1
Specimen exam answers.
THE MIDDLE AGES.
Answer two questions. Concision will be considered a virtue: 500 words for each answer will suffice, and if an answer exceeds 1000 words marks may be deducted.
1. Comment on the following passage
And hence, since the marriage tie was from the beginning so constituted as - apart from the joining of the sexes - to symbolize the mystic union of Christ and His Church, it is undoubted that that woman has no part in matrimony, in whose case it is shown that the mystery of marriage has not taken place. Accordingly a clergyman of any rank who has given his daughter in marriage to a man that has a concubine, must not be considered to have given her to a married man, unless perchance the other woman should appear to have become free, to have been legitimately dowered and to have been honoured by public nuptials.
(Pope Leo I to Rusticus)
Answer
General Background
Leo I was pope in the mid-fifth century. This was the age when 'barbarian' tribes had overrun the Roman empire in the west and divided it up into separate kingdoms. The rulers of the successor states did not regard themselves as destroyers of the empire. So far as they were concerned, probably, it was merely continuing under devolved management. They were not anti-Roman, and used Roman bureaucratic methods as far as they could. The nature of the 'barbarian' settlement is much disputed: maybe it was a matter of allocating land to the newcomers, maybe they just collected taxes in kind: after all, the difference might not be so great in practice. The economy had not fundamentally changed yet, to judge by coinage evidence. Some contemporaries seem to have been actually unaware that the Roman empire had 'fallen': around this time one nobleman teased a holy man for prophesying wrongly that it would! Still, the old system of a centralised autocracy drawing on a massive tax system to support a massive centrally controlled army was gone for ever.
Against that background the hierarchy of the Christian church had gone from strength to strength, a welcome element of continuity. In cities, which still existed, the authority of the bishop was enhanced, and in the West as a whole the pope acquired an increasingly high profile as a religious leader.
The Document
That is presupposed by this document. A bishop from what is now southern France had written to Pope Leo with a series of questions, expecting an authoritative answer. Such answers were called 'decretals'. This bit of the letter comes from the answer to just one of the questions in the bishops letter. The letter as a whole would have been kept in the archive of the bishop who asked for it. It was common for such papal 'decretals' to be distributed among neighbouring bishops and perhaps read out at a provincial council and included in its minutes. A copy would also have been available in the papal archive, which was already an old institution by this date. The pope's reply on this point reached a much wider audience when it when it was included in the church law collection of Dionysius Exiguus, which was put together circa 500 and spread very widely in the West after that, especially when it was given the backing of Charlemagne about three centuries later.
Pope and bishop
The character, setting in life, and transmission of any document need to be understood before it can be properly interpreted, but sometimes these preliminaries are also part of the interpretation. The document presupposes the division of the west into bishoprics and the authority of the pope as legal problem-solver. The transmission shows that archive keeping was normal even in this period of disruption through which secular archives had little chance of surviving. The incorporation of Leo's responses into the law compilation of Dionysius Exiguus shows how papal authority was kept before the mind of clerics through canon law in the sixth century and after.
The case in question
What of the problem that gave rise to the bishop's query? In one or more cases the daughter of a priest or deacon under bishop Rusticus's authority had been heading for marriage with a man who already had a partner. Should the partner be counted as a wife? Pope Leo gives criteria for deciding whether this existing partner is a wife. If she is a slave, who has not been freed, she is judged not to be a wife. Why does the bishop not extend his question to daughters of laypeople too? Probably because his practical authority over marriage did not extend beyond the clergy.
Marriage
One implication is almost too obvious to mention. It is taken for granted that a man can only have one wife and that if the first partner is his wife he cannot simply divorce her. In fact we should not take this for granted. In most societies in history, either polygamy or easy divorce (or women by men) or both have been the norm.
Less obviously: Leo is assuming that a slave will not be a wife. Behind him was the whole tradition of classical antiquity. It was taken for granted that slaves could not marry. The only way to marry one was to set her free. Christianity's doctrine of equality before God had not yet eroded this assumption. If we look forward to the Council of Châlons-sur-Saone in 813 we see that in the long run the Church rejected the exclusion of unfreed slaves from marriage.
To return to the text. It shows that priest and deacon's had daughters and were presumably still married. The discipline of the Western church at this date was that a a priest should live chastely with his wife. One may guess at the following pattern. A man becomes a 'cleric', starts on the road to becoming a priest, relatively young. He marries and has children. At a certain point he takes holy orders and a priest and supposedly stops having sex with his wife.
