At the Lateran Palace in the spring of 1059, Pope Nicholas II presided over a council that addressed various pressing issues.Footnote 1 The assembled clerics condemned the heresy of Berengar of Tours, settled disputes between Italian bishops regarding the possession of certain churches, and, most famously, issued a decree on the proper procedure for the election of popes. On the first of May, Archdeacon Hildebrand—the future Pope Gregory VII—introduced a new subject for discussion. Hildebrand told the council that he had been approached by a number of canons who wished to live a truly apostolic life. In their mind, this meant that they would hold no private property; as Hildebrand put it, these clergy, “inflamed through the Holy Spirit by the fire of perfect love . . . are known to embrace and profess the common life by the example of the primitive church, in such a way that they reserve no property for themselves, with their resources either distributed to the needy, left to their relatives, or given to the churches of Christ.”Footnote 2 These virtuous canons were troubled by the existence of other clergy, who also professed to be canons, but whose vision of that calling permitted the holding of property. The latter clergymen justified what Hildebrand called their “perversion” by appealing to the regulations for canons elucidated at the council of Aachen in 816 under the aegis of the Carolingian emperor Louis the Pious.Footnote 3 Moved by the rigor of the men who had petitioned him, Hildebrand encouraged the pope and council to consider the role of private property in the lifestyle of canons and to pronounce on the worthiness of the Aachen decrees.
Nicholas agreed to Hildebrand's request. The assembled clergy then found a copy of the proceedings of the council at Aachen and went on to discuss their merits. Those gathered at the Lateran had no quarrel with the passages from patristic writings included in the first part of the Aachen decrees, although they did remark disapprovingly on what they saw as a lack of coherent organization in the assembling of those texts. Their real vitriol was reserved for the second part of the decrees, which offered regulations for life at houses of canons, known as the Institutio Canonicorum. The Lateran fathers claimed that the unknown compiler of this portion “corrupted and mutilated” the spirit of the patristic texts and offered a flawed and debased model for canonical life.Footnote 4 The rhetoric used to describe the Aachen regulations and their compiler was both vivid and harsh: the dietary allowances in the Aachen text, for example, were condemned as more suitable for a Cyclops than for a human pursuing Christian moderation.Footnote 5 At another point, the Lateran clerics commented acerbically that while the compiler of the Aachen decrees probably would have acknowledged that Jesus said, “‘Unless someone should renounce all things that they possess, he shall not be able to be my disciple,’” he would also have vitiated Jesus's message by claiming that “this same [Lord] on the contrary said: ‘Unless someone retains what they possessed or acquired . . . he cannot be my disciple.’”Footnote 6 The Lateran council thus dismissed key regulations from Aachen as fundamentally flawed, particularly those concerning property and allowances for food and drink. By so doing, Hildebrand and the Lateran clerics cast doubt on the lifestyle of canons who adhered to the Institutio Canonicorum, and they questioned the possession of private property by clerics, a practice that, they argued, distorted the message of Jesus and threatened the ideal of communal life to which canons should adhere.
It should come as no surprise that the discussion concerning canons at Rome in 1059 focused on the question of property. Since Late Antiquity, the question of what—if any—property it was appropriate to hold exercised those seeking to live a dedicated religious life. Both explicit statements by Jesus in the Gospels and the model of the primitive church described in the Acts of the Apostles endorsed the renunciation of private property and the holding of all possessions in common.Footnote 7 As monasticism developed, many of the major rules, including that of Benedict of Nursia, made clear that monks were not to hold private property after their entrance into the community.Footnote 8 Early communities of canons have left us much less in the way of evidence, both about their ideals and their day-to-day function. There are famed examples of bishops encouraging their cathedral clerics to abandon private property when possible, although there is no reason to think this was representative of the majority of communities.Footnote 9
Nonetheless, the strong tradition of religious communities eschewing private property (at least in principle)Footnote 10 makes it striking that when Bishop Chrodegang of Metz (d. 766) wrote a rule for his cathedral canons in the mid-eighth century, he allowed those canons to continue to enjoy income from their private property after they joined the community.Footnote 11 Chrodegang's rule borrowed heavily from the Benedictine Rule, which he knew well from his founding of Gorze and patronage of other monasteries, but on this point he deviated.Footnote 12 The Aachen rulings of 816 went on to make the right to hold private property one of a handful of key distinctions between canons and monks—two groups who had theretofore often been difficult to differentiate.Footnote 13 This is not to say that the Aachen decrees ignored the communal life of the canons, including common property. On the contrary, they spoke of dormitories, refectories, a fortified enclosure, and other amenities for “brethren living together in community.” It also addressed proper treatment of common lands.Footnote 14 As Charles Dereine and Julia Barrow have noted, however, the phrase “communal life” meant different things to different people at different times, and for those at Aachen in 816, holding private property did not preclude living a communal life.Footnote 15
Private property, therefore, had always been a matter of debate for Christian religious communities. For canons, beginning in the Carolingian era, it became a defining issue: the conciliar and normative sources clearly show that in certain powerful ecclesiastical and political circles from the ninth to the mid-eleventh century, property helped to define what it meant to be a canon and was central to the discussion of the ideal life of such clerics. What such sources do not show, however, is how (or whether) those normative texts influenced houses throughout Europe. Nor do they illuminate the ways in which property figured in discussions among and about canons outside the centers of Rome or Aachen. More work is needed, therefore, in two different but related areas. The first concerns the functioning of houses of canons “on the ground” in the years between the Aachen and Lateran councils—a period which, for the sake of convenience, will be referred to here as the “long tenth century.” How did a given house organize, categorize, and oversee its property? What kinds of transactions did individual canons—and the community as a whole—conduct? What relative value was put on private property versus that held in common by the canons? Do we find any evidence for the influence of Carolingian ideas concerning property-holding at these houses? And perhaps most intriguingly, if communities saw the need to regulate or change their property holdings, what did they consider to be the abuses in need of remedy? Second, if historians better understand the role of private property and the communal life at tenth-century houses, they can then contextualize the concerns and ideals expressed by Hildebrand at the Lateran, without following his rhetoric too far and succumbing to a narrative of degeneracy and reform, of fall and redemption.
