Freedom and protection: Monastic exemption in France, c. 590–c. 1100

By Kriston R. Rennie

This book examines the history of monastic exemption in France. It reveals an institutional story of monastic freedom and protection, deeply rooted in the religious, political, social and legal culture of the early Middle Ages. Traversing many geo-political boundaries and fields of historical specialisation, the book defines the meaning and value of exemption to French monasteries between the sixth and eleventh centuries. It demonstrates how enduring relationships with the apostolic see in Rome ultimately contributed to an emerging identity of papal authority, the growth of early monasticism, Frankish politics and governance, church reform and canon law.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526127747

Kriston R. Rennie

Kriston R. Rennie is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Queensland

Book preview

Freedom and protection

Freedom and protection

Monastic exemption in France, c. 590–c. 1100

Kriston R. Rennie

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Kriston R. Rennie 2018

The right of Kriston R. Rennie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 2772 3 hardback

First published 2018

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset 10/12 Ehrhardt

by Out of House Publishing

For Monsieur Dumont

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Prologue

Introduction

1The road to protection

2Rome’s orbit

3Traditio Romana

4Making concessions

5The ‘fetters of feudalism’

6‘Victory of the papacy’?

Epilogue

Appendix: Monastic exemption privileges in France, c. 590–c. 1100

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book was born accidentally in Cambridge. In the stacks of the University Library, I stumbled across the archives for French cartularies and began noticing an intriguing pattern. Conceptualising this project was another matter entirely; it took many years and was greatly assisted by a number of fellowships. I started thinking more seriously about the topic during a faculty fellowship at the Centre for the History of European Discourses (University of Queensland) in the second half of 2013. In early 2014 I was granted a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship in the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University. I also enjoyed a visiting fellowship at the University of Ghent in the autumn of 2015, generously supported by the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy and the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies. And finally, this book was finished in 2016 with the tremendous support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Forschungsstelle für Vergleichende Ordensgeschichte (FOVOG) at the Technische Universität Dresden.

Everyone, at every institution, research centre, conference, and workshop, has played a role in shaping the final product. Gert Melville and Steven Vanderputten were early advisors who helped me set the right targets and ask the right questions. I owe them considerably for their time, their interest, their kindness, and their support. Countless other friends and colleagues were subjected to this book’s arguments over the course of many years, presentations, and conversations. I’d especially like to thank Steven Schoenig, Damien Smith, Atria Larson, Thomas Madden, and Adam Grissom in St Louis; Julia Exarchos in Ghent-Cologne-Heidelberg; Stephan Dusil and his law colleagues in Leuven; Kate Cushing, Tyler Lange, Levi Roach, Jason Taliadoros, and many others in attendance at ‘our’ conference in Paris; Christof Rolker, Bruce Brasington, Danica Sumerlin, Melodie Eichbauer, and Greta Austin at the annual Leeds round-up; Charles West, Stuart Airlie, Ed Roberts, and other co-contributors to the workshop on religious exemption in Sheffield; Julia Burkhardt, Nikolas Jaspert, Bernd Schneidmüller, and Jörg Peltzer in Heidelberg; and Cristina Andenna, Mirko Breitenstein, Jörg Sonntag, Emilia Jamroziak, Katrin Rösler, Michael Hänchen, and Sebastian Mickisch in Dresden.

The University of Queensland, and my colleagues in Brisbane, were also very generous and encouraging over the course of this project. They excused my many absences over the last three years, and their support for my research has helped make this book a reality. And last but not least, the anonymous reviewers for Manchester University Press provided a wealth of disciplinary insight and expertise, which has greatly improved this book’s overall clarity and purpose.

I’ve also enjoyed many personal luxuries while writing this book, namely the unconditional support of my family. The arrival of Elsa and Louis presented a serious distraction on the work front, but a correspondingly healthy realignment of priorities on the home front. Without a doubt, this project has taken longer to complete because of the inevitable melée at home. But my life is richer and more chaotic as a result.