What does the sentence about the mystic union of Christ and the Church mean? Leo's implies that a sexual union is not itself enough to make a marriage. A true marriage is a mirror of the union of Christ and the Church. The signs that such a marriage has taken place are that the couple are free (freed if necessary) and that the woman has a dowry (which she could not have if a slave and ineligible for matrimony).
Much later the meaning of this passage was changed in an interesting way, first in the ninth century by Hincmar of Reims, then in the twelfth by a crescendo of canon lawyers. The phrase was slightly adapted to mean that a marriage did not fully symbolise the union of Christ and the Church until it had been consummated by sexual union. This reflects the mystical and symbolic significance increasingly attributed to marital sex in the medieval church.
2. What was Stephen Langton's attitude to taxation and why should it matter?
Stephen Langton had two careers: first academic, then archbishop. The second also involved being a statesman, for the Archbishop of Canterbury was one of the great men and one of the great landowners of England. In Stephen Langton's case, he was deeply involved in high politics, at the time of Magna Carta and again in the 1220s, when a revised form of Magna Carta was confirmed as the law of England, which it remained. His attitude to taxation, which we find stated clearly in his academic lectures, is important because it helps explain his political role, which was decisive perhaps in 1215 and certainly in 1225.
Langton was an Englishman but his academic career was set in the Paris schools, which were already a university in all but name. He was in Paris just long enough to see the balance of power swing from England to France, when King Philip Augustus of France conquered Normandy and other territories on the continent from King John of England. These dramatic events may not have much affected the life of an English academic in the French capital.
Langton was a Master, roughly comparable to a professor at a modern university. As in a modern university, students had to prepare for examinations. As in a modern university, they knew their studies would enhance career prospects. Unlike a modern university, all students would be men and probably most hoped for a career in the Church, which would involve celibacy. That apart, student life would not be too different from now.
Langton's teaching would take too forms: disputations and lectures on the bible. In Disputations, he would provide over a logically rigorous debate between at least two advanced students. Lectures on the bible would also provide an opportunity to discuss disputed questions and questions of contemporary relevance. These lectures survive to us through 'reportation': student notes slightly edited by the lecturer.
Some comments in a lecture on Deuteronomy (an early book of the Old Testament) are especially relevant to this question. Langton says that the phrase 'immeasurable weights' (Deuteronomy 17: 17) is plainly, against modern kings, who collect treasure not in order that they may sustain necessity, but to satiate their cupidity'. He defines 'immeasurable' as 'beyond the measure of necessity: therefore, whatever goes further, that is, beyond necessity, is from evil, that is, it is evil and a sin.'
So which 'modern kings' did he have in mind? Perhaps not primarily the king of France Philip Augustus, who drew a very large income from the lands he controlled directly. Much more probably the Angevin Kings of England. In the second half of the twelfth century first Henry II, then Richard the Lionheart, then John used every possible means to maximise their income, for instance by selling to third parties the right to chose a spouse for vassal's children. Sometimes great men were simply fined 'because of the king's anger'. After losing Normandy King John experimented with new forms of direct and indirect taxation. Some of these were normal by the end of the thirteenth century, but Langton may have regarded them as actually immoral. He probably defined 'beyond necessity' fairly narrowly.
King John's voracious need for money to reconquer Normandy, and his failure to do so, brought about the crisis of 1215 and Magna Carta. Magna Carta laid it down that the new style taxes could not be levied without the consent of the feudal council. Much of Magna Carta is about restricting the ways in which the king could get money out of his subjects. Stephen Langton may well have had a hand in drafting the original Magna Carta but we do not know how central his role was.
However, in the 1220s and above all in 1225 his role was absolutely decisive By this time the King was Henry III, John's son. He was advised that he was not obliged to confirm it since it had been extorted by force. Langton threw all his weight against this suggestion and behind Magna Carta. The clause about the feudal council's consent to taxation had been dropped, but much of the issue was still about limiting the king's opportunity to extract money from his subjects. Langton was concerned to assert the Church's freedom (which Magna Carta guaranteed). However, if we take account of his remarks about royal taxation in his academic lectures it becomes clear that his enthusiasm for Magna Carta went further. It was an enthusiasm for limits on the king's taxing power. This seems like a secular concern, but for Langton it was a matter of ethics and sin. He and the bishops put a sentence of excommunication on violators of Magna Carta, and the Charter was still backed by excommunication in the fourteenth century, which explains why it is quoted in full in a popular priest's manual. One could say therefore that the English constitution has an academic and a religious origin.