This essay attempts to answer these questions and thereby to deepen our understanding of the role of property at canonical communities in the long tenth century. It does so through a case study of the Aquitanian house of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand in Poitiers. At the start of the period considered here, Saint-Hilaire was already a venerable house with a rich history. Founded before 507, the church was named for the city's first bishop, Hilary, who was famous for his battles with heretics in the fourth century.Footnote 16 The house remained important throughout the central Middle Ages: it was a key center of ecclesiastical activity in medieval Poitiers, along with the ancient baptistery and the cathedral.Footnote 17 Saint-Hilaire was populated by a mixed group of canons and monks in its early centuries, until it was converted exclusively to the lifestyle of canons in 808.Footnote 18 In addition to its prominence, Saint-Hilaire's surviving documentation makes it a compelling case study. It is home to a particularly valuable trove of eighty-two charters dating from the mid-eighth century to ca. 1059, most of which survive in their original form, meaning that—unlike most charters preserved in cartularies—they include the full texts and witness lists.Footnote 19 This makes tracking the movement of property and the careers of individual canons easier.Footnote 20 This article will first review the background of Carolingian thought on canonical property, in order to understand the most likely intellectual context for the practices of tenth-century canons. It will then use the Saint-Hilaire charters to elucidate the types of property found at the house and the various transactions in which both the community as a whole and individual canons participated. Then the article shall explore how property-holding was regulated in the long tenth century, looking both at limits imposed on individual transactions as well as broader reform efforts. Particular attention will be paid to three reform charters issued by the leadership of Saint-Hilaire around the year 1000, which give insight into their concerns and priorities regarding the community's property-holding. The resulting detailed understanding of both the quotidian functioning of property at a tenth-century house and the ideals that drove its reform will allow me to conclude this essay with comments on two broader topics: the role of wealth and property in a dedicated religious life, and the nature of reform movements in the church of the Central Middle Ages.Footnote 21 The tenth-century canons of Saint-Hilaire had a complex attitude to wealth. They were simultaneously protective of private property (even beyond the limits allowed by the Carolingian normative sources) and deeply concerned with the communal life as they understood it, particularly with the stewardship of their common land. The middle ground these canons inhabited on an issue so central to discussions of the ideal religious life in this period illuminates a similarly liminal position that scholars must come to in understanding the process of reform itself—a position that balances rejection of simple cyclical models of corruption and correction while acknowledging that changes in practice and priorities did occur over time.
I. Carolingian Thought on the Property of Canons
The Carolingian era produced two landmark texts for canons: the Rule of Chrodegang, written by the bishop of Metz for his cathedral canons, and the legislation of the 816 council convened at Aachen by Louis the Pious. Chrodegang's rule was revolutionary in allowing canons to continue to enjoy usufruct of their private property after their entrance into the community. Its wider influence, however, is debated and it is unlikely to have had a direct impact on the canons of Saint-Hilaire.Footnote 22 The Aachen legislation is a different matter. While there is no explicit evidence that Saint-Hilaire followed the Aachen decrees, two compelling pieces of circumstantial evidence suggest that the canons would at least have been aware of the Institutio Canonicorum and its strictures on property.Footnote 23 First, Saint-Hilaire had a direct connection with Louis the Pious and his activity on behalf of canons. It was Louis, in his role as king of Aquitaine, who supervised the division of the mixed community of monks and canons at Saint-Hilaire in 808, sending those who wished to follow the Rule of Benedict to live at the nearby monastery of Nouaillé, while imposing what he called the institutio canonica at Saint-Hilaire.Footnote 24 It certainly seems plausible that less than a decade later Saint-Hilaire would have known of the legislative activities of its former patron. Second, there is evidence that the Aachen proceedings circulated in Aquitaine. One of the surviving letters of Louis publicizing the Aachen decrees to bishops who could not attend the council was addressed to Sicarius of Bordeaux; there is reason to believe, therefore, that a copy or copies of the canons would have been found in Sicarius's archdiocese.Footnote 25 It is thus worth a review of what the Aachen legislation includes on the subject of clerical property, as it was the normative source with which the canons of Saint-Hilaire were most likely to have been familiar.
The Aachen legislation was the result of a major council that extended over two years, from 816 to 817. The council fit within the Carolingian imperial ethos of church reform: it sought to define in detail the lifestyle of canons and of monks and to make clear what differentiated them, with the intent of imposing that distinction on houses around the empire.Footnote 26 Louis the Pious was not the first Carolingian to make this distinction; his father and grandfather had also been concerned by the fact that some houses in their Empire did not clearly delineate between monks and canons.Footnote 27 It was Louis's reign that saw the most extensive legislation codifying this distinction, however, including the voluminous decrees produced by the 816 session of his Aachen council, which was devoted to canons. These proceedings consist of a prologue, 113 texts drawn from conciliar and patristic sources, and thirty-two chapters composed at the council that offered guidelines for the canonical life. The authoritative texts are drawn from a number of different Late Antique and Merovingian councils, as well as many celebrated authors, including Isidore of Seville and Gregory the Great. The most extensive passages on the subject of property are drawn from Augustine of Hippo and his fifth-century follower Julianus Pomerius; while the inclusion of Augustinian thought is hardly surprising, what is striking is the pragmatic attitude to clerical possessions found in the particular Augustinian passages selected by the Aachen clerics.Footnote 28
Julianus Pomerius's only surviving work, the De vita contemplativa, was written around 500 CE and languished in relative obscurity until it was taken up by Chrodegang of Metz as the basis for a key portion of his Rule for canons.Footnote 29 In turn, the council of Aachen cited five key chapters on clerics and property from Pomerius's work.Footnote 30 The De vita contemplativa was composed at the request of a Bishop Julianus,Footnote 31 who apparently asked Pomerius to address a variety of challenges he faced as a pastor, including, as Pomerius explained, “whether it is expedient to hold the goods of the Church to provide for the community life of the brethren and their support, or to spurn them through love of perfection.”Footnote 32 Pomerius's answer to the bishop's question about property takes up eight chapters in book two of his treatise—more than half of which are excerpted in Aachen's decrees—in which he made a multi-layered argument concerning the appropriate relationship between the clergy and wealth. He first endorsed the apostolic ideal of giving up private property, a virtuous act that is undimmed if the individual, while serving in a role such as that of bishop, goes on to manage church property as a steward.Footnote 33 Furthermore, a cleric who renounced all his private property was counted among the poor and could legitimately accept a modest living from church property.Footnote 34 On the other hand, clerics who could not or would not give up their private property might still hold it, but they must not accept church income.Footnote 35
Pomerius's priorities were, first, to ensure a correct attitude toward wealth on the part of clerics, and second, to preserve church property for its primary purpose of aiding the poor. In his view, property—even private property—was not by nature evil. While the ideal for Pomerius was a cleric who gave up all his property to the church and lived as humbly as possible off a meager church stipend, a cleric who held private property for his own support and took nothing from the church would not be condemned. True fault, rather, would lie with a cleric who ostentatiously gave his money to the church in order to gain renown and then took too generous a stipend to support his luxurious lifestyle, or with a cleric who held enough private property to support himself and nonetheless accepted further income from the church. Such men sought worldly gain and wealth, and, in so doing, stole from the poor.Footnote 36
Pomerius was a follower of Augustine, whose thinking looms particularly large in the history of canons and clerical wealth. Augustine wrote a number of texts about the clerics that he gathered around himself at Hippo, many of whom he had brought with him from his community at Thagaste when he was importuned into the priesthood.Footnote 37 Some of those texts went on to form what was known as the Rule of Augustine, which would be central to the creation of a reformed canonical order in the eleventh century.Footnote 38 It is very intriguing, therefore, that the council of Aachen in 816 did not choose to include any of the texts later associated with the Rule of Augustine, but rather closed its patristic excerpts with two sermons (numbered 355 and 356) given by Augustine late in his life, in 425 and 426 CE.Footnote 39 In these sermons, Augustine did not focus on his ideal vision of clerical common life, but rather described his arrival at a more pragmatic position on the question of clerical property, prompted by controversies that embroiled members of his community.