For the first time, I am not dedicating my work to family. I am finally recognising one of the more silent, distant in time and geography, yet pervasive influences on my life: my high-school history teacher, Alain Dumont. I owe my curiosity and passion for learning and history to him.

Abbreviations

Prologue

Let me begin this book with a story. There is a twelfth-century collection, known as the Monumenta Vizeliacensia (Ms. 227 Bibliothèque Municipale Auxerre), which contains a particularly memorable and colourful manuscript initial (fol. 22r). Simply described, it shows Count Gerard of Roussilon and his wife, Bertha – proud founders in 858–9 of the Burgundian monasteries of Vézelay and Pothières (see book cover image). At face value, this image recalls a pious act of lay patronage. On the one hand, it commemorates the count and his wife for their donations and endowments, venerating their political and spiritual role in shaping monastic identity and culture. Representing an idealised model of localised governance anchored in the gesture and memory of foundation, it symbolises a harmonious relationship between secular rulers and the religious life. But on the other hand, this image also leaves a lot unsaid.

The foundation of Vézelay and Pothières is just an opening scene. The remaining acts reveal a rich history of monastic exemption, whose privileges for the former monastery in particular came to define its place in the world.¹ Whereas the manuscript image signifies an essential starting point in time, the accompanying charters and their chronological arrangement in this twelfth-century collection frame the rest of the story. And that story, like so many others examined in this book, shows just how deeply the history of monastic exemption is rooted in the political, religious, social, and legal culture of the early Middle Ages. It belongs unequivocally to this era.

The papacy’s involvement in early monasticism is the critical question. According to the original foundation charter for Vézelay and Pothières, both religious houses were donated to Saints Peter and Paul in Rome, so that the apostolic see could ‘rule them, command them, and administer them’.² Desiring a ‘lasting guardian and protector of their order and their religion’,³ the count and his wife pursued a more permanent bond of paternal authority and governance from Rome that was relatively unknown to French monasteries before the ninth century. At their bidding, Pope Nicholas I granted a landmark privilege for Vézelay in May 863 that forbade the entry of kings, bishops, and other public officials, in order to protect the monastery and its inhabitants from undue, external interference. As far as early medieval privileges go, this charter reads like a formulaic expression of monastic rights and liberties, whose specific conditions served to protect against any obstructions in the election and ordination of an abbess; to ‘eliminate the possibility of avarice’ by forbidding payment for the religious services of consecration and ordination; to prevent the celebration of public masses by the diocesan bishop, unless he was extended an invitation; and, as a formal restriction on the bishop’s entry into the cloister, this privilege also protected against his demand for food and lodging.

The familiar charter language, however, does not diminish the exemption’s value or meaning. Set within a local context, this inaugural papal privilege held both immediate and long-term consequences. Its potential for transforming the political landscape prompted King Charles the Bald to issue his own exemption for Vézelay five years later (868), intended – as he put it – to add ‘greater durability’ to the authority of the apostolic see. Repeating many of the rights and liberties granted by Nicholas I, the king promised his own form of protection, expressing a level of secular cooperation that was emulated by many of his successors in the late ninth and early tenth century. Yet by all appearances, the papacy had already established a strong foothold in the business of monastic freedom and protection; invited in the first instance by the count and his wife, the popes in Rome became de facto rulers and proprietors of this distant religious house. What follows is an attempt to explain the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of this special relationship for numerous French monasteries between the sixth and eleventh centuries.

Vézelay was undoubtedly unique from its very foundation. Yet this monastery’s path towards autonomous governance and administration is representative of a growing ecclesiastical tradition, which can be traced to episcopal, Frankish, and papal practices. Its privileged position was not an a priori arrangement, but an outcome negotiated by the various parties invested in the monastery’s peace, security, and prosperity. With the initial support of the local count and his wife, and the complementary efforts of Frankish kings, it was the popes in Rome who came to monopolise the business of freeing and protecting this monastery. Committing more than twenty privileges to this effect over the next three hundred years, they asserted their control with increasing vigour, custom, and authority. What began as a local political and spiritual initiative, therefore, materialised into a working relationship with – and dependency on – the popes in Rome. This spiritual, political, and legal orientation was made possible through the instrument of exemption. Its meaning, value, practice, and institutional development form the basis of the following study.