THE MIDDLE AGES
For background, I give page references to a good and inexpensive textbook: C. Warren Hollister and Judith M. Bennett, Medieval Europe. A Short History (9th edition, 2002). Important only to use this edition, as revised by Bennett. It is much richer on social history.
I have also provided my own brief survey, under the same headings as the lectures. This may be found via my personal web-page.
11. From Theodosius to Charlemagne
Three dates:
378 Adrianople
597Papal mission to England
800 Coronation of Charlemagne
The political end of the Western Empire
The Roman Empire converted to Christianity. Christian theology and late classical culture combined in the writings of the ‘Fathers of the Church’ (= theologians of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages like Augustine of Hippo at the end of the century. Monasticism grew fast in the eastern half of the empire. The Roman Empire was divided into an eastern and a western half: two emperors, one for each half.
In 378 the Goths defeated the Romans at Adrianople, which was the beginning of the end of the West as a political unit. Theodosius became emperor in the West and settled the Goths within the empire’s limits. Hitherto the empire had used ‘barbarian’ ethnic groups as fighting units. Now they were no longer under control.
In the early 400s, the Roman legions left Britain. The Romano-British fought wars against Anglo-Saxon invaders with some success at first. In mainland Western Europe, barbarian kingdoms took the place of imperial Roman authority, the last emperor being deposed in 476.
Monasticism
Monasteries became common in the sixth century (500-600). They were not tied to cities. Often they developed around the tombs of hermits and holymen. The form which would have the greatest future was the Benedictine rule, but it was not yet the norm. It tended to keep the impulse to punish the body in check. Monasteries became increasingly important in the transmission of culture, as lay education declined.
The lay elite
Lay education declined because culture was no longer required for secular government service. Military skills were more useful in the service of the barbarian successor states. In the Roman world a rhetorical education had been needed for a place among the elite. In the world of barbarian kingdoms, fighting skills were more important. This meant not just leadership but personal valour. The leaders had a rather low life expectancy. Descendants of Roman senatorial families also became warriors. They lived off a surplus collected directly from the agricultural class. (Previously much of their income had come from the agricultural classes only indirectly: via imperial taxation and imperial patronage.)
The barbarian kingdoms and Justinian
The barbarian kings seem to have lacked much sense of a sharp break with the Roman Empire (and in the middle of the fifth century a Gallo-Roman landowner could make fun of a holyman for wrongly predicting the ruin of the empire). The new rulers tried to keep the trappings of bureaucracy and taxation, even though these institutions had lost their functional point.
In the sixth century the pattern of kingdoms had crystallized: Vandals in Africa; Visigoths in Spain; multiple (pagan) kingdoms forming in England; the Franks gaining control of what would later be France; Belgium and the western part of Germany (Cologne area etc); Ostrogoths in Italy.
However, in Italy the Roman Empire made a surprising come-back: Justinian, the emperor in Constantinople, re-conquered it. You remember that the empire came back from the edge of collapse in the third century. Perhaps it might have happened again in the sixth. Yet before long a new wave of barbarians, the Lombards, had driven back the empire from most of the top half of Italy.
Economic collapse and ‘the manor’
By this time the economic system of the former Roman Empire was in a fairly ruinous state, not only in England but throughout the West. Justinian’s re-conquest, paradoxically, had done terrible economic damage, perhaps more than the original barbarian invasions. There was also the problem of what to export to the East. The evidence of coinage and archaeological digs shows a sharp economic downturn in the later 500s and the 600s. The exchange element in the economy became less important. Semi-self-contained estates became the crucial units. These can be called manors.
Implications of the Islamic conquests
Thus the seventh century (600-700) the Arab invasions cannot be blamed for ending the Roman social and economic system. Yet it was another stage in transformation of the old world order: the Mediterranean had been the centre of the Christian world. Now much of it was hostile to Christianity and a threat to the western kingdoms (as well as to Byzantium). Moreover, faced with the threat of expansionist Islam, the Roman Empire in the East was unlikely to make a second come-back in the West. They could not do much to help an institution still loyal to the Empire, the papacy in Rome. Popes continued to feel part of the empire and to hope for protection, but were increasingly forced to look out for themselves.