Augustine began sermon 355 by reviewing his own history: when he agreed to become a priest of the church of Hippo, with his bishop's permission he continued the communal lifestyle of his monastery at Thagaste. When Augustine became bishop himself, he found that he could not perform his duties while living in a monastery, so he brought some of his monks to live with him in the bishop's residence in the city. These men faced a challenging situation: they were meant to hold all things in common, but they were surrounded by the wealth of the city.Footnote 40 As Peter Brown has commented, it was a situation ripe for scandal, and scandal did indeed come, in the person of Januarius, a priest in Augustine's community.Footnote 41 Januarius had two children: a daughter who was a nun and a son who was a monk. Januarius claimed that he had distributed his property to his family and owned nothing himself; any property he supervised was held in trust for his daughter. However, Januarius later changed his story and asserted that the property was his own, not his daughter's, and he claimed the right to leave that property after his death to Augustine's church.Footnote 42 Augustine was disturbed enough by Januarius's deception that he decided not to accept the bequest, but rather allowed the property to pass to Januarius's children, insisting that he would not accept property that came from questionable circumstances.Footnote 43 In response to this scandal, Augustine changed his policy regarding property and the brothers of his community.Footnote 44 While he still believed that clerics should distribute their property to the poor or the common holdings, he would no longer strip those who failed to do so of their clerical status, because that policy had encouraged the deception and hypocrisy of Januarius.Footnote 45 While Augustine disapproved of keeping property, viewing it as symptomatic of a lukewarm commitment to the religious life, the alternative was worse.Footnote 46
Augustine returned to the subject in sermon 356. Since writing the previous sermon, he had conducted an investigation of the property-holding of each member of his community. He found that only two men continued to hold private property, both of whom, Augustine asserted, would divest themselves of it when their family obligations allowed.Footnote 47 Augustine then went on to discuss the complicated ways that property could figure in the life of community members: a cleric might hold private property to support his family, for example, or use his money to build churches. While the church of Acts remained Augustine's ideal, he concluded that given the myriad of property arrangements that the lives of his clerics might necessitate, property itself was less important than how it was used and a cleric's attitude toward it.Footnote 48 A cleric who technically owned property but had no interest in its profits was not “rich” in any negative sense.Footnote 49 Finally, Augustine reiterated that he would not deprive property-owning clergy of clerical status, but he would do so for hypocrites who lied about their ownership of property. In selecting passages to excerpt from this most eminent of church fathers, therefore, the clerics of Aachen did not choose any of Augustine's strongest statements on clerical poverty, although he certainly reasserted the ideal of the communal life and joint ownership of property in these sermons. Rather, they chose two works that saw Augustine wrestle with the complexities of the ties between clerics and their property, in which he came to the position that what mattered most was not possession of property or the lack thereof, but rather a cleric's attitude toward wealth.
Following upon the lengthy collection of patristic texts and conciliar decrees, the Aachen proceedings offered guidelines for the life of canons. This portion of the text began by asserting both the worth of the canonical lifestyle and its challenges, while also elucidating certain key differences between canons and monks: “It is permissible for canons to wear linen, to eat meat, to give and receive private property and to possess church property in humility and righteousness, since we do not find that the sacred canons prohibit these things; on the other hand, they are strictly forbidden for monks, who lead a stricter life.”Footnote 50 While monks were required to give up all their property to the church and then received an income from it, canons often did not need to draw as much from the funds of their church, because they could continue to own private property.Footnote 51 Freed from the need to support all the clergy serving the house, church possessions were then to be reserved for their intended purposes: “From these resources, the soldiers of Christ are sustained, churches are adorned, the poor relieved and prisoners ransomed as opportunities arise.”Footnote 52 Because church property served these crucial purposes, it was particularly important for the stewards of that property to be scrupulous in administering it.
The Aachen decrees then went into more detail on the appropriate use of property by canons, drawing explicitly on the work of Julianus Pomerius.Footnote 53 It asserted that those canons who held their own property and could survive on it should not seek more than a minimal level of support from the church. Those who were poor, either by birth or by choice, might accept more from the church. Either path could be virtuous, as long as the intention was good. What was not acceptable was the multiplication of resources by some canons to fund luxurious living, resulting in vastly unequal incomes for different clerics.Footnote 54 Furthermore, canons who received resources from the church were expected to do something in return: they should behave blamelessly and be attentive to their duties, “so that no member of the congregation is useless or idle, accepting a stipend from the Church with no justification.”Footnote 55
Taken together, the collected patristic writings and original legislation in the council of Aachen form a striking picture of the appropriate place of property in the life of a canon. It is fair to label that picture as Augustinian, given the prominent place both of the bishop of Hippo himself and of his disciple Julianus Pomerius in the pertinent portions of the text. The writings of Augustine, however, contain multitudes, and it is telling that the Aachen clerics chose not to invoke him at his most stringent on the subject of property (as later generations of canons and their proponents would do). Rather, they selected texts that show Augustine asserting an apostolic ideal of communal property while acknowledging that it was nonetheless acceptable to possess private property if it was done in the correct spirit. Julianus Pomerius and the Institutio Canonicorum of Aachen in turn reiterated that less important than the existence of wealth was the attitude to it, as well as the preservation of church income for the aid of the poor. The normative text most likely to have influenced Saint-Hilaire's canons, therefore, presented a tolerant view of the possession of property while continuing to discourage greed and to remind canons of the primary purpose of the church's wealth. With this in mind, let us turn to the types of property found at Saint-Hilaire in the long tenth century, and the ideals that governed their stewardship.
