The Papal Revolution

The history of the church in England in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries was deeply influenced by the aftermath of two revolutionary events. The Norman Conquest was no less dramatic in its impact on ecclesiastical life than in the changes which it wrought in secular society. The church, like the land, was under new management, and the new French élite introduced important organisational changes based on continental models. Even more significant than the Norman take-over of the Old English church, however, was the rise to power at Rome of a radical group who shattered age-old concepts of the relationship of religion and government within Christian society. This movement is known to historians as the papal reform, or the Gregorian or Hildebrandine reform, after its most dramatic exponent, the archdeacon Hildebrand, who from 1073 to 1085 pontificated over the western church as Pope Gregory VII.

The reform movement at Rome falls into two distinct phases. From 1046 to 1057 the emphasis was placed on moral renewal. A succession of German popes, of whom the greatest was Leo IX (1048–54), with the full co-operation of the Emperor Henry III, mounted a determined attack on those clergy who had fallen from the ideals of the early church. The twin evils which they sought to eradicate were simony, or the purchase of ecclesiastical office from patrons, and nicolaitism, the keeping of wives, or in reforming eyes mistresses, by priests. Simony was regarded by hard-liners at Rome as heretical, for it involved trading in the gift of the Holy Spirit. The squalor of sexual relations could not be tolerated in those who celebrated the sacrament of the altar. Clerical marriage, moreover, created the likelihood of an hereditary priestly caste, passing on churches and bishoprics from father to son as family possessions. The papal reform movement was an attempt to recover the purity of the primitive church. It offended a great many vested interest, but it is remarkable how quickly its basic premises came to be accepted by Western Christendom.

At Christmas 1099, Bohemond, Prince of Antioch, completed the pilgrimage upon which he had set out four years earlier by praying in the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. The city had been captured by the First Crusaders nine months earlier while Bohemond was still securing control over his new territories in northern Syria. Up to the time of the capture of Antioch he had been one of the main leaders of the crusade. He was by descent a Norman, his grandfather Tancred of Hauteville having a quiver-full of sons who sought their fortunes outside the duchy. Bohemond's father, Robert Guiscard, had made himself master of southern Italy in a series of campaigns from the early 1050s into the 1070s. In 1081, Guiscard had even invaded the Byzantine territory of what is now Albania and northern Greece and defeated its emperor in battle. Bohemond (his unusual name stemming from a legendary giant) continued his father's policies of expansion at the expense of the Christian Greeks both before and after the First Crusade, but it was that expedition against the Muslims that gave him opportunity to seize one of the greatest cities of the Levant and create his principality.

He was not the only significant Norman to play a part in the dramatic events which followed upon Pope Urban II's sermon at Clermont in November 1095. Robert, duke of Normandy (the eldest surviving son ofWilliam the Conqueror) also proved himself a fine soldier in the holy war. It was claimed that he had been offered the throne of Jerusalem itself following the city's capture, but that he had declined the offer. Arnulf de Chocques, the Patriarch responsible for restoring the structure of the Church in a region long under Muslim control, was formerly a ducal chaplain in Normandy. Several contemporary Latin chronicles stressed the importance of the Norman contribution to the great adventure, the pilgrimage in arms, which established Christian rule over the Holy Land for the first time since its conquest by the armies of Islam some five centuries earlier. The popular, vernacular literature represented by twelfth-century chansons de geste (songs of great deeds) fêted Duke Robert's heroism for generations afterwards.

Normandy and England in the central Middle Ages are exceptionally well provided with chronicles, even though their composition, as we shall see, tended to occur in clusters, leaving gaps for periods of great upheaval and trauma. For example, there are few contemporary indigenous reports on the settlement of the vikings in Normandy c. 900 or on the conquest of England in 1066 or on the ‘loss of Normandy’ in 1204. Conquests are usually reported by the conquerors and not by the victims, while defeats are usually digested over a long time and the victims’ views do not emerge until the second or third generation afterwards. Moreover, as this chapter will show, historians’comments are not static but change over time, sometimes frequently. Hence, as we shall see, many narratives were revised, updated, and altered by their authors as they went along, illustrating the changing perspectives on the (recent) past. The chronicles of Normandy and England also illustrate the interesting change of balance between the two nations. Normandy rose from a small, relatively insignificant, principality to become the dominant political force in France (and England), but then fell out of the English orbit in 1204. England in contrast, having suffered two successive submissions to foreign forces (Danes in 1016 and Normans in 1066), emerged as the dominant partner of the Anglo-Norman alliance before, in 1204, it ‘lost’ Normandy. Conquest and defeat led to the migration of people across national boundaries, with the consequence of Normandy and, especially, England becoming multi-ethnic communities. What political upheaval and social change meant for these countries can be charted through the comments of their historians. This chapter is concerned with the Latin historiography of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the Anglo-Norman realm. In England the vernacular Old English was replaced by Latin on a large scale by the end of the eleventh century, while from that time onwards, as Ian Short describes in Chapter 10, vernacular French begins to rival Latin as a language for literature and historiography.

