This article investigates the minimum level of religious observance expected of lay Christians by church authorities, and the degree to which legislation and procedures attempted to enforce these standards. 1 Once baptized, a person entered the community of the faithful; and the medieval church was as much accountable for the health and salvation of the ignorant, the ambivalent, the disobedient or distracted as they were of the devout. From the twelfth century, theologians, clerical authorities and the laity turned with concerted enthusiasm to the question of lay observance, advancing high ideals for lay commitment and expanding opportunities for lay participation. Yet while acting to elucidate and advance these qualities, the church was nevertheless mindful of the number of Christians who might fail to reach even basic standards. The resulting balance of the ideal and the possible, and the degree to which it reached and was enforced upon the less-enthusiastic laity is explored here through expectations for knowledge, observance of sacraments, and participation in regular duties such as church attendance, tithe-paying and fasting. The result was a complex ideal of lay observance that was balanced by a tolerance of laxity and even failure, and a system which increasingly exhorted specific expectations but was hesitant to define contumacy or disobedience in many but the most obdurate or scandalous cases.
This chapter re-evaluates the place of hospitals in canon law by looking at the period c.1140–c.1275, the critical era that witnessed, simultaneously, the charitable revolution and the consolidation of classical canon law. It surveys the main—and conflicting—hypotheses for the development of hospitals in law at this time, to unearth an underlying problem: lack of explicit canon law for hospitals. The chapter goes on to argue that this absence of law provides the key to understanding welfare houses under the church. It was the consequence of the church’s inability to claim a general jurisdiction over hospitals and so to address them in canon law. This inability provides a key to reading law, as the general papal councils reveal. Lateran IV (1215) offered a call for alms to provide for the poor in hospitals, while Alexander III’s Lateran III (1179) offered Cum dicat Apostolus, an argument for the ecclesiastical defence of leper-houses that made no mention of the places themselves. In a similar fashion, Lateran II (1139) issued a decree against false nuns that aimed to stamp out a problem (and opportunity) fostered by the growing number of hospitals. Together, they reveal both the constraints and the imaginative legal activity of councils, who reached beyond the facilities themselves to solicit others to act. The implication, the chapter concludes, is that councils could act on people, not places, and that welfare facilities were places, not communities.
The hospital was brought to England by the Normans and rapidly absorbed into pre-Conquest frameworks of land-tenure, custom and alms. These charitable houses became a recognised and popular type of house, distinct in form and development from both monasteries and French hospitals. Although its constitution was not written, the early hospital had a consistent arrangement, physical in substance and purpose: it was a form of sited alms, with regular, visible, dependent provisioning. Its customary systems of support were public demonstrations (and thus repetitive commemorations) not only of the nature of its endowment and alms, but also of the founder's intent and generosity.In c. 1085 Archbishop Lanfranc, the (Lombard-born) Norman builder of the monasteries of Bec, Caen and Canterbury, established two charitable sites at Northgate and Harbledown in Canterbury. There are no texts of Lanfranc's for his twin foundations, but Eadmer wrote twenty years later of his work: I should not allow to pass unmentioned what he did for the poor, beyond the walls of the city of Canterbury. Outside the northern gate of that town he built (construxit) a stone house, fine and large, and added to it many small dwellings with an extensive courtyard, for the various needs and comforts of men. He divided this palace (palatium) into two, putting men suffering various infirmities in one part and ailing women in the other. He also arranged for them, from his own income (de suo), clothing and daily food, and attendants (ministros) and wardens (custodes) to see that they might want for nothing and that the men and women do not enter one another's areas . . . Further removed, beyond the western gate of the city, sheltered on the steep side of the hill, he built wooden houses and assigned (delegavit) them to the use of lepers, the men (as in other places) separated from the society of women. From his own income (de suis) he established that the lepers be supplied with all they might need according to the nature of their disease, and for this he appointed men whose skill, kindness and patience were such that, it seemed to him, none would dispute. 1 Eadmer lacks a vocabulary for Northgate and Harbledown and his stilted description suggests both the English author's own marvel and his attempt * I am grateful to Benjamin Thompson, Barbara Harvey and Henrietta Leyser for their inspiration, advice and discerning insight.
Clement V’s council of Vienne (1311/2) in its canon, Quia contingit (1317), offered the only substantial statement in canon law to address the management of welfare houses, which it defined as xenodochia, leprosaria, almshouses, and hospitals. The canon has long confused and disappointed historians, not least for its absence of any detail as to how a hospital should be arranged. The chapter explores possible sources for the council’s act and elucidates the choices made and procedures followed by the council, when drafting the canon. It provides a new reading of the canon, as the culmination of a long relationship between canon law and welfare houses. As had Carolingian councils, and Urban III’s Ad haec, Quia contingit legislated for hospitals as structures for the administration of gifts (alms) to the tasks of human welfare to which they had been assigned. What the canon did now was articulate a right by which bishops might act to ensure that, if failing, managers or patrons fulfil these obligations.
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