II. Property at Saint-Hilaire, 816–1059
The unusually large number of charters surviving from Saint-Hilaire between 816 and 1059—and the fact that many of them exist in their original form, including witness lists—means that it is possible to know this house unusually well, from its practices of property-holding to its internal organization. Saint-Hilaire was governed by an abbot. The charters provide us with the names of a handful of men who held that position between the mid-eighth and mid-tenth century, including three bishops of Poitiers.Footnote 56 A turning point in the rule of the house then came by the early 940s: a charter dated June 941/942 shows William III Tow-Head, count of Poitou (r. 932/4-963), holding the abbacy of Saint-Hilaire.Footnote 57 From that point through the end of our period, the counts of Poitou (who would, from 957, also hold the title of duke of Aquitaine) served as lay abbots of the community; the most important figures, for our purposes, are Duke William IV Iron-Arm (r. 963-993) and Duke William V the Great (r. 993-1029).Footnote 58 Lay abbacy was a common practice among secular rulers beginning in the Carolingian era, and it was not seen by contemporaries as necessarily exploitative or corruptive. Indeed, the duke-abbots of Saint-Hilaire on more than one occasion returned lands and rights that they held by dint of their office to the community, and as we shall see, they oversaw attempts to improve the regulation of property-holding at the house.Footnote 59
Under the abbot of Saint-Hilaire there served a variety of officers. There are numerous references to canons who held the rank of priest (presbyter or sacerdos), deacon (levita or decanus), and subdeacon (subdecanus). The charters also record titles associated with more specialized responsibilities, whether in the choir, the school, or the production of documents.Footnote 60 Of more interest to the question of property at Saint-Hilaire are two offices that were frequently involved with grants: the treasurer and the provost. The treasurer (called claviger most frequently, but also archiclavus, thesaurarius, and aedituus) seems to have been the more eminent of the two offices, as it was only held by one person at a time, and that person was often prominent in other aspects of their career—treasurers of Saint-Hilaire in this period included the bishops Ebles of Limoges, Fulbert of Chartres, and Joscelin of Bordeaux.Footnote 61 The provost, meanwhile, was a less exclusive title, as more than one prepositus is listed in charters from the same time frame—and even, on occasion, in a single charter.Footnote 62 As I will discuss below, it was often the treasurer or provost who made a formal request to the abbot to grant common land to an individual, and those officers also played a prominent role in large-scale attempts to reform Saint-Hilaire's property-holding.Footnote 63
Within the charters of Saint-Hilaire there appear two basic categories of property: first, private property held by individual canons, and second, property held in common by the house and its members, although the latter might at any time be granted in lease to a canon (in which case it was called a benefice) or to a layperson (called a precarial grant).Footnote 64 There was a good amount of fluidity between these categories, as private property might be given as a gift to the house, and a benefice or precarial grant—technically the property of the house—could be held by a family for such a long period that they came to view it as family property.
Private property often came to canons, not surprisingly, from their blood relations. At times these transactions were captured in the written record at the moment they occurred. For example, in March of 913, a man named Ingelricus and his wife sold various allods to Ingelricus's brother, Launonus, treasurer of Saint-Hilaire.Footnote 65 Launonus paid one hundred silver solidi for the properties in question, which included various types of cultivated land, open pastures, buildings, and a number of serfs. The private nature of the property is established by the use of the term allod (allodus) and by Ingelricus's declaration to his brother that “we turn it over from our power to your lordship, for holding, possessing, and doing what you wish there by hereditary law.”Footnote 66 These clear signals of the private status of property appear regularly in the documents; there is no sense that the existence of such property was something to be avoided or elided.
Some of these documents describe transactions that appear to have been fully private, involving none of the house's common property. Why, then, were they included among the house's records? When Launonus bought land from his brother and sister-in-law, or Archambaldus sold a hill-top field to his fellow cleric Salomon, or Amalricus sold land to Ebles, treasurer of the house, why did Saint-Hilaire preserve records of these events, beyond the obvious fact that the buyers and sellers were canons?Footnote 67 The question becomes even more pressing when considering the inclusion in the archives of charters recording transactions between laypeople with no visible connection to Saint-Hilaire.Footnote 68 At the very least, the fact that documents noting canons' private property were preserved suggests that there were no qualms about the house's clergy owning such property, or indeed even acquiring more of it. It is also possible that in preserving records of these sales, the house was looking to the future, hoping that the private property would end up as the property of the house through later gifts, whether from lay owners or from canons.Footnote 69
In other charters, it is possible to catch a glimpse of canons' private property at the moment it ceased to be private—that is, when the canon donated it to the common holdings of Saint-Hilaire.Footnote 70 For example, the canons Iterius and Rainardus purchased land from the allod of their fellow canon Salomon in the summer of 1017.Footnote 71 In a later appendix to the sale charter, written in a different hand, Rainardus turned over his portion of the allod to Hilary and the common property of the brothers. Rainardus wrote, “I give a certain allod of mine that I bought from the cantor Salomon, and Iterius with me, as this charter shows, to blessed Hilary for the aid of my soul, placing this charter on his body, in such an arrangement that, while I live, I shall hold it under a payment of six denarii . . . and after my death the brothers of blessed Hilary shall have it.”Footnote 72 Rainardus thus narrated the transformation of an allod that he had purchased into a benefice that he held from the saint, via a ceremony that involved laying the document itself on the tomb of Hilary.Footnote 73
Rainardus's description offers an apt transition to the second category of land at Saint-Hilaire: the common property of the house. Rainardus made clear that he was giving the land both to the community of canons and to the saint himself—hence the gesture of laying the charter on Hilary's grave. This understanding of common property as belonging both to the canons and to the saint is reflected throughout the charter record. Lands and assets were given to the clerics as a group, as when Ebles, the former bishop of Limoges (r. 944-976/977), treasurer of Saint-Hilaire, and brother and uncle of successive dukes of Aquitaine, gave a donation “to the clerics of that same church serving God day and night there.”Footnote 74 Certain of the charters refer explicitly to the entirety of the common property holdings; one document from the summer of 969 gives a gift in communio kanonicorum, while another from about a year later states that the donation should be used for the support of all the brothers and that in future the canons shall hold it in common.Footnote 75 At the same time, striking language found again and again in these documents underlined the ultimate ownership of the house's property by the saint himself. A charter from the mid-eleventh century articulates this sentiment in its opening line: “The most blessed Hilary held an estate whose name is Benaicum, and Hugh, viscount of Châtellerault, held custom in it.”Footnote 76 Other gifts were made to “our most excellent lord Hilary,”Footnote 77 “into the lordship of Hilary,”Footnote 78 or to the basilica “where that precious man lies in his human body.”Footnote 79 In addition to its pragmatic value in supporting the functioning of the institution and the feeding of its members, therefore, this land was the property of their holy patron, and must accordingly be protected.Footnote 80 Gifts to that property might also encourage the saintly confessor-bishop to offer aid to the donor at critical times in the future.
