the archdeacon of Canterbury, did provide guidance on the subject. As in the case of York, clerics in William’s archdeaconate were also seeking a way around the legislation prohibiting clerical marriage. In particular, archdeacons and canons moved their women out of their homes in the towns, but into their country manors.41 Anselm made a somewhat surprising decision, saying that “for the time being, until something else is laid down, this should be tolerated if they make a resolute promise not to have intercourse with them, nor to speak to them without legitimate witnesses.” For those priests who refused to abandon their wives, the canons of the council were to be observed, and these priests were not to celebrate Mass. Yet Anselm allowed that, if these priests could find chaste replacements, they could then keep their benefices until Lent.42
The Westminster canons of 1102 were not upheld, and, with Anselm in exile, Henry I began collecting the cullagium, a tax on married clerics, as a revenue-raising tactic. William of Malmesbury records that the decrees of the council were immediately ignored and “the first to offend were those who had made the rules,” a statement likely referring to the bishops who presided over that council.43 The collection of the cullagium by the king’s officials made it appear that the practice of clerical marriage was officially tolerated, especially in the absence of the reforming archbishop. In 1105, Anselm’s letter to Prior Ernulf about concubinous priests shows that many priests and even the king may have inherited an unclear understanding of the decrees of Winchester, which allowed then currently married priests to keep their wives. The king’s decree that “they could have both churches and wives as they had at the time of his father [the Conqueror] and Archbishop Lanfranc” was either a misunderstanding of the Winchester decrees or an intentional tactic to justly collect the cullagium from concubinous priests. Anselm declared boldly that such “execrable unions” had never been accepted by the Council of Winchester and that any priests living with women anywhere in England faced deprivation of their benefices.44
After Anselm’s second exile had ended, he held a second Council of Westminster (1108), in which the effort to eradicate clerical marriage was renewed; in fact, the only records of this council suggest it was exclusively concerned with the problem of clerical marriage. Anselm’s biographer Eadmer, who documented the proceedings, explained that many priests in England had fallen back into their old marriages or even taken on new relationships during the time of the archbishop’s exile; this laxity explained the need for another directive, one that would attempt to prevent the “loopholes” of the previous council. The 1108 decrees were even more severe than the ones promulgated six years earlier. While the spirit of the decrees remained the same as the 1102 conciliar statutes, the change in administrative enforcement was most notable. Priests, deacons, and subdeacons could not cohabit with any women, except close relatives as defined by the Nicene consanguinity canons. Priests had to put away their women, out of their homes and out of proximity to their homes. Priests and their women could not meet in any private home; if necessity required that they speak to their women, they had to do so “out of doors” in front of at least two witnesses. If priests violated this decree and were accused by two witnesses or by the “common talk of the parishioners,” they faced canonical compurgation. The guilty were to be deprived of their benefices. Those who insisted on cohabitating with women and celebrating Mass had 8 days to decide between the two; afterward, the unreformed would be excommunicated. As part of these decrees, controls were enacted to ensure that cullagium and other forms of extortion did not persist. Archdeacons and deans were singled out for their likely involvement in such extortion. Finally, the council declared that priests who abided by the law and put aside their women were to abstain from celebrating the divine office for forty days and have suitable vicars serve their churches. If they relapsed into their former habits, these clerics would have their property seized, along with their concubines, and both handed over to the bishop.45
What is notable about Eadmer’s reporting of the 1108 council is that of the numerous, lengthy directives regarding clerical unions, not one uses the term uxor (wife) to describe the female partner of a priest. Eadmer’s choice to describe priests’ partners differently from his description of the 1102 council may have been intentional. In 1102, he describes these women as they must have appeared to all in Anglo-Norman society: legitimate wives. But by 1108 the necessity of further legislation to eradicate this problem led him to address them as the Church now viewed them—the “women” (feminas or mulieres) of priests.46
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