Jonathan Sumption - Pilgrimage : An Image of Mediaeval Religion

The world which the mediaeval pilgrim left behind him was a small and exclusive community. The geographic and social facts of life made it oppressive and isolated and, except in the vicinity of major towns and truck roads, the chief qualities of human life were its monotonous regularity and the rule of overpowering conventions . Existence, for the great majority, meant rural existence. Towns were few and small, and separated themselves from the country by moats of legal privilege. Villages asserted their independence and marked out their territory with rows of stakes and crosses. Even where migration occurred, it was not allowed to disturb the placid conventions of rural life. English villages of the thirteenth century were forbidden to receive strangers, and were held collectively responsible for crimes committed in their midst. Townsmen were enjoined to watch for strangers and lock their gates at sunset.

Nowhere was the closeness of these communities more apparent than in their religious life. What is a parish?, asked the thirteenth-century canonist Henry of Susa; it is a place with well-defined frontiers whose inhabitants belong to a single church. The parishioner belonged in a very real sense to his church, and lived his whole life under its shadow. There, and there alone, he was baptized and married, attended Sunday Mass, paid his tithe and offerings, and there he was buried when he died. The statutes of the church constantly reminded him of the fact. No one may receive the sacraments in any church but his own. On no account admit to confession any person from another parish. No stranger is to be allowed burial or marriage in the parish church. A thirteenth-century archbishop of Bordeaux excommunicated all strangers who have abandoned their own parish churches which they ought to be attending, for the parish priest should be able to see the face of every member of his flock. Pierre de Collemieu, archbishop of Rouen, required parish priests to keep a list of their parishioners, and to eject any strangers whom they found in their churches on Sundays except for noblemen and beggars. It was not unknown for those who died outside their own parishes to be exhumed and brought back to their own churchyards.

The Lateran council of 1215 reinforced this dependence on the parish by making every layman confess his sins at least once a year to his parish priest, and to no one else. Only bona fide travellers and those in danger of death were permitted to confess to a strange priest, while those clergy who had no parishes were forbidden to hear confessions at all. The right of the mendicant orders to hear them was hotly resisted by the secular clergy as an intrusion upon their prerogatives, and was only tardily recognized by the papacy. Confession, the most personal act of piety which the ordinary man performed, was far from being the anonymous ceremony found in the modern Roman Catholic Church. It is true that the actual words spoken were inaudible, but the sacrament itself was held in public, openly, and not in some private place, especially in the case of women, as the synod of Nmes ordained in 1284. Moreover the parish priest was expected to probe for further, undeclared, sins, and to inflict a lengthy cross-examination on the penitent. Several hand-books for priests were available in which useful and pertinent questions were set out for this purpose.

Dignity and privacy were not concepts dear to the hearts of mediaeval men, who conducted their communal lives on the unspoken assumption that the sins of one were the business of all. This was particularly true of breaches of sexual morality. In a small village near Bonneval in the Loire valley, the repentance of a prostitute at the end of the twelfth century was an event of public importance . Most of the inhabitants gathered in the street to debate whether she should go immediately to the nearest priest in Bonneval, or await his arrival for Mass on the following day. They decided to wait. In the morning they accompanied the sinner in a body to the church and, all speaking at once, recited her history to the priest. After a short homily, the priest confessed her in the presence of the villagers and sentenced her to an annual pilgrimage to Chartres. Then he absolved her amid scenes of emotion and jubilation. In the records of episcopal visitations it is clear that the majority of witnesses regarded eavesdropping and peeping through windows as a duty. When bishop Trefnant of Hereford visited his diocese in 1397, most of the laymen who appeared before him were accused by their neighbours of adultery, bigamy, quarrelling with their wives, denying conjugal rights to their husbands, and other matters which would now be regarded as private. A similar picture emerges from the records of a provincial society in France. When a Poitevin peasant-woman, Clmente Gaboreau, failed to appear in church one Sunday in 1387, her fellow parishioners recalled that she had often been seen entering and leaving the house of one Guillaume Achale and immediately suspected the worst. It was common knowledge in the village of Asnois (Poitou) that the wife of Pierre Vigoureux was the mistress of the parish priest. Jean Bourdeau, carpenter of Courlay (Poitou) was completely unaware that his wife was unfaithful to him, until several peeping-Toms told him so, whereupon he killed her with a sickle. The fifteenth-century author of a manual for parish priests no doubt had such incidents in mind when he warned his readers against all that standeth or hearkeneth by nights under walls, doors, or windows, for to spy touching evil.