Looking closely at the charters, yet another layer of organization within the common lands is visible. Land that is described as “the property of blessed Hilary” is sometimes further designated as belonging to the treasury or to the lands intended specifically to support the brothers as a group. For example, the treasurer Ebles of Limoges approached his brother William III Tow-Head in ca. 957, asking “that [William] might give to a certain man named Ucbertus land from [Ebles's] benefice and from the teshauro of the above-mentioned Hilary.” Another document showed the treasurer Savaricus giving land “from his benefice . . . that is, from the land of blessed Hilary, belonging to the thesauro.” Land was also described simply as bordering the terra thesaurarii.Footnote 81 These references suggests that the treasurer—an officer to whom was entrusted the care of sacred vessels and other treasures of the house—had been allotted some specific estates whose income may have been used to help him carry out his duties.
Numerous charters, meanwhile, refer to land within the property belonging to the saint that was intended to support the canons. Such land might be labeled the fraterna terra or fraterna fraustra, as in a document from 974, in which Duke William IV described a request that he “concede something from the fraternal land; that is, from the property of blessed Hilary.”Footnote 82 In other documents, land was given to the saint and designated expressly for the support of the canons.Footnote 83 These formulations suggest that within the lands belonging to the saint and the house there were further subdivisions into categories of land specifically for the support of the brothers and land dedicated to the support of the treasury and church. Fundamentally, it was all common land, but common land allocated for particular ends.
Of course, that allocation could change with time, most commonly when the land was granted to an individual in exchange for regular payment. Many grants from common property went to canons of the house. A typical arrangement is recorded in a document from Duke William IV, dating to the early summer of 974, when William granted to a canon named Isembard various properties from the common land of the brothers that included lands, a house, and a mill on a small brook.Footnote 84 Isembard was permitted to designate two successors from among the canons who would hold the benefice after him. Isembard and future beneficiaries would pay five solidi annually on the feast of Saint-Hilaire. Similar arrangements were made when common land was granted to laypeople. For example, Rodgarius, the provost of Saint-Hilaire, asked William Iron-Arm in 967 to grant land from the common property of the brothers to two laymen, Radulf and Odo.Footnote 85 Payments were established and limitations were put on the number of successors to whom the beneficiaries could pass the property.
As these transactions indicate, the house's assets did not simply move out from the common property to a beneficiary and then back into common holdings again. Rather, the benefices or precarial grants could be transferred from one tenant to another. In some cases, the original charter allowed the tenant to name a certain number of successors who would serve as his heirs after his death.Footnote 86 In other cases the transfer was arranged at a later date.Footnote 87 At times the terms of the transfer were of significant complexity, as when a subdeacon, Raino, turned over part of his benefice to another cleric, the cantor Salomon, for a five-year term during which Salomon might plant vines on the property or build as he wished. After five years, they would divide the proceeds.Footnote 88 Such arrangements were not exclusive to canons; rather, we also find canons transferring their benefices to laypeople (or vice versa),Footnote 89 and laypeople passing estates among themselves.Footnote 90
Given the multiplicity of ways in which the common land might be doled out to individuals, and the concern that any such grant might result in reduced income for Saint-Hilaire from that land for years or generations to come if the recipients were not scrupulous in fulfilling their obligations, the job of supervising these transactions and overseeing the general state of the common property must have been a critical one. The abbot, unsurprisingly, seems to have been the ultimate authority in these matters, and occasionally he would be approached directly by someone desiring a grant.Footnote 91 In many cases, however, the abbot was solicited by the provost or treasurer on behalf of a would-be tenant. In a typical example, under the abbacy of Duke William V the Great, the treasurer Gauzfredus asked that a precarial grant be made to Rainus, sub-deacon of Saint-Hilaire, out of the property of Hilary.Footnote 92 The frequent appearance of the provost or treasurer in these transactions suggests that their responsibilities included supervision of the common land.Footnote 93
The myriad complexities of this property-holding system are perhaps best captured by tracking the activities of a single individual who appears repeatedly in the records of the house; one such canon was Salomon, a deacon, a cantor, and a scribe who wrote numerous charters.Footnote 94 Salomon featured in documents of the house across a fifty-year period from 967 to 1017.Footnote 95 In these documents, he engaged in a wide variety of property transactions, thus illustrating the various aspects of property-holding in which an individual canon might participate. First, he both owned private property and held land from the common property of Saint-Hilaire. Examples of the former come when he exchanged one of his allods for a benefice, when he sold an allod for payment, and when he purchased another cleric's land in a private transaction.Footnote 96 Benefices, meanwhile, came to him from a variety of sources: usually they were transferred from the possession of another cleric,Footnote 97 but on one occasion he took over a layperson's precarial grant.Footnote 98 Salomon seems to have consciously built concentrations of property in certain geographic areas. Many of his holdings clustered around the small church of Sainte-Triaise,Footnote 99 for example, and he also made an effort to acquire land bordered by land he already owned.Footnote 100 In an interesting example of the latter case, Salomon exchanged land with another canon, the treasurer Savaricus.Footnote 101 The treasurer gave to Salomon a piece of arable land from his benefice, belonging ultimately to Saint-Hilaire. While no yearly payment is specified in the document, it is likely that one was required, given that this was standard in such arrangements. In exchange, Salomon parted with a piece of his private property, turning over to Savaricus a vineyard on the side of a hill near Saint-Hilaire. At first glance this might seem like an unequal trade—Savaricus received a piece of property unencumbered by other claims, while Salomon received a benefice. This is flawed reasoning, however, on a number of levels. First, it assumes that private property was seen as superior to benefices, when in fact the tie with the saint created by a benefice may have rendered it more valuable than private land, at least in the eyes of some. Furthermore, it might have been more difficult to realize income from the vineyard, as it required more skilled and costly labor to maintain the vines. Finally, the benefice that Salomon received in this transaction was bordered on one side by land he already owned. He may have seen it as worthwhile to create a larger estate out of two contiguous pieces of land, even if it meant giving up an allod.