Notes

1 Initially founded as a nunnery, Vézelay was refounded as a male monastery sometime in the 870s or 880s.

2 Monumenta Vizeliacensia , no. 1, p. 247.

3 Ibid., no. 2, p. 250.

Introduction

This book examines the institution of monastic exemption between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Broadly conceived, it is about monastic freedom and protection – that is, the attainment and political currency of these objectives. More specifically, it examines the elaboration of monastic exemption privileges from a marginalised to centralised practice, an institutional story that ends with direct subjection to the papacy. The following pages are fundamentally about assessing and explaining this transformation. I ask why so many monasteries were seeking exemption privileges directly from Rome. What significance did they hold for monks, bishops, secular lords, and popes? How and why did this practice develop throughout the early Middle Ages? I consider as my evidence a growing number of cases whereby privileges were granted to individual religious houses, as a means to understand the papacy’s vigilant efforts to protect, support, and even control them from afar. Given that such practices were frequently interpreted as an affront to episcopal order, jurisdiction, and authority, moreover, this book also considers the religious and political context of individual communities, whose ‘special relationship’ with Rome transformed their spiritual, economic, disciplinary, and judicial orientation.

Monastic exemption privileges give witness to a rich and lively institutional story of power and freedom – a traditio Romana (or ‘Roman tradition’), whose origins and development date to the early Middle Ages.¹ Viewed as outgoing papal grants of immunity and protection, they are significantly more than just diplomatic objects of study or platitudes of spiritual, fiscal, and judicial obligations, concessions, rights, and liberties.² On the contrary: as cultural, symbolic, and performative products of their time, exemptions are ‘flexible instruments of political and social life’ that served ‘strategies far beyond their surface meanings’.³ As ‘chameleons, shifting according to circumstances’,⁴ they became ‘key instruments in the politics of negotiation’.⁵ Their social and political significance thus offers valuable insight into the transformative world in which they were created. Their very existence – usually copied and preserved in a monastic cartulary or papal register – underlines some greater contemporary purpose and declaration of intent.

Appreciating their value and significance poses the greatest methodological challenge. On the one hand, exemptions were coveted assets and commodities, ‘objects’ actively sought and acquired by monasteries and abbots. They assumed their political, spiritual, and legal currency from what they actually conveyed: specific conditions, concessions, and exclusions that defined a monastery’s place in the world.⁶ Characterised in the charter evidence by formulaic rights and liberties from unwanted interference, exemptions possess a much deeper historical significance.⁷ Interpreted throughout this book as privileges of monastic freedom and protection, they embody tensions between increasingly powerful bishops and abbots, both vying for control of the localities in the face of changing royal power and political and ecclesiastical structures. Their appeal and realisation saw the gradual realignment of numerous monasteries towards the growing authority of Rome. Indeed, as acquisitions and commodities, monastic exemption privileges were useful aides-mémoires: what they are, what they meant and represented to contemporaries, and ultimately what services they provided were socially and politically constructed qualities that demand further contextualisation.

On the other hand, exemptions were also gifts in exchange transactions.⁸ They regulated relations with others and shaped monastic identity. Their contemporary meaning thus derived not simply from the physical parchment or papyrus on which they were drafted in Rome, but more so from the forged connection between donor and recipient – the pope and the abbot and/or his monastery. Their meaning, power, and efficacy were mutually constructed through the ‘modalities of communication’⁹ connecting Rome and the ecclesiastical provinces. And their redeeming value was born from the exchange act itself: a monastery’s petition to Rome in the first instance, followed by the legal conditions, stipulations, rights, and liberties articulated more explicitly in the exemption charter.

