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November 2002

Parish History Episode 19

Rome and Normandy

There has been little enough to record of the village of Houghton-le-Spring since its foundation by Anglian settlers around the Sixth Century. It and the whole region around was devastated by Halfdane's Vikings in the late Ninth Century, and there was probably nothing of Houghton but a mean hamlet when the monks bore Cuthbert's corpse down from Warden Law, to rebury it at Durham, in the late Tenth Century.

Houghton was not to be reborn as a village of even local importance until after the Norman Conquest. when its surviving peasants would he incorporated into the Norman feudal system and the parochial system of the Roman Catholic Church. But before attempting to view the rebirth of Houghton, it would be useful to describe the rise of these twin powers. Rome and Normandy, which were to have such an influence on our country and our village.

We may recall that, though the Iona Mission may have been more important for England as a whole, the Mission despatched by Pope Gregory to Canterbury in 597 had always been dominant in Kent. and, at the Synod of Whitby in 664, the Roman customs were adopted by the Northurnbrians, and soon afterwards by the whole of the British Isles. For the next hundred years or so, the primacy of Rome was to be freely acknowledged by the English Churches, although the popes, concerned chiefly with their relationship with their earthly sovereigns, the Byzantine Emperors, had paid but little attention to English affairs. Then, for a further century. say 760 to 860, the popes were similarly dependent on the Frankish kings.

For all that, during the periods of Byzantine and of Frankish domination of the Papacy, there were able, learned and devout popes: they had to take account of the realities of their position and to conciliate the princes of this world, but they upheld their office for the most part, and played an effective part in Church affairs, at least in that empire which at the time seemed to dominate the world scene, if not in remote kingdoms such as Northumbria. But as the Frankish power collapsed under the onslaught of Viking and other raiders, and as Rome became freed from allegiance to the House of Charlemagne, so the Papacy became dependent upon the "patricians", on the upper classes of Rome. Successive popes were inducted into office, often after great dispute and violence, because they were the tool of this or that faction of Roman patricians; and most of the popes of this period, roughly 860 to 960. were devoid of leadership, administrative capability, learning, or even, it seems, of piety. Then, in the middle of the Tenth Century, a new German monarchy was created by the victories of Heinrich, and his son Otto, Over the Vikings and Magyars. Otto decided to elevate himself by marching, in 962, at the head of his knights, to Rome, in order to seek coronation by the pope as the first Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. He had no intention of interfering in the affairs of the Papacy, but the situation that he found there seemed so scandalous to the knights and prelates in his train, who had by then been deeply influenced by the reforms associated with the monastery at Cluny. in Burgundy, that Otto arranged to depose Pope John XII, for the many sins alleged against him, and to replace him with another man, who became Leo VIII.

The next four Kaisers after Otto I all marched on Ronne at least once during their reign. and all found themselves being beseeched by various factions of the Roman nobility to depose or discipline the current pope, and all took such action as they deemed appropriate. The result was that the Papacy improved considerably in moral tone. but became more and more dependent on the German Kaisers

Reform up to this time had been primarily an incidental consequence of the Kaisers' armbition to be crowned in Rome, and to be seen as Defenders of the Faith. But then in 1039 there succeeded a new Kaiser, Heinrich III, a pious man, who wanted Reform for its own sake. If lie had had his own way, the Roman Church might have become as dependent on the German emperors as was the Church of Constantinople on the Byzantine emperors. But one way that the Roman popes could shake off the German influence would be for them to themselves see to the reformation of the Church. But the impetus still came, in the first instance, from North of the Alps.

In 1045, on learning that there were three rival claimants to the Papal Throne in Rome, Heinrich III marched into Italy, deposed all three, and arranged for the Bishop of Bamberg (in Germany) to be elected as Pope Clement II. When Clement died in 1046, he was replaced by Damasus II, who had up to then been Bishop of Brixen. However the Reforms of Cluny had reached Bamberg and Brixen, and this German interference in Roman affairs was to prove wholly beneficial.

Even so, their achievements were to be greatly transcended by those of Damasus' successor, Pope Leo IX and Leo's Secretary of State, a monk called Hildebrand. During the five years of Leo's pontificate (1049 to 1054), he and Hildebrand began a practice, hitherto unknown, of regularly travelling from Rome, to visit other cities of Italy, in order to root out vice, particularly simony (the sale of clerical offices) and clerical marriage. There was at this time a movement of popular religion in Italy, known as the Patara, a sort of Moral Majority to use a modern term, which was calling into being mobs of violent enthusiasts who literally chased priests and bishops out of their homes and towns, if popular gossip accused there of financial speculation, or sexual immorality, or even of lawful marriage.