Taken together, the documents surrounding Salomon show that a prominent member of the house (both a scribe and a leader of the choir) owned property in various types of holdings, and that he acquired further property throughout his career, both in the form of private property and benefices. Furthermore, he seems to have worked to consolidate his holdings into more coherent estates. None of the documents show any concern on his part for the morality of collecting property. While the Aachen decrees endorsed the ownership of private property by canons, and while they did state that canons could “give and receive” such property, they did not give an explicit endorsement of the kind of concerted estate-building in which Salomon and others took part. In fact, despite its acceptance of private property, Aachen condemned the pursuit of wealth by canons.Footnote 102 This is not to suggest that Salomon and others were knowingly defiant of Aachen or that historians should think of them as corrupt. Rather, it argues that if the Aachen decrees were known at Saint-Hilaire, the understanding of the acceptable use of property contained therein had evolved to allow for activity such as that of Salomon, which apparently struck the denizens of the house as appropriate and normal. If holding and even building private estates did not trouble canons in this period, what then did they see as abuses in need of remedy? What aspects of property transactions did the documents seek to regulate? And what circumstances provoked the house into wider-scale efforts to reform its property-holding?
III. Limits on Property Movement: Regulation and Reform
Regulations on property appear frequently in the charters, and they range from limits imposed on individual transactions to wider reform efforts. At the individual level, provisions might be added to the terms of a particular grant that limited the ways in which it was used. The impetus for regulation sometimes came from the tenant, as individuals or families holding a benefice or precarial grant sought to correct an arrangement that was perceived to have fallen into an unacceptable state. In an illustrative example, Ademar, a canon of Saint-Hilaire, agreed to return to the house land that his family had held for many years and had invested considerable money to improve. In his quitclaim, which is dated to November 1058, Ademar stated:
I held a certain land beneath the castle of Saint-Hilaire on the river Boivre, which my parents had held and on which they built a mill of two wheels. The canons of the blessed bishop [Hilary] . . . corrected me, saying that neither I nor my parents held this property rightly. For my part, I, investigating more diligently in my mind, reconsidering the property as well as other things, finally learned that the above-mentioned building was [part of] the land of Saint Hilary . . . Therefore, because it seemed to me unjust to cheat the Lord's servant, for the salvation of my soul and for the redemption of my parents, who did not hold the above-mentioned property rightly, I gave assent to the demand of the canons, devotedly releasing the above-mentioned land with the building to the blessed bishop.Footnote 103
It is worth noting that the canons and their officials immediately returned usufruct of the property to Ademar and two successors of his choosing from among the canons, in recognition of the amount of money his family had put into the land over the years. Presumably, with the goal of reasserting ultimate ownership of the land having been achieved, the canons wished to continue what had, after all, been a productive relationship.Footnote 104
While tenants such as Ademar might occasionally be moved to return property or clarify the terms of a lease, regulations on individual transactions were more often initiated by the house and were written into the terms of a given grant. For example, Duke William IV Iron-Arm, abbot of Saint-Hilaire, regularly established a limit in his grants on the number of heirs to whom a canon could pass a benefice. In a typical case, William granted land at Briou to Radfredus, a cleric of Saint-Hilaire, “and to two of his successors, whom he might choose from the canons of the above-mentioned confessor.”Footnote 105
More sweeping than clauses written into individual transactions, however, were attempts by the leadership of the house to institute broader regulation of property-holding. The first such regulation attested to in the charter record came at the end of December 889 or 890, when King Odo of western Francia (r. 888-898) was asked by the abbot of Saint-Hilaire to confirm the principle that benefices could be granted from the canons' common land in exchange for rent. As the king put it in his charter agreeing to this request, “they asked that we concede and confirm villas transferred by the above-mentioned abbot from the power of the most excellent confessor of Christ, Hilary, to the brothers in various uses necessary for them.”Footnote 106 If King Odo confirmed the legitimacy of making grants from the common land, later officials of the house issued documents that reacted to the ways in which that principle had been applied. At the end of the tenth century, the treasurer of Saint-Hilaire, a deacon named Gauzfredus,Footnote 107 issued a charter in which he—with the support of Duke William V, the abbot of the house—attempted to come to grips with what he saw as the major concern regarding the property of Saint-Hilaire: the danger that it was being alienated too far from the common holdings through possession by the wrong sort of tenants. Gauzfredus began his charter by bemoaning the problems plaguing the church at the millennium, “with the end of time at hand.”Footnote 108 At this inauspicious moment, “it happens that the properties which the holy fathers conferred on the holy church are now carried away by force, are now alienated, are now claimed by unjust ministers, and only the name of the holy church remains, while the revenue of the church estates is put to the service of those unworthy and criminal.”Footnote 109 Gauzfredus felt confident that reward would come to those who sought to remedy this unfortunate situation.
His method of remedy was interesting in its moderation. He did not prescribe the seizing of property from those who held it unjustly. Rather, Gauzfredus seemed to advocate a wait-and-see policy; regarding churches and estates owned by Saint-Hilaire, he referred to a time, “when our churches, which are held by many people, shall be released from occupation and freed from those by whom they are held . . . [and] they shall revert to communal lordship.”Footnote 110 While Gauzfredus may have simply wished out of discretion not to refer to violent coercion as a method for getting these properties returned, his use of the passive voice and his phrasing suggest to me that he intended to wait until lands were freed through the death of tenants, or perhaps until some of those who held churches and estates would be moved to give them up in a manner similar to the quitclaim of the canon Ademar.
What then would be the fate of these churches and allods in future? Gauzfredus was clear that they must “revert to communal lordship” and “be held for communal and fraternal use.” However, this did not preclude the assignment of these assets to new tenants. Rather, better judgment must be exercised in carrying out these assignments: the allods must not be fragmented into overly small sections, and they must be designated to the right sort of tenant. Gauzfredus advised, “faithful men shall be chosen, who, with fidelity having been sworn to Saint Hilary and to the brothers, shall take those [properties] under their protection for oversight, and they shall bring back the revenue faithfully to the common enclosure.”Footnote 111 Finally, Gauzfredus prescribed the appointment of a responsible canon who would oversee the common properties.