It serves our purposes well to consider the subject along such lines. At the very least, it is worth thinking about their material functionality and existence, delving beyond an abstract meaning of exemption to consider its practical application and value to contemporary medieval society. In so doing, I hope to understand whether a monastery profited from the arrangement, beyond the explicit and formulaic conditions detailed in the charter evidence. By association, I hope to understand how a monastery’s relationship with Rome – new or renewed – benefited the papacy, especially for burgeoning arguments of centralised political and spiritual power in the early Middle Ages.

One thing is certain: as products of reciprocal exchange, exemption privileges provided individual monasteries with a more concrete and beneficial relationship to Rome. This connection was formalised in social, political, and legal terms through the very process of exemption, which brought abbots to the threshold of the apostles in search of something advantageous, valid and legally binding, and often permanent.

Both the monastery and the papacy stood to gain from the exchange. Identifying and explaining this relationship, however, is not without its interpretive challenges. The monastery’s demand or plea for specific and explicit concessions is seldom transparent in the extant sources.¹⁰ The charter evidence is terse and framed as an outgoing, beneficent papal response to monastic requests; it rarely reveals the conditions or motives that impelled its drafting.¹¹ This diplomatic consideration implies a one-way relationship initiated by an abbot on behalf of his monastery. Indeed, the most common expressions in the charter evidence tend to reinforce this very idea, suggesting a regular flow of business towards the centre of Christendom.¹²

It was Rome’s authority that made monastic freedom and protection possible – rights and liberties granted immediately and often in perpetuity. An exemption’s social, political, and legal force was ineffective without obedience to this spiritual and political centre, from whose ‘authoritative power’¹³ each privilege was formally issued. The situation is representative of what Pierre Bourdieu called ‘symbolic domination’, which ‘presupposes, on the part of those who submit to it, a form of complicity which is neither passive submission to external constraint nor a free adherence to values’.¹⁴ In short – and here the analogy relates to the subject of medieval exemptions more clearly – I am talking about ‘social titles of credit and credence – of credentials – which, like aristocratic titles and academic qualifications, increase in a durable way the value of their bearer by increasing the extent and the intensity of the belief in their value’.¹⁵

While political organisation and ideology are important factors in comprehending medieval papal power, their abstract constructions should not distract us from the individual value of exemption privileges. The nature of each relationship can be explained in part by a sociological theory of ‘total services’, which formed the personal bond between the donor and recipient. Max Weber called these binding characteristics ‘status contracts’, a term used to distinguish primitive changes in ‘the total legal situation (the universal position) and the social status of the persons involved’.¹⁶ The defining characteristic is ‘a voluntary agreement constituting the legal foundation of claims and obligations’,¹⁷ which is what early medieval exemption privileges represent. For in essence, a monastery sought subjective rights (e.g. autonomy) by objective legal means: that is, through ‘an agreement between concrete individuals’.¹⁸ The symbolism of these contracts, moreover, meant that the monastery would become ‘something different in quality (or status) from the quality’¹⁹ it possessed before.

The privilege in this concrete sense was a political instrument: an authoritative and formulaic confirmation of rights and liberties.²⁰ It was something to be owned, possessed, given, exchanged, and perpetuated by future generations of popes, monks, and abbots. Its presentation and central meaning represents a form of mutual interaction and agreement, whose social and political substance contributed to bolstering the position of the monastery and its master in Rome: the papacy. By virtue of increasing demand, the latter became the primary dealer and distributor of an increasingly valuable political asset. After all, the papacy was the one partner with something substantial to offer. In bestowing specific conditions, it effectively provided a ‘customers’ service’²¹ to monks and monasteries, lending authority, propagating norms, and ultimately adding value to their commodity. This asset was dispensed through transactional means, the outcome of which officially bound the monastery to Rome and Saint Peter.

