abjured publicly in the Jesuit Church in Rennes.Footnote 60 The public display of reformed spirituality, through the Mass, penitence, and prayers for the dead, reinforced and supported clerical initiatives in the countryside.
Another feature of revived spirituality in rural parishes was an increase in the number of devotional confraternities. Confraternities were, of course, widespread in late medieval parishes. The journal of the Sire de Gouberville, a seigneur in the Norman Cotentin neighboring Brittany, notes his confraternity membership: for example, on December 8, 1558, the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin, Gouberville was too unwell to attend church but sent an offering of one sou “for my confraternity of Our Lady” and a liard for candles.Footnote 61 After the religious wars ended, traditional confraternities were restored and new ones founded, above all those of the Rosary and the Holy Sacrament.Footnote 62 The clergy in particular were leading advocates of these new confraternities. But seigneurial patronage was also important in establishing and maintaining these groups. Thus, in 1647, when the parishioners of Bourg-Paul-Muzillac applied to the vicar general of Vannes to found a Rosary confraternity, they did so in the name of “rector, priests, gentlemen, treasurers and parishioners,” highlighting the role of the clergy, but also the presence of lords; the signatures on the document followed the same hierarchy, with those of priests followed by that of the procurator of the senior seigneur, then the other manorial lords of the parish in traditional order of importance.Footnote 63 In the 1660s, in Sarzeau, Jean Touzec, Sieur de Grand Isle, was instrumental in reestablishing an old Rosary confraternity in the parish where he was seasonally resident, when not performing his office of avocat in the royal courts at Vannes.Footnote 64 Occasionally, seigneurial chapels were transformed into confraternity chapels, but whether this followed their disuse or with the permission of the founder, we do not know. Thus, in the parish of Confort-Berhet, a chapel was founded in 1523 by the seigneurs du Perrier in which a Rosary confraternity was placed before 1643; it then became a site of pilgrimage and gained papal indulgences in 1685 and 1687.Footnote 65
Further, numerous chantry and anniversary foundations created by seigneurs in the seventeenth century were for Rosary altars. Whether the founders were members of the confraternity or if they just wished to benefit from the indulgenced altar associated with the group is unknown; the confraternity gained from the financial support and extra liturgical activity. Thus, in 1648 in Nivillac Church, Marguerite Guiton, widow of Sieur de la Grée, founded two weekly Masses for two altars in the church, the Rosary and Holy Sacrament.Footnote 66 In 1658, Suzanne Groy, wife of the Sieur of Meslon, gave one third of her inheritance to create a rente of 100 livres to pay for a weekly Mass at the altar of the Rosary and a sung Mass on each of the feasts of the Virgin.Footnote 67 Other confraternities also benefitted from support. In 1647, Suzanne Guyot, widow of the Sieur de Salines, founded, in the parish church of Notre-Dame-du-Méné, a continuation of the procession of the Crown of the Virgin for the confraternity of that name.Footnote 68 In 1676, Jeanne Couvrans Dame de l'Angle and Fougeret, founded a procession of the Holy Sacrament at eight o'clock in the morning on the first Thursday of each month in Herbignac parish church, accompanied by the display of the sacrament during the high Mass of the day.Footnote 69 Seigneurial support of such activities was widespread. Again, lords lent their influence and patronage to the sponsorship and maintenance of parish devotional activities. That other, well-to-do parishioners followed their lead may perhaps be seen in parishes such as Muzillac in Vannes diocese, where in 1679 the dowager Dame de Séréac founded a chantry, followed by four others in the next five years, by a choir priest, two couples, a merchant, and a laboureur.Footnote 70
New pilgrimage sites, which sprang up in good numbers in seventeenth-century France, also owed much to local seigneurial patronage. In Brittany, the new shrine of Saint Anne at Auray benefitted from seigneurial support. In 1625, Yves Nicolazic, a peasant of the parish of Pluneret, found a statue of Saint Anne in one of his fields. In the face of initial skepticism from his parish curé, Nicolazic gathered support from local notables to found a shrine to the saint. A few days after the discovery, several gold coins miraculously appeared on Nicolazic's kitchen table; deciding to take them to the Capuchins in Auray, he called first on the seigneur who owned the field, Sieur de Kerloguen, who kept two of them “out of devotion” and promised to donate the site for a chapel. He also gave an annual rente of 15 livres for Masses as a short-term loan, which he would recoup once there were sufficient alms and donations for the maintenance of the shrine. Madame de Kervilio and Madame du Quenven each purchased one of the coins and gave their support, the latter also providing lodgings for the Carmelites who were the first guardians of the shrine. Two sisters of Madame de Quenven's husband founded Masses for the new chapel, once built.Footnote 71 Examples can be multiplied across northern France.Footnote 72 Whether for votive, pious, or speculative motives, the support of local lords was crucial for the creation of many new shrines.