What concerned Gauzfredus about Saint-Hilaire's property, then, was not the existence of canons' private property, which went essentially unmentioned. Nor did he dispute the principle that benefices could be granted from common land. Rather, he was troubled by the terms under which the benefices had been granted in the past and the resulting alienation of the property from the common holdings. He did not seek to eliminate tenants, but rather to institute more care and oversight in the process of selecting men to whom the house's lands would be entrusted.
Roughly fifteen years after Gauzfredus's charter, Duke William V the Great of Aquitaine, the abbot of the house, issued two charters addressing once again the protection of the common properties of Saint-Hilaire.Footnote 112 Unlike Gauzfredus's document, which lists no witnesses, William's were witnessed by many of the region's elite, including the bishop of Poitiers and the count of Angoulême.Footnote 113 William began each of his charters with a meditation on the responsibility incumbent upon those who oversee church property and the consequences they face should they neglect it: “If anyone . . . does not dispose of the things that were subject to their authority with fair government, and through negligence and lack of care allows these things gradually to come to ruin and to fall into deterioration, let him know that he shall incur the wrath of the highest judge, and he shall prepare the ruin of his own soul.”Footnote 114 William's mindfulness regarding his responsibilities as abbot can be seen throughout his tenure, whether he was returning rights that he held over Saint-Hilaire's lands to the community, or, in this case, stepping in when he learned that “bad customs” were resulting in losses to Saint-Hilaire.Footnote 115 Moved by reverence for his responsibility and exhorted by the canons, William sought to stem this tide of estates “separated by crooked business and absolutely alienated from the use of this place.”Footnote 116 In his second charter, William revisited the responsibility of those in leadership positions at religious communities for protecting church property. While evil deeds might be prevailing, due to rabid tyrants, lax clerics, and—appropriately enough, for a document from Hilary's church—the Arian heresy, William vowed that under his leadership “the spouse of God shall not remain widowed by her own ministers.”Footnote 117
How did these “bad customs” troubling William manifest themselves—what, specifically, were the threats to Saint-Hilaire's property and what remedies did William propose? He was concerned with two things. The first was that a proper decision-making process be put in place to oversee the granting of common land. William specifically worried that the common property of the canons would be doled out to someone by the provost or another administrator “against the advice and will of the canons.” Even an official whose job description included supervision of the house's property should not act unilaterally, but rather should consult with the canons before granting the common property.Footnote 118 A provost who neglected these duties risked excommunication, which conveys the seriousness of the matter. Proper procedure would not only provide checks on the power of any individual to make grants, but would result in the selection of the right sort of person as a beneficiary. In particular, if that beneficiary was a layperson, William forbade that he or she be unknown to the canons, advocating instead for someone “who frequented the church and was useful in that place.” That person must also accept the conditions imposed on the property, including regular payments and returning the property to the community upon his or her death.Footnote 119
William's second concern involved internal threats to common property: that canons themselves would try to sell or plunder common property, or would “claim inheritance in the properties because of their relations.”Footnote 120 The latter complaint suggests that even when canons gave up their family property to the common holdings, they remained invested in it and perhaps tried to dictate its management. Given that, in his first charter, William scolded canons who tried to use their former worldly status to influence decision-making processes within the community, it seems that vestiges of the canons' previous lives often troubled both community relations and the financial well-being of the house. William warned that any canon who treated the common land inappropriately would be forced to give up his role in the community: “He shall not have the consolation of this place, but as a bandit and a liar he should relinquish the status of canon . . . let him be expelled as an enemy by the decision of the canons.”Footnote 121
In the three charters of Saint-Hilaire that might plausibly be described as instituting broader reforms of the house's property-holding, therefore, there is no concern expressed about the fact that purely private property of canons exists, or even that the canons built or increased their private holdings during their careers. Rather, the regulations issued focused on the management of common property. First, there was anxiety that canons might treat the common land proprietarily, in some cases due to long possession of a benefice and in others due to the fact that the land in question had once belonged to their family. Second, the leaders of Saint-Hilaire worried that precarial grants had gone to the wrong sort of lay beneficiary—those whose good will and morality had not been adequately confirmed. Finally, the documents limited the arrangements under which such grants could be made. Specifically, they frowned on multi-generational grants, perhaps because such arrangements facilitated proprietary feeling. In order to try to regain control of these matters, the documents put increased responsibility on the shoulders of the provost or treasurer, and established a system to check their decision-making.
IV. Conclusion: Reform, Property, and Tenth-Century Canons
Property at Saint-Hilaire in the years between 816 and 1059 included both the private estates of canons and lands held in common by the community, albeit with fluidity between the two categories. The desire to eliminate private property among the canons, which was expressed at the Lateran Council in 1059 and which was a foundational element of the movement of regular canons, is nowhere to be found. On the contrary, the allowance of private property for canons, established in Carolingian normative sources, was perpetuated and expanded upon. Private property was not merely tolerated as a regrettable remnant of a canon's former life and responsibilities, or because it allowed more of the church's income to be used for worthier purposes, or because it might someday become the property of the church. Rather, it was a resource to be held openly by the canons, to be developed, enlarged, and tended.
At the same time, the charters of Saint-Hilaire showed a deep and abiding interest in maintaining common property. Common property not only provided support for the brothers and the institution, it belonged to their saintly patron, Hilary. The leaders of the house were charged with its maintenance and would be punished, both in this life and the next, if they neglected it. Reforms of property-holding at Saint-Hilaire were concerned exclusively with the recovery, maintenance, and future protection of common property. The documents of Saint-Hilaire thus show us a community in which both common and private property were embraced, and if properly regulated—that is, if common property was held in appropriate leases and did not vanish into private coffers—coexisted harmoniously.