Priests, with their wives and children, were hounded out of their homes, and occasionally lynched.

Pope Leo and Hildebrand did not of course approve of lynch-mobs. To obviate the need for them, they established a system of Church Courts. so that immoral priests could be disciplined, and married ones forced either to discard their wives or leave their office.

Having, so to speak, ridden the Patara in Italy, Pope Leo and Hildebrand then attempted to extend the reforms to the rest of Latin Europe. Three times in as many years they toured the heartlands of Western Europe, visiting France, Germany and Hungary, holding synods and imposing new disciplines wherever they went. New cathedrals were built, in Romanesque style (most of them later demolished, to be replaced by grander Gothic buildings) and codes of canon law were drawn up, with rules binding not only on the clergy but on the laity as well.

Suddenly Europe - at least, Latin Europe woke up to the realisation that there was Law in Europe, above the local laws. After six centuries of anarchy, Rome ruled again, though a very different Rome to that of the Caesars. Leo never, it is true, visited Bohemia or Poland. Scandinavia or our islands, or the new Christian kingdoms emerging in Northern Spain, but these were peripheral areas. The core of the continent had been subdued by Rome.

Pope Leo not only welded Latin Europe into a new unity. He also, unintentionally, left it separated from Eastern Christianity. This arose from his policy towards Sicily and Southern Italy. When, three hundred years before, the Franks had taken control of Northern and Central Italy, they had left the South in the hands of the Byzantine Emperors. Unfortunately the Byzantines, once they had lost control of Rome, transferred the allegiance of the Southern dioceses from Rome to Constantinople, which infuriated the Popes.

Later, however, most of Sicily and the South were conquered by the Arabs.

Appeals for help against these Saracens were made by the Sicilians, and in about 1016 boatloads of knights began to arrive from Normandy - that area of Northern France where a sort of Danelaw had been conceded to the Norsemen by the Franks in 911. Within only a hundred years these descendants of the Vikings had been transmuted somehow into French-speaking knights, and now saw themselves as the champions of Latin Christianity. The Romans however watched their progress with anxiety, and feared a Norman attack on Rome itself.

Pope Leo accordingly despatched an embassy to Constantinople with a proposal that the Byzantines should return to Sicily, destroy the Normans, and restore the Emperor's authority in the South, but that the dioceses of the South should be placed under the authority of the Popes of Rome, not that of the Patriarchs of Constantinople.

The Emperor gave a guarded welcome to the embassy, but the Patriarch did not, and soon the Greek and the Roman churchmen were serving writs of excommunication upon each other, the latter doing so in the name of the Pope. Although doctrinal issues soon became involved, this episode in 1054 was the start of a mutual estrangement between the Churches of East and West which has by now lasted for nearly a thousand years.
The further effect of these mutual excommunications was that the West was cut off from the learning of the East, and became more Inward-looking, but now that Leo had united the Western lands as never before. the Churches on the fringes of the Latin sphere, like those of Poland and Bohemia, had either to gravitate towards Rome, or alternatively draw away from Rome towards Constantinople. as the Russians and Bulgarians did. Where there had been one Church, there were now two sects.

England, remote from Constantinople, bad no real choice in where to place its allegiance. So England would now acknowledge the primacy of the Roman Church. That in itself was nothing new. Rome bad been important before, as the source of the mission that had brought Augustine to Canterbury. More recently, Rome had been the goal towards which thousands of English pilgrims had tramped, and to which had been despatched chests of "Peter's Pence". But it had sent back surprisingly little in return. But soon legates and canon lawyers would be making the journey from Rome to England. From now on, Rome was going to rule the West, not simply to sit inactive and receive tribute.

But for the moment the English Church was still unreformed. Neither Pope Leo nor Hildebrand (who was himself to become Pope in 1073, after advising Leo IX and four of Leo's successors on policy) had ever visited England. Many of the English clergy were married, and to foreign eyes they looked coarse end rustic and old-fashioned, It was not to be until the Norman invasion that real reformation would come to England. The Normans had maintained their power in Sicily and Southern Italy, and in 1066 they would make the short sea voyage from their French homeland to England. At the end of the century they would take a leading role in the First Crusade. They became at this period the Knights of God".