Seigneurial piety was thus influential in rural parishes. Boschet comments that the piety of notables provided good examples for others to follow, citing the small town of Pont-Croix and the parish of Beuzée-Cap-Sizun in the far west of the province, where the nobility was a force for virtue amongst the people.Footnote 73 Boschet also commented on the effects of personal conversion: gentlemen “treated their vassals more gently, paid the wages of the their servants, and paid off their other debts; servants no longer stole from their masters and the morals of a whole town and canton were entirely changed.”Footnote 74 Pious seigneurs could also use their jurisdictional powers to curb activities considered profane by religious reformers. Thus, in the mid-seventeenth century, the seigneur of Trémaria used his authority to curb the celebrations and dances that traditionally accompanied the annual feast day pardon at the chapel of Saint Tugean in Primelen parish.Footnote 75 Through financial support, personal enthusiasm, and the sponsorship of seigneurial families, the devotional priorities of Catholic Reform were made present in country parishes. It is likely that leading families were important transmitters of ideas from towns and religious communities to rural areas; like clerics, they probably acted as intermediaries between literate and oral cultures, through the transposition of ideas into activities. Further, lords gave moral and material support to clergy in their parishes, as we will now see.
III. Patronage of the Agents of Reform: Priests and Missionaries
The relationship between local seigneurs and clergy working in rural parishes was traditionally a close one across the period under study. Seigneurial families provided personnel, appointed to benefices, and sponsored visiting preachers. Although variable according to region, some lay seigneurs maintained rights of advowson in the early modern period and, therefore, had a direct impact on the recruitment of clergy. For those who did, the exercise of this right was increasingly circumspect after 1600 as expectations of curés changed: better initial and ongoing education, formation of morality and professionalism in seminaries, and higher standards and inspections through visitations all served to transform clerical religious and social behavior in the countryside. Parishioners came to expect good liturgies, preaching, catechizing, visits to the sick, and charity. Thus, one way in which seigneurs could influence the progress of religious renovation was through the presentation of reforming clergy to parish livings. In Brittany, however, few benefices were in the gift of lords for most patronage was held by bishops and religious houses—in the diocese of Rennes, for example, no parish benefices were in lay hands.Footnote 76
Some appointments, whether the patron was clerical or lay, were always sinecures for relatives and friends, utilizing the resources of patronage for family members, benefactors, and allies. For this reason, across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rural nobility was still a source of parochial clergy. In the Beauce region in the sixteenth century, for example, of thirty-seven noble members of the first estate identified by Jean-Marie Constant, three were bishops, 30 percent were members of chapters, 40 percent were monks or nuns, and around 10 percent were parish priests.Footnote 77 The experience of the Gouberville lords in western Normandy was typical of many. The seigneur de Gouberville, father of the diarist Gilles, had granted his own brother the benefice of the parish, which the priest held in plurality with two others. He migrated around his parishes, visiting the inhabitants and holding Masses, appointing vicars as his full-time substitutes.Footnote 78 Although curé Gouberville was relatively diligent, others were not. But by the second quarter of the seventeenth century, heightened expectations, together with religious revival, had an impact on noble-born candidates as with others. Vocations are apparent among some and, for others, attention to duty was at least a requirement. An example can be seen in the career of Michel Le Nobletz, born into the rural nobility of the parish of Plougerneau in Léon in 1577. After training for the priesthood, in 1608 he began to evangelize in the countryside, preaching and catechizing in the rural parishes and the small fishing ports in Trégor, Léon, and Cornouaille.Footnote 79 Another example is Monsieur de Trémaria, an important landowner around Plogoff in western Brittany and conseiller of the parlement of Rennes, who was so greatly affected by the missionary work of Julien Maunoir that he assisted the missions and then became a priest himself.Footnote 80 Charles de Gouandour, son of the seigneur and lady of Kervenoual in Guiscriff parish born in 1640, was educated by the Jesuits but decided to follow a vocation as a secular priest and became rector of Inzinzac. He was a model priest: he organized missions, instructed his flock, taught catechism, visited the sick, made peace between spouses, worked to reduce drunkenness, went on annual retreat, and embellished the liturgy.Footnote 81 Noble families thus supplied reforming priests from their own ranks and through appointment of others.