The viking settlement of Normandy and the rise of the house of Rollo, founding father of the principality, was first related by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, himself a Vermandois clerk, who served the dukes Richard I (943–96) and Richard II (996–1026).

At a time when the relationship of the United Kingdom with the mainland of western Europe is a topic of intense and empassioned debate, the Anglo-Norman period of English history obviously still matters, even if it is so often ignored by those who perceive the distinctive English character to have been forged in the Tudor age by Protestantism and maritime adventure. 1066 remains indeed the most memorable date in English history – the occasion of the last successful invasion of the southern kingdom, the effects of which were extended peaceably, by means of service and marriage, into Scotland. All this was accomplished, too, while Norman adventurers were establishing in the Mediterranean the lordships which were eventually to be united in the kingdom of Sicily, and further east the shorter lived principality of Antioch.

The nature of Anglo-Norman society and government remains as controversial today as it was when in 1966 Sir Richard Southern delivered a famous lecture on ‘England's first entry into Europe’. Certainly, as he stated then, ‘never before or since has the union of England with the community of Europe been so all embracing, and so thoroughly accepted as part of the nature of things’. In terms of cultural advance, Southern was convinced that the long-term effects of the Conquest had been beneficial: ‘the intellectual isolation, which had been so marked a feature of pre-Conquest England, was a thing of the past’ – an observation at which many scholars of Old English art and literature might, it must be confessed, demur. Yet Southern also viewed England between the reigns of the Conqueror and King John as a colony, exploited for the benefit of the motherland: ‘it is very doubtful if the kings had any policy at all in England; they had only expedients for furthering a policy elsewhere’. His own measured judgement was that ‘these were prosperous years for England, but there was not much expression of joy’.

Since the ninth centenary of the Conquest there has been continuous lively debate on every aspect of Anglo-Norman history, from the rituals of kingship to numismatics, from religious sentiment to the nature of tenures.

Normandy's origins lie in the context of Frankish politics of the ninth century, when competing Carolingian kings and princes struggled for power, and Viking armies preyed on centres of wealth in uncoordinated, irregular, but disabling attacks, from northern Britain to the Mediterranean. Hoping to employ poachers as gamekeepers, if only temporarily, embattled native rulers granted land and some kind of authority to Viking leaders in Frisia, Francia, and the British Isles, but only Rollo's early tenth-century settlement on the Seine survived; it was transformed by his descendants into the mighty political player which, from the second half of the eleventh century, drastically altered the balance of power and redrew the political map of western Europe. For years the issue of Normandy's origins has divided historians. Some have seen little of Scandinavian character in the political inheritance of the first settlers and have argued for continuity, supposing that Rollo was handed a Carolingian political and cultural package on his arrival in 911. Supporters of continuity have seen the later workings of ducal power as the visible end of a continuum which began in unfortunate obscurity as Rollo took over the exercise of public authority from his Carolingian predecessors. A contrary view has characterised the first stages of Viking control as insecure and makeshift; but, it is argued, when the Vikings proceeded to dig themselves in they fashioned a new social order drawing more fundamentally on their own native customs and institutions in law, social regulations, and agrarian and maritime practice. Some subscribers to this view would see Frankish institutions as only late grafted onto an enduringly Scandinavian stem. Crucial to the question is the issue of numbers: a large complement of immigrants (of all social levels) would presumably have been required to produce a society with a strong Scandinavian flavour, while a small aristocratic minority might have made less of an impression on native Frankish culture (though neither of these assumptions has gone unchallenged). The difficulty in deciding between these two options consists in reconciling the two faces of continuity – Scandinavian and Carolingian – presented by the Norman evidence.