What, then, happened at Saint-Hilaire after 1059—in the era associated with the Gregorian reforms and the expansion of the regular canons? There is not space here to give that subject its full due, but a brief sketch is in order. In the 1060s and 1070s, concerns identified with these reform movements did indeed appear in the documents of Saint-Hilaire. First, certain elements that were already present became more prominent. For example, attention to the common life had long existed in the form of common prayer and jointly-held lands, but in the late eleventh century new aspects appeared, such as the practice of canons issuing charters as a group, rather than through the abbot or treasurer, and the use of the term “chapter.”Footnote 122 Second, entirely new elements, consistent with the ideals of the outside reform movements, began to emerge. For the first time, there is the enforcement of clerical celibacy, for example, as well as Saint-Hilaire's support for the creation of a small community in Burgundy in 1080 that would live without any private property.Footnote 123 Champions of wider reform movements sometimes intervened directly at Saint-Hilaire; most notably, Pope Gregory VII issued three documents for the house in the spring of 1074.Footnote 124 Nonetheless, the driving force for change at Saint-Hilaire often remained local: the lead actors in this period were still the dukes of Aquitaine, as well as certain bishops known to be in the duke's circle.Footnote 125 It is worth noting that even the charters of Gregory VII were issued at the request of the house's local advocates in Poitiers. Saint-Hilaire's transition from the tenth century to the era of papal reform and the regular canons thus showed an intriguing mix of continuity and change, of influence by outside and local authorities. How can this case study contribute to current thinking about the nature of reform movements in the church of the Central Middle Ages?
For historians of the tenth century and its church, reform is a fraught concept. With the exception of certain monastic movements, the tenth century has long been more associated in scholarship with conditions that demanded reform—decadence, chaos, and corruption—than with reform itself. This has been true both in work on politics, which saw discussions of the decline of the Carolingian empire and the disorder of the “feudal revolution,” and in writing about a church that had moved away from Carolingian standards and fallen into the grip of lay overlords.Footnote 126 Both in the rhetoric of the Gregorians and in the work of scholars who followed them, reform often appeared as a necessary corrective to conditions in the tenth century, moving the church from its destructive path. The result of this persistent narrative was two-fold: first, scholarly neglect of the tenth-century church relative to the eras on either side; and second, a teleological vision that led inexorably toward unified movements of reform and change in the late eleventh century.Footnote 127
While there have always been important voices to challenge this narrative—Gerd Tellenbach is a notable example—in recent years it has come under attack from multiple angles.Footnote 128 First, scholars have taken increased note of the ways in which modern interpretations of medieval reform have been shaped by historical and historiographical movements, including the Gregorians themselves, as well as the Reformation of the sixteenth century.Footnote 129 Second, detailed studies of how reform movements worked on the ground have shown that even the most influential of them were subject to local influence and variable success.Footnote 130 Third, scholars have become more aware of the hazards of using reform rhetoric as evidence. Steven Vanderputten, for example, has explored the slippage between the description of reform movements found in texts written by their proponents and the actual progress of events at particular religious communities. As Vanderputten pithily states, “reform, in addition to being a historical reality, also functioned as a literary theme,” whose conventions required the decline and decadence of a given house or region and the arrival of external authorities to impose change.Footnote 131 Vanderputten advises skepticism regarding all such conventions, as they tend not to hold upon close inspection. To take at face value accusations like those of Hildebrand at the Lateran regarding existing orders of canons and their landholding practices, therefore, has become less tenable.
This general pattern in scholarship on the tenth-century church holds true for work on canons more specifically. Research has tended to neglect tenth-century houses, focusing either on the Carolingian regulation of the canonical life or—even more dominantly—on the emergence of the regular canons.Footnote 132 There has been particular interest in identifying the moment that “regularity” arrived at a given house, usually in the later eleventh or twelfth centuries.Footnote 133 But this, too, is changing: another manifestation of the challenge to certain long-standing assumptions about reform and the church in the Central Middle Ages has been a growing tendency to eschew firm lines between tenth-century belief and practice on the one hand and Gregorian reforms or those of the regular canons on the other. For example, the excellent work of Yannick Veyrenche has shown that reform measures appeared at houses in the Rhône valley well before the wider spread of the regular canons in the late eleventh century.Footnote 134
This newer scholarship on canons is laudable, as it privileges continuity between eras over the drawing of strict lines between them. It also places eleventh-century reform movements at houses of canons in the context of earlier events, asserting, in the words of Michel Parisse, that “the movement of regular canons . . . had deep roots that reach back into the tenth century.”Footnote 135 Yet this approach also has potential pitfalls, as it seems at times to search for elements of the movement of regular canons avant la lettre. One of the few direct references in recent scholarship to William the Great's charters for Saint-Hilaire in 1016, for example, refers to his work there as a “precocious” reform; it is, of course, only “precocious” if understood in terms of events that had yet to occur.Footnote 136 While there is value in examining continuity across periods, one should be wary of a swing too far in this direction.
Rather, what Saint-Hilaire shows is how much “reform” in the church defied simple dichotomies of change and continuity, international and local, corruption and correction. There was no defining moment at Saint-Hilaire when common land, or solicitude for the communal life, emerged in the documents. The assumption that there was at some point a change of heart among the canons, a turn toward “regularity,” proves false; rather, the concern for the communal life is visible throughout the charter record.Footnote 137 Fraternal land and its supervision, distribution, and preservation were also ongoing concerns, alongside private property, transactions, and residences.Footnote 138 Furthermore, while the three tenth-century reform charters discussed above are certainly more detailed in their measures to protect common holdings, there is ample evidence elsewhere in the documents of smaller-scale, ongoing efforts at such oversight. These include an oft-repeated charter format that shows treasurers or provosts approaching the abbot for approval of a benefice, as well as references to group decision-making regarding property.Footnote 139
Based on the evidence of Saint-Hilaire, therefore, an interpretation of tenth-century canons that posits no interest in reform or communal life before the advent of the Europe-wide movement of regular canons cannot stand—and indeed, has already been discredited by Veyrenche and others. But scholars should also be wary of any attempt to identify a revelatory “reform moment” before 1059. Nor would a model of cyclical reforms interspersed with periods of disinterest or dissolution be convincing. Rather, this essay has argued that stewardship of common property and its significance in the life of the canons are a constant hum in the charters. Concerted efforts to support the common life, such as those of Gauzfredus or William the Great—or indeed some of those advocated by later eleventh-century reformers—appear as changes in scale rather than as “precocious” innovations or as flickers of light amidst darkness. Reform movements did bring their own momentum and emphases to a house such as Saint-Hilaire—both the presence of documents issued by Gregory VII and the prioritizing of issues such as clerical celibacy represent breaks from the past. That break, however, was softened and filtered by the work of local authorities, as the reform movement had to adapt to and incorporate the traditions of a particular place. The story of property and reform at Saint-Hilaire, therefore, provides further ammunition for scholars seeking to complicate models of reform in the church of the Central Middle Ages.