A more common form of patronage in Brittany was the appointment of chaplains for personal and family chapels and chantries. An archidiaconal visitation of the deanery of la Roche Bernard in Nantes diocese in 1665 revealed twenty-six chantries in Coueron parish, three of which were presented by local seigneurs, and sixteen chantries in Saint-Etienne-de-Monluc parish, of which four were presented by local lords, for example.Footnote 82 Again, across the period, some appointments were used simply as sinecures for relatives and friends. Thus, in a 1684 foundation of Sunday and feast day Masses in her manorial chapel, Françoise Bonneau, dowager lady of La Guère, made her son Jacques Pantin the first chaplain and thereafter the patronage was to stay with her heirs.Footnote 83 In Saint-Etienne-de-Monluc, the chaplain of two chantries presented by the seigneur des Forges was named as Bertrand Arondel, but the priest serving the Masses was François Bernard, a local priest.Footnote 84 However, in many cases—and increasingly as the seventeenth century progressed—foundations were used to support local unbeneficed clergy.Footnote 85 The history of a chantry foundation of 1629 in the manorial chapel of la Civelière in Pirmil shows something of how patronage worked: the first chaplain appointed was René Barbe, a choir priest of Pirmil. By the 1650s, the chaplain was M. Bourget, canon of Nantes, who presumably hired a local priest to say the Masses. When he died in 1653, Guillaume Pergemine, choir priest of Pirmil, was appointed and for the next thirty years the chaplains were normally recruited from among this group.Footnote 86 Seigneurial foundations also provided material support. When, in 1690, Guillaume de Boyer, seigneur de Vaudequip, created a weekly Mass in his parish church of Allaire, he provided the benefice with a house and garden in the bourg and one third of the tithe due to him, to support a chaplain.Footnote 87 By such means, seigneurial appointments supported local clergy while the exercise of patronage at the local level reinforced a lord's territorial authority.
Seigneurs might also sponsor promising young men to train as priests. Yves d'Alam, later the Discalced Carmelite and missionary Bruno de Saint-Yves, received support from M. Barbier de Kernaou of the diocese of Léon, who paid for his education in Rennes hoping to make him tutor of his children, only to lose him to the Carmelite order.Footnote 88 In Cordemais parish, the chantry “Trois Maries” in the gift of the seigneur de la Chevalleraye was held by the “sieur de Montmorency, escolier” or student, again served by a local priest, Pierre Le Ray, while Montmorency trained as an ordinand.Footnote 89 In 1603, Jacques de Kermadec, a former avocat in the parlement of Brittany, sponsored Jean Gouilliart, a schoolboy of the parish of Carnac, who intended to become a priest and who lacked a benefice. Kermadec gave twenty écus (sixty livres) annual rente, until Gouilliart obtained a benefice, in return for prayers and the furtherance of divine service.Footnote 90 Seigneurial patronage could this help advance the training of good clergy.
The relationship between seigneurs and parish priests was vital to the quality of rural religious life, for the work of the curé was dependent on the good will and support of the lord. The journal of the curé of Saint-Denoual in the diocese of Saint-Brieuc from the eighteenth century shows how a priest was careful to make himself useful to his lordly patron. In so doing, he was able to procure charity for local paupers, donations of ornaments, and the finances necessary for the upkeep of the church. Further, when three local gentlemen forced the churchwardens to approve the removal of the pulpit so they could have a better position for their pews, the curé was able to use his good relations with the senior seigneur of the parish to call on the vicar general to deny their request.Footnote 91 There could also be conflict, of course, when religious and secular functions, or just personalities, proved incompatible. The priest Sieur Colin was the chaplain of a great lord of the Nantes region with a benefice worth 1500 livres a year, but when he refused to serve as a general factotum to his master, Colin was locked in a room in the château and forced to sign his own resignation.Footnote 92 For good or for ill, parish personnel were dependent on seigneurs.