What began life as a request or granting of favour was transformed through the machinery of government into a placard of freedom and protection. To grasp its broader meaning and significance, this book examines monastic exemption over a number of centuries and intersecting historical eras, adopting a longue durée approach to its institutional practice and growth. It asks what these privileges entailed, how they came to be, and how they changed over time. Through a comparative analysis of medieval monastic cartularies, royal, episcopal, and papal charters, papal privileges and letters, annals, ecclesiastical histories, capitularies, saints’ lives, conciliar acta, and contemporaneous canonical collections, it examines their impact on medieval society, law, and the institutional structure of the local and regional church. These different genres of medieval source materials interact with one another on a number of levels. They offer significant regional variety, while also informing our understanding of the wider institutional practice and contemporary meaning of exemption.

The relative merits of narrative and legal sources – as witnesses to the life and governance of individual religious houses – make it possible to reconstruct such a rich and long history. Whereas the privilege itself represents a monastery’s core spiritual and jurisdictional liberties, the remaining evidence offers the critical historical context in which these specific rights were sought, created, pronounced, and enforced. The church council, for example, provides a valuable glimpse into prevailing socio-political conditions and regulations under which monasteries operated and existed; royal and episcopal charters and capitularies show the willing contribution of kings and bishops in protecting and fostering monastic communities, as well as the transforming nature of their relationship over time; papal letters and canonical collections offer a broader, pan-European perspective, which complements the localised version of individual exemptions captured in many saints’ lives, ecclesiastical histories, monastic cartularies, and annals. And forged exemption charters, just like their authentic counterparts, are equally revealing for a monastery’s intentions, individual circumstances, collective history, and memory; they illustrate latent and overt political characteristics in an historical era which generated stronger and more permanent ties to the apostolic see.²²

Examining these sources in tandem, this book fundamentally argues for the exemption’s importance in the emerging identity of papal authority and primacy from Rome, especially in the centuries prior to the turn of the first millennium. The essential focus, however, is contingent upon what these privileges actually provided. What material, economic, social, and political profits were expected and gained by the beneficiary and grantor? Exceptions to the rule of law were nothing new to medieval contemporaries; they were woven into the fabric of secular and ecclesiastical administration, law, and government. It is their individual circumstances that defined a monastery’s political position within and beyond its diocese; its corresponding relationship with the bishop and secular lord; its dependency on ecclesiastical and secular authority for matters of foundation, finance, rule, governance, discipline, order, and protection; and possible antagonisms over ties of dependency, domination, and subjection/subordination – sometimes the very reason for a charter’s existence and preservation. Examined for what they truly are – namely prohibitions, limitations, and restrictions of local power and influence – they help explain the growth of the Roman Church in the early Middle Ages, the burgeoning papacy in the same critical era, and the formation of medieval ecclesiastical power politics more generally.

More than simply a rejection of secular subordination, monastic exemption privileges came to free the monastery from episcopal interference in spiritual and administrative matters. Their meaning, therefore, as will be argued throughout this book, was transformed in the early Middle Ages, becoming closely connected to ideals of papal protection and centralised control from Rome. This ideological development in turn helped secure the freedom of individual monasteries in spiritual and temporal matters. Whether these developments implicate the late eleventh century must also be assessed in this respect, representing the book’s logical end point.

It is precisely this longer period of institutional development that attracts our attention. Considering early structural developments within the Roman Church, associated meanings and transformations of episcopal jurisdiction and power, and the influence of early church council legislation and canon law, this book seeks to understand the practices and meanings of exemption before the eleventh-century reform movement. As such, it holds a particular interest in comprehending the papacy’s early participation in granting exemption privileges, which is traditionally attributed in the first instance to Pope Honorius I and the northern Italian monastery of Bobbio in 628. Considered in relation to the contemporaneous developments of royal and episcopal privileges under the Merovingians and Carolingians, charters issued to various medieval monasteries from the seventh century onward bear witness to the papacy’s intentions, and the extent of their involvement in monastic governance. The purpose of this book is to evaluate the nature and value of these privileges as political instruments, and to consider the papacy’s monastic ‘policy’ – if this is indeed the accurate or correct terminology – for houses of monks/nuns and regular canons, with a view to assessing its development and influence. In so doing, it ultimately questions the nature of alliances that culminated in monastic exemption, taking an interest in the socio-political and legal reasons impelling such relationships and the consequences for all involved.