John Le Patourel, in a classic survey of the governance and administration of the Anglo-Norman regnum, published in 1979, argued that, between 1066 and 1154, Norman practices were introduced into England to a considerable extent, but that this gradually tailed off, more especially after 1154. The ‘Norman Empire’, which collapsed in the 1140s, and its Angevin successor, were two distinct political constructions. The Angevin territorial complex, besides being much the larger, was ruled by a different dynasty, and its distinctive government was based on different principles. In the time of the ‘Norman Empire’, England and Normandy were usually governed jointly by one man. In the short periods when this was not the case, the brothers each had claims on the other's authority. Normally, though, the same authority was exercised in both territories. There was one royal household; one set of household officers; one curia regis, and even one nobility with estates in both countries. Government was effected by the king, constantly on the move with his household. Some adaptations occurred, such as the adoption of the Old English seal and writ, and provision was gradually made for the operation of one judicial system throughout both lands. In Normandy, this Normano-English judicial system provided the forum, and most of the substance, of the Coutume de Normandie. In contrast, Le Patourel argued, the English legal systemwas largely Norman-inspired. The Normans at first tried to take over the organisation of shires and hundreds, and to treat it as they did their Norman comtés, vicomtés and prévôtés, but Heny I saw an advantage in preventing total assimilation. While the shire units remained untouched, as did variations in the conditions of the peasantry, in other areas the process of assimilation continued down to 1135.

During the 1140s, it appeared for several years as though there would be a clean break, until the Angevin dynasty triumphed. From 1154 onwards, the Normanisation of England declined, and the introduction of further innovations in government and administration was much more of a two-way process. However, each segment of the ‘Empire’ had its own Law or Customs, and these were not introduced elsewhere, except to a very limited extent.

Twelfth-century historians differed as to which of the Old English kings was most worthy of admiration. For William of Malmesbury, it was Edgar, ‘the honour and delight of Englishmen’, who experienced ‘no treachery from his own people and no destruction from foreigners’, and in the chronicles of whose reign ‘scarcely a year is passed over … without his doing his country some notable and necessary service and without his founding some new monastery’. Eadmer of Canterbury agreed, describing Edgar as ‘that most glorious king … a devoted servant of God, [who] when foreign invaders surged in on every side fought them, conquered them and kept them at bay’. For Henry of Huntingdon, it was Cnut who held the palm; ‘before him there had never been in England a king of such great authority … lord of all Denmark, of all England, of all Norway and also of Scotland’. The Ramsey Chronicler was of the same mind: Cnut was ‘inferior to none of his royal predecessors in virtue or strength of arms’.

Edgar and Cnut were significant choices for twelfth-century writers. The former had kept invaders at bay, as Edward the Confessor and Harold II had not, and the latter stood, in implicit contrast to William I, for the ideal conqueror king, a foreigner who nevertheless preserved the fabric of the English Church and kingdom. Now this kingdom had fallen, and ‘all had been reduced to servitude and lamentation, and it was even disgraceful to be called English’. To contemporaries, the reason was clear: ‘such things happen because of the people's sins, in that they will not love God and righteousness’. Later writers have required more specific causes, and have been more accustomed to apportion blame than praise. Some have seen ‘a certain built-in obsolescence’ in the Old English kingdom itself, with its ‘many weaknesses, in military organisation, in uncertain frontiers, in racial divisions and political instability, in the absence of a unified law and custom, and, not least, in the absence also of the feudal bond’. Others have concentrated on politics rather than institutions.

In the early tenth century, a band of Vikings settled along the Seine River in northwestern France and laid the foundation for the duchy of Normandy. The term ‘Viking’ was rarely used in medieval Europe: instead, these unwelcome seafarers from Scandinavia were called by the Franks ‘Northmen’ (northmanni), a word which evoked fear and distrust in the minds of Europeans. Northmen were those who plundered churches, burned villages and captured Christians to be slaves. Consequently, when a sizable group of Northmen or, as they came to be called, Normans, decided to make their home down-river from Paris, they were viewed by their neighbors with alarm and suspicion. Generations after the settlement of Normandy (Northmannia), Frankish writers continued to describe the Normans as untrustworthy and violent. Despite the hostility of their neighbors, however, the Normans assumed Frankish ways: they accepted the religion, the language and the women of the Franks. Through this process of assimilation, Normandy gradually came to be accepted as a newprincipality in France. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Norman churches and schools stood at the forefront of European civilization, and within two centuries of their initial settlement along the Seine River, the Normans had conquered England, carved out a new kingdom in southern Italy and Sicily, campaigned against the Byzantines, and charged off on crusade to the Holy Land.

While seeking acceptance, the Normans encouraged the view that their unique heritage set them apart from other Europeans. This pride in their origins is reflected in the legend about the foundation of Normandy which was preserved in writing by Dudo, a churchman at Saint-Quentin in the early eleventh century. Dudo's history of the Normans is notoriously inaccurate in its facts, yet nevertheless valuable in its perspective. In his account, the Normans’ first ruler, the Viking Rollo, met with the Frankish king Charles the Simple in the year 911 at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte. Dudo describes King Charles as desperate to establish peaceful terms with Rollo and his companions, offering his daughter Gisla to Rollo in marriage, along with the ‘territory from the river Epte to the sea as an allod and property; and the whole of Brittany to live off’.