A third group of clergy important in parish life, although intermittently, was the mendicant religious orders, either through seasonal preaching campaigns or, in the seventeenth century, through missions. In the later Middle Ages, Franciscan and Dominican preachers travelled through the countryside giving sermons in rural churches, particularly during Advent and Lent. It appears they were often invited by local seigneurs and given hospitality in their manor houses. The journal of the Sire de Gouberville has numerous entries recording visits by mendicant preachers. For example, on December 6, 1561, Leonard Mesnage, Franciscan of Valognes, preached in the parish church at Mass and Robert Toulorge, Franciscan of Bayeux, preached at Vespers. They dined and slept at the manor house.Footnote 93 In Brittany, Guillaume de Rosmadec, who purchased the seigneurie of Buhen-Lantic in 1584, restored a chapel of Saint Fiacre on his lands and settled hermits there from the Franciscan tertiary community of Saint-Brieuc. The hermitage was abandoned when war ravaged the area in the 1590s, but in 1599, two professional pilgrims who had been travelling for five years took over the site. Rosmadec purchased habits and Roman breviaries for them and settled them in, although the foundation does not seem to have survived Rosmadec's death. Rosmadec also secured the services of the Franciscans of Saint-Brieuc to preach in another of his manorial chapels at Notre-Dame de la Cour on Sundays in Lent and a Franciscan from Dinan preached every Saturday in Lent.Footnote 94
The numbers of missions in rural parishes grew across the seventeenth century and many local seigneurs were important supporters. Nobles across northern France founded missions. The Gondi family's employment of Saint Vincent de Paul on their estates in Picardy and the subsequent formation of the Lazarists is perhaps the best known.Footnote 95 But on a more local level, the Mesgrigny family founded the Mission of Le Mans, a group of priests who visited each parish at the core of their lordship of Belin every five years.Footnote 96 In Brittany, Michel Le Nobletz was assisted by numerous local notables, such as the seigneur de Kergroadez who lodged Nobletz in his château during his missions in the area.Footnote 97 Missionaries were often invited to parishes by local lords. Boschet's Life of Julien Maunoir stressed that “the rectors and the seigneurs of neighboring parishes [of Quimper] asked the Father to bring them the graces attached to the holy word and religious instruction.”Footnote 98 Thus, Maunoir's missionaries were called to the parish of Riec by the marquis of Pontcallec to instruct his vassals.Footnote 99 Madame de Kerazan, widow of the seigneur, encouraged Maunoir into the parishes which “belonged” to her and offered him the services of her son.Footnote 100 Monsieur de Pennanech Querjegu, a seigneur in Trebrivan, was a donor to the Jesuit college of Quimper, in return for which Maunoir and others worked in his lordships.Footnote 101 Further, châteaux and manors provided the essential support base for rural missions as much as presbyteries did. In 1675, a seigneur of Plouzever and his wife hosted Maunoir and his missionary team during their visit to the parish. The lord served them at table and the lady prepared food and provided other hospitality during their stay.Footnote 102 Missions were certainly attended by nobles. Mademoiselle de Quisidic was converted after attending a sermon of Le Nobletz in Morlaix and decided to dedicate herself to Christ in the Third Order of Saint Francis.Footnote 103 Noble support for clergy and missions was therefore central to the success of religious revival in the countryside. Patronage of the material fabric of religious life, the stage on which the clergy operated, was also important and provides a final example of seigneurial religious works.
IV. Paying for Reform: The Material and Liturgical Fabric of Religious Life
For the rural churchgoer, the revival of Catholic spirituality was experienced primarily through new forms of religious practice. In a society where action was an embodiment of thought, in the religious sphere, liturgy and ritual were means to teach as well as express new forms of spirituality. The introduction of new liturgies into rural parish churches was therefore often the first and chief way in which revival was propagated. There was a financial cost to such changes: priests had to be paid and books, music, ornaments, vestments, and ultimately church structures and fittings themselves had to be adapted or renewed. While parish priests were often the principal actors here, the role of seigneurs was crucial. At their most passive, lords used their landed resources to support church restoration; at their most dynamic, they initiated projects themselves. In most parish communities, the most visible and active contribution of local seigneurs to religious renewal was through their patronage of the physical fabric of worship.