In order to achieve these objectives, the book focuses primarily on the papacy’s alliance with French – i.e. west Frankish and Capetian – monasteries and the course of its development between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Such a concentration begs the obvious geopolitical question: why France? The answer is relatively straightforward: this western Christian region – known as Gaul in late antiquity, Francia in the Merovingian and Carolingian eras, and France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries²³ – provides the richest diagnostic slice for investigating the institutional growth of exemption in a critical period of its early development. This material and diplomatic reality owes much to the political maturation of western Europe after the Carolingians, drawing our attention to the collapsing rather than prevailing secular authority. The long-term effects and consequences of monastic exemption are far more visible in this region of western Christendom. Whereas Italy, England, and Germany form part of the same institutional story, the total number of privileges was far greater in France, and remained so for their evolution well into the twelfth century. Comparatively speaking, this regional development reflects how the Ottonians favoured the exemption of only a few monasteries in the ninth and tenth centuries, rarely and occasionally.²⁴ It also reveals an imperial attachment to religious houses that was ‘always temporary’.²⁵

Medieval France offers a contrasting and rich picture of authority.²⁶ It is particularly in this region that ‘the monarchy became weaker; territories splintered even more; ties of vassalage began to weaken’.²⁷ This unique socio-political environment created new administrative opportunities, the outcome of which – it has traditionally been argued – contributed to a renovation of monastic structures and dependencies. As Ferdinand Lot contended, ‘the claims of the papacy came to be recognised in France. Their triumph was rapid and bright.’²⁸ Jean-François Lemarignier employed the same thunderous language, defining the dominant historical discourse on monastic exemption, arguing that it produced a new form of liberty that experienced its ‘première application éclatante’²⁹ in the wake of a crumbling Carolingian Empire. The ‘singularités françaises’³⁰ in the ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages, it is argued, can be found most readily in the relations between the papacy and the Church in France.

The geographic focus of this book is thus deliberate and rewarding. That it is determined by much of the extant evidence from these early medieval centuries is a cogent reflection of papal diplomatic practice and concern, Frankish administration, and evolving ecclesiastical–political structures. A special relationship between Rome and French monasteries was long in the making, well before the advent of Cluny in the early tenth century, which represents a better-known model. An alliance between Roman pontiffs and Capetian France was formed already by the end of the tenth century, which partnership arguably paved the way for the reception of later reforming ideals. Indeed, for the tenth century alone, French monasteries and churches received 83 of 247 papal charters (33.6 per cent).³¹ In his work on the years 896–1046, Jochen Johrendt offered 112 examples concerning free abbatial election (Abtwahlfreiheit), thirty-three of which are French in origin (41 per cent).³² Privileges of ‘exemption’ for France offer another nineteen examples (23 per cent) for the same decades, representing the well-known monasteries of Psalmodi, Vézelay, Charroux, Beaulieu-lès-Loches, Lézat, Langogne, Lusignan, Cluny, Sainte-Croix (Bordeaux), Saint-Florent (Saumur), and forgeries for Fleury and Déols.³³ Privileges of papal protection (Papstschutz), moreover, add sixteen genuine and five forgeries to our growing list concerning the monasteries of Vézelay, Cluny, Déols, Sauxillanges, Homblières, Charroux, and Langogne.

By my own calculations, approximately 221 exemption charters were granted to 93 French monasteries between the late sixth and eleventh centuries (see map and Appendix). This breakdown of charter evidence reveals a uniqueness