The years in which the ‘Plantagenet’ counts of Anjou ruled Normandy (1144–1204) are usually regarded as a period of Norman decline. In 1144 the Angevin conquest of Normandy deprived the duchy of the dominant place which it had hitherto enjoyed within the Anglo-Norman regnum, and in 1204 the dukes of Normandy were ousted from the province completely. Thereafter the leaderless duchy became a supine dominion of the Capetian kings of France. The Normans retained a strong sense of provincial identity after 1204 and occasionally asserted their political weight, securing their famous charter of liberties, the Chartes aux Normands, during the revolt of the provincial leagues in 1314–15, but they never recovered the preponderant role they had enjoyed in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Nor did a new ducal family emerge, not even from the Capetian dynasty, although the Valois kings were later to make their eldest sons dukes of Normandy from time to time. In part, the province's decline reflected the more general eclipse of territorial principalities in France in the face of the rising Capetian monarchy. However, the history of Normandy after 1144 should not be seen merely as an appendix to a story of Norman greatness that ended in 1135. These six decades of Angevin rule were crucial to the establishment of enduring Norman customs and institutions, many of which lasted until the French Revolution – and in the Channel Islands survive even today.

Angevin Normandy has been curiously neglected by historians, but the reasons are not hard to find. Geoffrey of Anjou's subjugation of the duchy in 1144 was narrowly preceded by the death of Orderic Vitalis, and no narrative from the Angevin period matches his Ecclesiastical History as a source for Norman history. Most that survive are short annals; the only significant chronicler in Normandy was Robert of Torigny, abbot of Mont Saint-Michel (1154–86), whose chronicle is both laconic and prosaic. Torigny had previously added to the Gesta Normannorum Ducum, the text which had been rewritten to legitimise the reigning prince in almost every generation since Dudo of Saint-Quentin, but despite Torigny's initial plans he did not continue this work past the death of Henry I; nor did Gervase, prior of Saint-Cénery on the border of Normandy and Maine, whom Torigny urged to perform this task in his stead.

The context of the power of sin

The Oxford English Dictionary defines sin as ‘A transgression of the divine law and an offence against God, a violation (especially wilful or deliberate) of some religious or moral principle.’ According to this definition, a sin is committed when someone does something wrong: human beings are the subject and sin the object. Without a perpetrator, sin would have no existence. Yet the apostle Paul portrays sin differently. In his letter to the Romans, sin comes to life. Humanity is no longer the subject, but the object. It is no longer the person who commits the sin: rather, sin is at work within the person. In conjunction with death, sin rules over the entire world (Rom. 5:12–21). The law is powerless before it. It exploits the commandments of God for its own ends, using them to provoke the very things they were intended to prevent (7:7–13). Human nature, sold out to sin, is powerless to resist. Those who end up doing the evilthat they deplore recognise, to their dismay, that sin has taken charge of their behaviour (7:13–25). In Romans 5–8, sin is the active agent and humanity its passive victim.

Two recent German monographs have explored what lies behind this distinctive portrait of sin. According to Röhser, sin is not some demonic being that holds sway over humankind. Sin should not be referred to as a power, since this term is colourless and unbiblical. Instead, Paul conceived of sin as a personified deed.

Introduction

1 Corinthians contains only one isolated reference to the power of sin, in 15:56. This verse, which may well be a gloss, speaks of the law as the power of sin. Nevertheless, the subject of sin was never far from Paul's mind as he wrote to the wayward church at Corinth and thus a chapter on 1 Corinthians earns its place in this study on Paul's hamartiology. On the basis of a comparison with the sin language of 1 Corinthians, it will be possible to see whether or not Paul's use of the symbolism of the power of sin in Galatians and Romans represents a significant difference in his understanding of the human condition. This chapter will use Douglas' Grid and Group matrix to analyse 1 Corinthians, with a view to analysing the social location of Paul and the Corinthians and the influence their social location has on their different perceptions of sin. In this way, it will be possible to perceive how Paul's sin language would have been understood (or misunderstood) by the letter's original readers in the socio-cultural setting of first-century Corinth. It will also be possible to test the usefulness of the model, by seeing whether or not it can yield any fresh exegetical insights into the hamartiology of this particular letter.

A chapter on 1 Corinthians is also required because numerous scholars have applied Douglas' model to this letter and have come to substantially differing conclusions.