The introduction of the Roman rite of the Mass was a major innovation in rural parish churches. In Brittany, its adoption can be seen through churchwardens’ accounts from the 1580s and particularly from the 1610s onwards. Simultaneously, there was an expansion in the number of Masses commissioned, partly a revival of pre-Reformation views of the Mass as “good works” and also from a restored concern for souls in Purgatory which motivated increased post-mortem foundations. Since the central Middle Ages, seigneurs were important patrons of such Masses. Liturgical commemoration served to remember the deceased and honor the family in a public space; it gave charity to the church and it helped to liberate an individual's soul from Purgatory. While the commemoration of the seigneurial lineage was primal, there was also a clear desire to provide more services for parishioners. Thus, in 1679, René Blouet sieur du Fail and his wife founded in the church of Bourg-des-Comptes “a solemn [requiem] service to be celebrated on Easter day each year” and they requested that “the very Holy Sacrament would be displayed on the high altar in the usual place” to encourage the parishioners to “greater devotion.”Footnote 104 The churches of the mendicant orders were important sites for such foundations, but lords also founded Masses in parishes where they had seigneurial rights. Thus, at Rochefort-en-Terre in the fifteenth century, the Rieux lords founded a daily sung Mass and offices with six chaplains and a dean, turning a parish church into a collegiate foundation.Footnote 105 In the later sixteenth century, we see the revival in this tradition in the foundations of the seigneurs de Runangoff in the parish of Pédernec. In 1493, Guillaume de Rosmar gave an annual rente of wheat to pay for three anniversary Masses on the feasts of the Annunciation, Assumption, and Nativity of Our Lady; in 1576, this was augmented by his great-grandson Jean and his wife to include anniversaries on four further Marial feasts and prayers on the tomb of the lords each Sunday. In 1607, their descendants founded three further feast-day anniversaries: Epiphany, the fourth Sunday in Lent, and on the patronal festival of the parish church.Footnote 106 In the seventeenth century, the numbers of Masses founded in parishes expanded further, and Restif has found that almost one quarter of such foundations in eastern Brittany were created by seigneurs.Footnote 107 The bequests of David de Cléguérec and Jeanne du Mur, seigneur and lady of Meslien, exemplify this practice: they left foundations for weekly Masses to three mendicant houses, a weekly Mass in their parish church of Cléguer, three in their manorial chapel of Meslien, and one for the chapel of their second residence of Kermadoa in the parish of Keruel. Their piety was territorially defined by their properties and interests.Footnote 108 The augmentation of divine service in its reformed format was achieved through such patronage.
Two further innovations were advanced by foundations. First, one of the changes in seventeenth-century post-mortem liturgies was the growing preference for sung, high requiem anniversaries held at the high altar over the weekly, low Masses held at side altars which had predominated in the Middle Ages, although these did continue and some wealthier patrons founded both.Footnote 109 The focus on the high altar reflected the augmented status of the Eucharist and a taste for elaborate liturgy. Also, there was a preference for services to be held on Saturdays, Sundays, and feast days, when the whole parish was gathered.Footnote 110 Thus, in 1593, the will of Françoise de Roche Chouart, dame de la Touche du Grand Boys in the parish of La Limousinière, asked that a perpetual anniversary be made of four commemorative services on the four great church feasts.Footnote 111 In 1632, the seigneur and lady of Querradever founded a weekly high Mass on Saturdays in honor of the Virgin in the parish church of Lesneven, and in 1635, Hector de la Cour, seigneur of La Boissière, requested in his will a perpetual foundation for the first Sunday of each month and for the priest to mention him and his late wife during the bidding prayers of the main parish Mass.Footnote 112 Secondly, liturgical embellishments became popular, such as evening hymns for the Virgin and the Holy Sacrament. In 1668, the seigneur du Bois and his wife founded a sung Mass of the Beata at the altar of Notre Dame of the parish church of Ancenis; for double feast days, there was to be a Mass of the office of the day followed by a sung Salve with a display of the Holy Sacrament, and each Saturday there was to be a morning Mass and a Salve sung in the evening at five o'clock.Footnote 113 The yearly liturgical cycle was linked to the seigneurial family in this way while innovative and traditional prayers were combined.
