that clerical marriage was not only permitted but accepted by Anglo-Norman culture.
The Legislation Prohibiting Clerical Marriage in the Anglo-Norman Realm
Early eleventh-century efforts to prohibit clerical marriage in England and Normandy were sporadic and ineffective, largely due to the lack of centralized reform efforts. For most of the eleventh century, the Roman pontiffs led the way in designing legislation to achieve a celibate priesthood. The term “nicolaitans” was used to refer to clerics who kept wives, a reference derived from the biblical Nicolaitans, a group known for their sexual licentiousness.17 The impetus for the Roman campaign against clerical marriages appears to have been twofold: the preservation of a ritual purity and the prevention of priestly lineages; but, ultimately, it was a reconfiguration of the sacerdotal body, one that rendered it chaste but virile. Under Pope Leo IX, papal policy shifted toward prohibiting priests from living with their wives, which was defined as an act of fornication. In 1049, measures were taken to enforce celibacy by excommunication and by ordering the laity not to attend the masses of such priests.18 Leo later added that abandoned clerical concubines should be made into slaves (ancillae) of the Lateran palace.19 Shortly afterward, a Lisieux council (1055) took the first steps in Normandy to separate clerics from their wives; the decrees of this council forbade clerics in major orders from living at home with women, under penalty of excommunication.20 Thus, the earliest Roman efforts at enforcing clerical celibacy were the literal, physical separation of men from their wives, presumably to project an image of the chaste body.
This sort of Roman legislation was further continued by Nicholas II, who reiterated Leo’s decrees, and eventually by Gregory VII. Gregory repeated the previous canons concerning celibacy in 1074, when he convened his first synod and decreed that no one would be promoted to major orders without a vow of chastity.21 He also argued that those unchaste priests and deacons should be prohibited from performing their duties. In one of his letters, he asserted,
It has come to our ears that certain of your people are uncertain whether or not priests and deacons or others who minister at the sacred altars and who persist in fornication should do duty at mass. To them we reply by the authority of the holy fathers that in no wise should ministers at the sacred altar who continue in fornication do duty, but they should be driven outside the sanctuaries until they show fruits worthy of repentance.22
Pope Urban II continued the reform efforts of his predecessors by extending the celibacy campaign to separate priests further from their wives. At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Urban decreed that priests, deacons, and subdeacons would be removed from office if they cohabitated with a woman.23 This canon was reissued at the councils convened at Rouen, Tours, Nimes, and Poitiers. Before the injunctions at Clermont, Urban, in the manner of Peter Damian, had stated at Melfi (1089) that clerical wives might be offered to noblemen as slaves, if they aided the pope with his reform.24
While the Roman initiatives against clerical marriage gained strength under the reform papacy, efforts to achieve similar measures were enacted by the archbishops in England and Normandy. The experiences of archbishops like Lanfranc and Anselm in eradicating clerical marriage reveal the many problems with the institution of such laws. What these bishops pursued as reform policy was not strictly Roman, although it shared some of the same goals. In addition to the severe policies toward clerical marriage and clerical concubines, the papacy also passed decrees against lay investiture, decrees that were not promulgated at the earliest reform councils in Normandy.25 Instead, the Anglo-Norman councils created laws on clerical marriage that fit into a wider initiative to define a standard of religious manliness.
Lanfranc’s council at Winchester (1076) took a departure from the stricter, Roman rules on clerical marriage by allowing currently married priests to keep their wives, but prohibiting both secular canons and new ordinands from doing the same. Lanfranc’s intent behind this decree was unclear but likely meant that married clerics should live with their wives chastely. When contrasted to the laws of 1072 promulgated by John d’Avranches at Rouen, these were lenient measures. John d’Avranches took a hardline approach worthy of the Roman initiatives by renewing the canons of Lisieux (1064). These decrees had said that priests, deacons, and canons who had taken wives and concubines since 1063 must put them aside; even clerics in minor orders were advised to remain unmarried, a clause unseen in any other legislation of this period.26 John’s position on this issue is interesting, given that his brother Hugh had been a married bishop of Bayeux. John’s Rouen synod also stipulated that married clerics could not obtain any part of the revenue of their churches, even if a continent vicar served as a substitute, and that archdeacons should also model chastity for their clergy and not “smuggle” any women into their homes. These decrees went farther than previous synodal legislation, stipulating that those clerics who had “lapsed” publicly would not automatically be allowed to return to their churches, even after doing penance, for this would only encourage further incontinence. Only in extraordinary circumstances should an incontinent priest be allowed to return.27
John’s decrees were significant, not only for their severity but also because they gestured toward the model of the manly celibate. A public lapse revealed a disorderly, priestly body, one that showed failure to restrain sexual desire. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, John’s renewal of the Lisieux canons and his extension of severe penalties were met with one of the most notorious riots in Norman history, in which the assembly of married priests reacted to the legislation by casting stones at the archbishop.28 Lanfranc, as abbot of St. Stephen’s of Caen, had presided with Archbishop Maurilius over a similar set of severe decrees at the earlier Council of Rouen. Lanfranc, then, was part of introducing hardline tactics against married priests in Normandy twelve years earlier; when presiding over the Winchester council as archbishop of Canterbury, he backtracked from his previous position. The reasons behind this move are entirely speculative. Lanfranc may have learned from previous experiences that such legislation was hardly enforceable and could result in short-staffed parish churches, or he may have been pressured by his suffragan bishops to take a more gradual approach to the problem.29 This raises an important question. Were Norman priests easier to discipline and separate from their wives than English ones? Or was the policy at Rouen in 1064 such an abysmal failure that Lanfranc learned to take a different approach with incontinent clergy?
Lanfranc’s experience as the new archbishop of Canterbury brought him into intimate contact with the problem of clerical marriage, as he encountered married bishops. In 1071, he wrote a letter to Pope Alexander II, seeking advice on how to treat the case of Bishop Leofwine of Lichfield, who publicly acknowledged his own wife and children. Leofwine was not the only married bishop, as Lanfranc discovered. In a second letter to Pope Gregory VII in 1073, Lanfranc admitted that “bishops, the very men who should be shepherds of souls, in their endless craving for worldly glory and the delights of the flesh are not only choking all holiness and piety within themselves but the example of their conduct is luring their charges into every kind of sin.”30 Lanfranc knew very well that the existence of married bishops reinforced a lay model of masculinity, making the problem of clerical marriage quite difficult to eradicate, as it modeled improper behavior to the lower clergy. If Lanfranc’s 1076 decrees had been effectively enforced, it would have created a two-tier system, with older clerics allowed to keep their wives but newer clerics displaced from this tradition; the effect would have been to encourage the perception that clerical marriage was allowed (for some).
Lanfranc was well aware of John d’Avranches’s efforts in Normandy to eradicate clerical marriage. In a letter to the archbishop of Rouen, Lanfranc openly acknowledged his admiration of John’s legislative efforts and dispelled any notions that he had criticized John for not controlling his clerics more effectively. Instead, he lauded John for his strong-handed efforts at ecclesiastical discipline and reiterated that he himself, as defined in the decrees of Winchester, would prohibit any new canons, priests, or deacons from marriages or else deprive them of their benefices.31 But Lanfranc’s understanding of implementing such strict policies