To accommodate changing religious priorities and liturgical practices, the rebuilding and refurbishing of churches was a significant feature of the late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rural parish. The religious conflicts of the later sixteenth century caused damage to many places of worship in France through the depredations of war. Restif shows that the great majority of parishes in the diocese of Rennes were affected in the 1590s, for almost all those with surviving accounts show damage by soldiery and objects and textiles stolen, damaged, or destroyed.Footnote 114 At the same time, the emergent Catholic and Counter Reformations propagated new ideas about church use and layout.Footnote 115 Probably the most important influence on interior church design from the late sixteenth century was enhanced focus on the sacraments, above all the Eucharist, and the importance given to participation in the rite, which made the visibility of the ceremony of the Mass a priority.Footnote 116 The continued importance of saints’ devotions, as well as changing popularity of saints, also meant some reordering of altars and decorative schemes. Naves and choirs were rebuilt, bell towers constructed, and porches, ossuaries, and cemetery walls erected, all to embellish and define the sacred space at the heart of the parish.Footnote 117 Such alterations were ultimately decided on and financed by the whole community through the parish générale. But changes to churches were also of direct concern to seigneurs for their pre-eminences and property were part of the physical fabric. Lords also controlled resources necessary for construction. The participation of the seigneur, active or passive, was therefore vital to the success of much church refurbishment.
The first priority of seigneurs in any building project was to safeguard the symbols of their pre-eminence and even to expand their scope at the expense of other families. Disputes between nobles over pre-eminences were common at all times; reconstruction work enhanced usurpations and counter claims. The turbulence of the fifteenth-century wars and the religious conflicts of the later sixteenth century all saw churches damaged while concurrent economic turbulence saw a transfer of lands and seigneuries to new families. These processes led to an increase in disputes over pre-eminences in rural parishes, for newcomers were keen to refurbish and reestablish status symbols and tombs, the visible markers of their newly acquired social status.Footnote 118 In Sulniac parish church, the seigneur de Bobbley claimed rights to display his arms as founder and entered into conflict over this with the seigneur de Ferrières who, restoring the main gable of the church, profited from the work to substitute his arms for those of Bobbley. The parish upheld Bobbley's rights.Footnote 119 Similarly, parishes sometimes undertook alterations which reduced the display of seigneurial power to the advantage of the church. Thus, at Chanteloup, the rood screen dividing the chancel from the nave was taken down and a balustraded east end was erected instead so that the seigneurial pew and vault lay outside of the liturgical space.Footnote 120 Again disputes arose. There was little of religious inspiration here, maintenance of family honor was the chief cause of such actions. But seigneurs did contribute more widely to church building. Their control of resources such as quarries and timber, their relative wealth, and their access to money made their support and participation vital to many projects. In 1633, the seigneur de la Morinière assisted in the rebuilding of the chancel and tower of the church of Saint-Philibert-de-Grand-Lieu, in return for which the parishioners “tolerated” a tomb in the choir; similarly, in 1646, the dame de la Barillière contributed a large sum to the reconstruction of the church of Mouzillon, for which she was allowed to build a chapel which opened into the chancel.Footnote 121
There were certain fittings which were particularly associated with seigneurial families, shown by the placement of their heraldry: in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they favored stained glass and in the seventeenth century altar retables. The donation of stained glass windows either in the chancel, where the seigneur was the patron, or in seigneurial chapels again allowed lords to reflect their own devotions, to offer the parish new spiritual motifs, and to represent the donors themselves. In Moncontour Church, the east window of 1530–1540 shows the birth and life of Christ in eight panels, with two seigneurial donors at the bottom: Claude de Villeblanche, sieur du Plessis-au-Noir, parish of Trédaniel, and Christophe de la Motte, sieur de Vauclair, parish of Plémy.Footnote 122 Guy III d'Espinay (d. 1551) and Louise de Goulaine commissioned windows for their seigneurial chapel in Louvigné-de Bais; they worked with the parishioners on a decorative scheme for the church windows and their contribution was a scene of the Transfiguration. Their heirs put in another window in 1594, showing the sacrifice of Isaac, continuing a eucharistic scheme.Footnote 123 In Plogonnec, the windows were reglazed in the later sixteenth century with scenes of the lives of Christ and the saints: the east window had scenes of the Passion of Christ with representations of lordly donors Alain Nevet, presented by his patron saint, Saint Alan, and a lady of Treanna in the lower register; the window over the altar of Sainte-Barbe showed the Last Judgement, along with patrons the lord and lady of Kergadalan; a third window was given by a lady of Guengat; and there were others. The lords of the fiefs of the parish all contributed to the project.Footnote 124 In the seventeenth century, the donation of retables took the place of stained glass. At Brélévenez in 1630, Gilles Le Borne, seigneur du Goasven, gave a sculpted wood retable for the chapel of Saint-Loup in the north aisle.Footnote 125 The Huart family of Messac contributed to the retable of the parish church in 1678 in return for a display of their arms.Footnote 126 In the late seventeenth century, the seigneur of Saint-Denoual paid for the modernization of the church, which included replacing chancel wall paintings and the tabernacle with a newly constructed altar retable, taking down a raised gisant tomb of one of his ancestors and replacing it with a plain floor slab, and other refurbishments, including a new seigneurial pew in the chancel.Footnote 127 In recognition of the status and support of the seigneur of a parish, there was a tradition of dedicating church bells to the chief lord of the parish and a lady of his family, who acted as godparents when the bells were recast. There are numerous surviving examples. In 1571, the bell of Pleguen Church was recast with the seigneur Rolande de Rouvre as godfather.Footnote 128 In Dirinon church, a bell cast in 1655 carried the names of G. Dulouet, seigneur de Lisquivit, and Mauricete Doulouet, Dame de Coatjunval.Footnote 129 The soundscape of the parish thus integrated seigneurial patronage.
A major investment made by many seigneurs in parish churches was the creation or refurbishment of a private chapel, usually opening onto the chancel. Well before the Reformation, these private chapels were a long-standing feature of the seigneurial presence in rural parish life. As reserved and demarcated spaces, they maintained the social distinction of lordly families while providing burial sites, space for elaborate memorials and monuments, and an altar for private Masses for dead members of the lineage. The building of new chapels and the restoration of existing ones, in parish and mendicant churches, was a marked feature of Counter-Reformation piety in some cities in France by elites eager to demonstrate social status and to act as privileged mausoleums for their families, as Vanessa Harding's study of Paris has shown.Footnote 130 Rural churches also gained such structures. Régis Bertrand raises the question of whether such chapels were accessible to all parishioners or whether they were private spaces. Gallican rights allowed founders the privileges of private property: to screen and lock chapels to distinguish them from the main body of the church.Footnote 131 There seems to have been a mixed economy in practice. Some chapels were open, extensions of transepts; others were screened and private. Yet the point of commemoration and Masses was that celebration was communal, drawing widely on the prayers of the faithful. Simon Roffey argues that “a prime consideration . . . was that their Masses were linked into a wider ritual network. . . . In many cases, they clearly operated within a wider religious context and were components of an inclusive ritual layout.”Footnote 132 Further, they added to the decoration, plan, and aura of a parish church, for they contributed new forms of architecture and display.
More common in rural Brittany, and probably throughout northern France, was the private chapel associated with a manor house, another means of combining prestige with piety. This was another long-standing practice of lords and other landowners in the countryside: by the early sixteenth century, many châteaux and manors had oratories or small chapels built on adjacent land. The parish of Guisseny in the Léon had eight private chapels, despite the vicissitudes of the League wars.Footnote 133 After the conflict, lords again began to build chapels. Restif estimates that, by the end of the seventeenth century, the dioceses of Rennes and Saint-Malo had 431 and 487 chapels, respectively, and even the tiny diocese of Dol had 56.Footnote 134 Bishops and clergy had long been concerned about private chapels and the removal of their owners from parish worship and attempted to impose conditions, particularly church attendance on Sundays and feast days, on their founders through licenses. Lords had to make a case for the wider public function of their chapels. In many regions, particularly those of large parishes and dispersed settlement patterns as in Brittany, such chapels often provided for local inhabitants.Footnote 135 Thus, Jean Lecompte argued, “impelled by the pure motive of enhancing the glory of God and considering that their house and seigneurie of La Galardière is more than half a league's distance from the parish of Vern, and that most of the neighbors and particularly the children and servants did not hear Holy Mass on Sundays,” he wished to found a chapel.Footnote 136 In 1673, Marguerite Bouttin, dame de Camprillon and owner of the seigneurie of Noyer in Orgères parish, founded a chapel next to her house on account of the distance from the parish church and the poor state of the roads.Footnote 137
Finally, seigneurial families were important donors of liturgical ornaments and vestments to churches in order to embellish worship and to memorialize their lineage.Footnote 138 Thus, in 1608, the seigneur and lady of Kerroué gave a gold-plated cross to the church of Loguivy, costing almost 400 livres.Footnote 139 In 1664, the will of Louise Guéguen, daughter of the lord of Kerbrat Locmaria in the parish of Plabennec, left money for services across the year following her death and a large linen veil to cover the crucifix during Lent.Footnote 140 New devotions required new ornaments. For example, in 1658, Suzanne Groy, wife of the Sieur of Meslan, left a perpetual rente to the parish church of Piriac to maintain a lamp before the tabernacle of the Holy Sacrament, in return for a Pater and Ave said for her soul by parishioners during Sunday Mass.Footnote 141 The seigneur of Kerbarh similarly gave a perpetual fund to pay for a sacrament lamp in the parish church of Croixanvec, while Carantec Church retains a silver sacrament lamp given by the seigneur of Louet in 1690.Footnote 142 As Peter Marshall states, these items “comprised a field of memory on which [donors] could inscribe a post-mortem presence through pious donations of objects personalized with names and coats of arms,” and where gifts were used for liturgy, then individuals hoped to achieve a perpetual linkage of their own names with the Mass.Footnote 143 Again, seigneurs patronized the parish and augmented their family credit at the same time.
V. Conclusion
A preliminary study of Brittany suggests that the role of middling and lesser seigneurial families in rural religious revival after 1550 was similar to that of the English and Scots gentry. In particular, their impact on the fabric and worship of the parish church was notable. Their pre-eminences in churches and rights of patronage gave them a vested interest in the physical manifestations of religious change; their judicial authority, no matter how abraded it became in the latter part of the seventeenth century by Crown and bishop, gave them authority over moral matters and powers to intervene in parish church affairs; their economic rights in woods and quarries, along with their relative wealth in their communities, made their practical support important. Where seigneuries were acquired by new families, and the period saw an active market in lands and fiefs, they sought to integrate themselves into the parish community and reinforce their legitimacy by taking over and adding to—sometimes replacing—the symbolic furnishings of parish churches and chapels. Social status was thus a vital part of the “religious” interests of lords in parishes.
Seigneurial involvement in parish religion went further than the embellishment of buildings and worship, however. Individuals experienced personal conversion, they supported new devotions through their foundations, and they assisted with the creation and maintenance of confraternities. The close relationship of lords with clergy, from the chaplains they appointed to the parish priests they invited to supper and the missionaries to whom they gave bed and board, again made seigneurial resources and networks vital to the promotion of spiritual works. Not all seigneurs were resident in the countryside; however, seasonal occupation of estates and manors was widespread, and even when away, lords were in close contact with parishes through their agents. Indeed, the movement of seigneurial households between urban centers—with their more innovative religious cultures, educational establishments, and religious houses with which lords had close kinship and cultural ties—and their rural estates made them important consumers of new devotional practices. Their contribution to new parish devotions has likely been underestimated to date and its nature and impact require further investigation.
In Brittany, more lords may have resided in the countryside and there may have been more missions than in other regions of France, but the involvement of seigneurs is likely to be similar elsewhere. More systematic research is needed of regions and families to provide the detailed studies of the religious interests of French Catholic rural elites that we have for the Protestant British Isles. For now, it is apparent that through the traditional concept of “good lordship,” of obligation to kinship group and community, and, for some, through personal devotion, seigneurs participated in rural Counter Reform through the exercise of their patronage, their example, their authority, and their material resources. The legal status and rights of seigneurs, however humble, set them apart and gave them a role in religious life that was unique to their position. There are limitations to these conclusions, of course. A disparate and partial primary source base, particularly the lack of serial data other than wills—which are themselves scarce, makes quantification of lordly participation difficult. There were also other groups in the countryside—notably clergy, non-feudal landowners, and wealthy peasant farmers—who were important agents of renewal. Above all, to judge the impact of seigneurial influence, detailed study of the responses of specific rural communities is required. But the position and resources of the seigneur made lordly participation in religious change important if it was to succeed.
